Grrl Power

I telegraphed the checkpoint a little bit, so some of you saw this coming. I had considered obfuscating what Krona was doing a bit more, but decided against trying to be intentionally misleading. So for anyone who guessed it, collect your no-prizes on the table in the corner next to the nacho cheese fountain. I […]

I asked around online for some fan art to celebrate page 500, and here’s what I got so far! Hopefully more will be coming. If so I’ll add them here. Anvil by Dan Butcher of the superhero webcomic Vanguard. Dabbler by Shane Rivett of Heroes of the World and Beyond And this one was something I […]

Sydney’s rather collected attitude here surprised even me. When I sat down to write this page, I’d intended for her to be a lot more scared. Even though she knows less about Sciona than you guys do at this point, she just saw her cuddly jaguar buddy hanging ten in the corner, so she she should […]

This is the power Sydney bought the first time the skill grid came up. Yes, sometimes I plan stuff waaaaaay in advance. Sometimes I’m like “heh heh, that’s a funny joke, I should totally edit this page I’ve already started drawing.” Mostly there’s more planning. Mostly. This is definitely an inopportune time for Sydney to […]

Obviously trying to attract the attention of your teammate might also attract the attention of anything else that can hear, but as Holo-Halo, Sydney is… well, I would say especially brash, but that’s a minor distinction in her case. Less risk averse I guess. The funny thing is, projected Sydney can’t touch anything, but Sydney […]

For someone who has superpowers, and relatively new powers at that, Sydney doesn’t use them a whole lot. Sure she’s gone flying a few times and sometimes hovers awkwardly in the air with the flight orb, but it seems like she’d be using them all the time. Especially the Lightbee function of the comm-ball. She’s sort […]

I fully expect the majority of the comments to be about how a Bishōnen playing deck should be filled out. I intentionally didn’t show Sydney holding the Ace or Kind of Hearts, and I prefer to leave those high level decisions to experts more qualified than I. As it is, I think “L” might be […]

Pixel is extremely unusual in having disparate power sets. Not necessarily unique, but it’s hard to get scientists who can study her without being read in on the whole lycanthopy thing. Of course there are some who know the whole shebang, but even so it a complicated field even more complicated. There’s so many variables […]

Krona’s in that weird category where she has quite a bit of power, but it has to be applied. It’s not raw power like Maxima, and for Krona to do anything more than hit snooze on a bladder, she has learn its properties and how to edit them. This implies, at least for her, that the […]

Guys. The hoops I had to jump through so Sydney could drop some hot Arnold quotes… It’s literally the only reason they’re at a Mars chocolate warehouse. Pretty sure I deserve an Eisner or the key to a city or something. By the way, Hot Arnold sounds like a disgusting sex move, probably involving Icy […]

I did way too much research to try and figure out how to write Sydney’s squee word bubble. Ok, not “too much” but given how little I know about how to write music, it took longer than it should have. As it is I doubt I put enough of those horizontal bar things to make […]

When I first wrote this page, I lowballed Harem’s age at 27, which is closer to her age plus just her first dupe. I was surprised when I added them all up, so I went back and changed her original “a few months” to “a few years.” This might be a slight reversal to thoughts I had […]

Dabbler is setting up her hotbar if you couldn’t tell. Her life is like one of those games where you wind up with waaaay too much inventory and you have to keep going back to your stash to swap your “Carpet Bomb” rocket launcher for the Lightning Orb wand with 15% chance to stun, cause […]

Hey, I think they’re up to something. Oh, and in panel 3 the bats don’t literally say “Form of a Vampire.” I just thought it was funny. But if you do want to imagine it, obviously they’d do it in a chorus of high pitched squeaky voices. So yeah, there’s probably an interesting story behind […]

With a moral compass like that, Ravven should at least be on the suspect list. It does seem like a lot of work to go through to drum up some business though. When Ingsol says he knows a dozen individuals, he’s thinking of those who are capable, not necessarily motivated. Blood magic is not so […]

Well, I almost forgot to post this page since holiday travel has me all turned around, but here it is. Obviously Ravven should have a Who’s Who entry but I’m not in front of my regular machine, so I’ll get that up when I get back home. Sydney has a talent for asking people just […]

I went into this page thinking one big panel would take slightly less time to draw seeing as the holidays are coming up and it would be great to get a little ahead (or less behind) so I don’t have to spend most of Xmas day drawing. It, in fact took slightly less time. Slightly. :/ […]

Time to wrap up that fight! And yes, Pixel likes the occasional spank, but we don’t know if Elsbeth likes being cuffed or doing the cuffing. There’s no real female equivalent of “Bro.” Obviously there’s “broette” but that’s just tacking a feminizing suffix onto a word as a stopgap since there’s not a real word […]

That thing may have its second wind, but it’s pretty outnumbered at this point, even if most of the gallery has cleared out. But maybe it has some more tricks up its tattered sleeves now that its powered up. I think I may have commented on this before, but oh well, if I have it’s been […]

The bloody handprints on the face of the mannekillers was probably a solid clue, but this just confirms it. Pixel recognized the rune on the sword piece, and knows there’s a handful of things you can make using that rune, plus the coloring of the wedge and all that. She was just trying to see […]

So I actually had to ask around on twitter if it’s possible to wear a thong without having a wedgie. I mean, aren’t thongs worn “up in there?” Well, apparently they’re not supposed to be? (At least to the one source who responded to such a weird question.) Which is contrary to literally every picture and […]

I’m really bad about featuring new characters on a page without naming them. It’s on the next page so I’ll just tell you her name is Krona. That way you guys don’t have to refer to her as “hacking girl” in the comments. I’m also really bad about controlling the firehose of new characters, but […]

So if I recall, the passage I misread which inspired the idea for Elsbeth was something like the character opens her spellbook and pulls something out of it. It turned out to be something you could reasonable expect to keep in a book though, like a bookmark or a warrant or something, but my mind […]

Well normally comics posted on major holidays have a slow start, but you guys seem to like Clover. She’ll be in a few more pages during this arc, but since I have that disease where I can’t help but introduce characters like a crazy person (can you spot the two new ones on this page?) […]

Fun story, when I designed Clover (as in Clover honey… honey badger, clover honey badger, hah hah I’m clever you guys.) I made her haircut look like badger stripes, coming down over her eyes. Only, that’s the way a regular badger looks (one might say, a vanilla badger), not a honey badger. Womp waa. I […]

Don’t fret too much about Kat, the Mannekillers are severely outnumbered at this point. Actually I don’t know what Dabbler is doing right now, I guess she’s sparring with the big one with the helmet, just behind what we can see in the last panel there, cause that’s easier to draw. Trust me though, it’s […]

I’m not sure that digitigrade legs would be especially effective for kicking. Well, maybe they’d be better at thrusting kicks like in the first panel, but I think you’d lose some power with axe kicks and roundhouses. Anything that involved leading with the heel, since it’s further up the leg, you’d lose some angular momentum. […]

It makes sense that if you’re going to send someone or something into a room of largely magic creatures and get all hostile, you’re going to have some protection against magic. Then again it’s probably fair to assume that a bunch of automata might just be disposable. I haven’t really talked about the rules of […]

I have been dissatisfied with my kind of boring panel layouts, so I decided to experiment a little. Hopefully this page isn’t confusing at all. As with the reddish skin tints, i.e. the red noses, (which you’ll notice I totally forgot to do on this page :P) I may over do it before I correct […]

Icon is a suit of sentient armor “cursed to wander the Earth, forever in search of a hero” Or something like that. It’s not literally a curse, he just outlives his “pilots,” or at least outlasts his partners’ useful adventuring career. Though he (I say he for simplicity even though Icon is obviously genderless) can […]

If martians busted in and started ray blasting everyone, they might not wait for Irradon to give permission to retaliate, but sapient animates, i.e. the intelligent swords, the chatty mirrors, even the castle full of servants who got changed into boudoirs and clocks and candlesticks, haven’t always been treated as well as they could have. […]

Eee! I’m so excited! So Wearing the Cape is one of my favorite superhero novel series. I’ve mentioned it before, usually when a new volume comes out, and guess what? <—— Hmm. One of those gals looks familiar. A while ago, Marion G. Harmon, the author of WtC (and as it turns out, reader of Grrl Power) […]

So Max is fast. Not Flash Silver Age light speed fast. That creates severe writing problems as far as I’m concerned, even if you ignore all the shockwaves, and explosive friction and X-ray blasts. Even still, Max’s speed is the first thing any opponent of hers needs to be able to counter. Thanks to Sydney’s heads […]

The problem with action pages is that I usually feel like there’s less for me to comment on down here, at least in comparison to a more typically neurotically exposition laden pages with a dozen panels. So… yup. The door blew up. Someone obviously has an issue with The Council. That or the Girl Scouts […]

Maybe Sydney is misreading the situation and those guys are the SWAT themed strippers The Council ordered. That attic mostly contains the cantrip equivalent of artifacts. Frames for paintings that never get dusty, a rain cloak that never gets wet (because water passes straight through it.) A necklace that glows when detect magic is cast […]

Maxima probably didn’t know about Ingsol’s attic or else she would have had Pixel or someone keep Sydney company (i.e. supervise) out there. Still, it’s unlocked and poorly concealed, so one would hope there’s not a Hand of Vecna laying around up there. The average human amasses quite a bunch of stuff over their lifetime. Some are […]

Wait! Argus could be the Epimeliad’s apple tree! And another intelligence person could be this Disney princess type who can talk to birds and squirrels. But she always sings everything and pulls everyone into her songs and everyone hates her, but she’s so sweet she gives everyone diabetes. And the QM is a… dwarf? Gnome. […]

This is Sydney’s last interruption, promise! In that first panel Maxima’s totally giving Sydney the “We are here as representatives of blah blah” and “I will turn this car around.” and probably something about a million extra laps. It obviously doesn’t stick, which may be the biggest challenge with training Sydney. Some stuff she takes to […]

I implore you to read Sydney’s last bubble in the most Smirnoffy accent you can. I won’t say this joke was a prime motivation for the entire Sigil story arc… but it was definitely one of the first gags I wrote down when I started putting ideas for it together… and this was like, well […]

Ingsol asserting the member races are monsters on the inside isn’t really supported by their behavior so far. Even Grumpy Gus Azilus was making a fair point. I’m not entirely sure if it will come up in the comic, at least in this scene, (I haven’t written this far ahead) but there are really strict […]

Whoops, I just noticed Sydney’s choker is missing in panel 4. I’ll get that fixed when I get up. Finally we get to the point of the meeting. That does seem pretty serious, given their daily existence depends on the veil. Well, they could exist without it, but a lot of them would have to […]

Azilus is being slightly melodramatic. Their presence doesn’t endanger the Council, but their coming and going could. If they constantly broadcast a publicly available GPS signal, then their presence would be problematic. Still, there’s a huge difference between working with clandestine agents, and someone who is the fame equivalent of the AAA actors who play […]

Dabbler’s involvement with Arc-SWAT is curious considering the existence of The Council, but Dabbler didn’t immigrate through normal channels. Actually it’s more of a migration. Well, it depends on how long she’s planning on staying. The sequence of events leading her to join the team would be fun to tell if I was a 5 […]

I like the idea that Supers have an inexplicable compulsion to dress in capes and skin tight outfits, as suggested in the top flashback panel – only of course they don’t actually wear that stuff in my world. At least not the “official” ones. There are a few vigilantes out there. The expression “You can’t […]

Actually they’re both wrong, the 4th wall is usually behind and over the shoulder of the last person who spoke, so the camera can catch the reaction glance. Of course the 4th wall is just the camera (at least in TV/movies, not plays obviously) and the camera could be positioned anywhere. Heck, you could have […]

To head off the comments about “but the government has known about supers for a long time,” yes that’s true, but I can only fit so much on one page. :) But think about a world in which there is no Superhero archetype, but there is other super-y stuff. Figuring out that these wildly disparate […]

This is kind of a weird page, in that Sydney asks a question and it doesn’t quite get answered on this page, but some of you can probably see what Ingsol is winding up to. I found the aside with the spells as programs too enticing to edit out. In a post computer world, it’s […]

Basically Ingsol is saying that if you’re planning on enslaving humanity or something else dramatic that will blow the show for everyone else, like trying to wipe out another Council race in a loud and bloody war, either get it done before the Council finds out or, well, die. Possibly you’ll go to supernatural Sing […]

Now we’re starting to get to some of that plot stuff I keep hearing about. Really the explanation Ingsol is about to drop should be fairly self evident, given what all you guys know about the things Sydney has seen, like at the club (and even some of the things she’s missed, but I don’t […]

Sydney might not be quite so haranguey if Maxima wasn’t standing there. Yes, she’s essentially firing spitballs from over Superman’s shoulder, but hey, they’re all friends, right? Friends can tease each other about fatal weaknesses and allergies, right? Harangue in a good word. It’s one of those words where if the first time you encounter […]