I think I remember it happening a few times in X-men, Nightcrawler would teleport in somewhere and startle someone, but it seems to me that someone just appearing out of thin air would make drinks go flying and people go falling backwards over couches. Even if you’re used to someone on your team doing that, people generally don’t sneak up on each other all that often. You hear footsteps and clothes rustling, even if they’re being quiet, you can hear them occluding other sounds, but someone just appearing like that. You can count on Harem startling people quite a bit in the comic, but she’s a fast learner and will probably not appear within arms’ reach of Sydney any more.

Check back on Wednesday, I’m going to try and figure out how to post a voting incentive for topwebcomics.com since they reset their ranking on the first. It’s just a pencil drawing I started over Xmas break. I’ll let you guess the theme.

A few requests for Max’s grin:

I had this page written, penciled and inked when I realized I forgot to include Maxima explaining the “Archon” on the building. Luckily I had a big establishing shot of the lobby which you can’t see anymore. Well it’s not the last time we’ll be here I imagine. Plus now I can touch it up a little since my architectural skills are slightly less advanced that a kid with Duplo blocks. Not lego mind you. Duplo.

Getting all this explanation out of the way is going to make for a short press conference, or at least to the reader, since I’ll be able to sum it all up with a “One Explanation Later” caption. That actually makes for better pacing though, so let’s tell everyone who’s a new reader by then that I planned it that way.

Oh and Maxima covering up her face with her salute? That’s called poor planning. Learn from my mistakes. Also, drawing people salute is surprisingly challenging. Especially from that angle.

I know Sydney’s head looks weird on the first panel and I forgot ‘co-ed’s’ glasses, I’ll fix that.

A little bonus page for you guys. Apparently Max gave the tube back – not that it matters. This is one of those cover element things where it doesn’t have to match what’s inside 100%. Which honestly is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, you know the cover shows Sabertooth feasting on Wolverine’s spine when nothing remotely close to that happens in the comic, and Sabertooth is not even in it.

That’s not as bad as other big pet peeve about comic book covers, which is where the cover is done by some amazing artist like Joe Madureira or Alex Ross or Boris Fucking Vallejo and the inside looks like it was drawn by some kid that just had a stroke. I mean, the interior art is usually fine, in comparison to the cover, there’s no way you won’t be disappointed.

So not a whole lot happening on this page really. I just wanted to establish the new setting, at least the exterior. It’s too bad I’m miserable at architecture though. I think the basic exterior looks ok, but everything surrounding it is massively underdeveloped. That’s ok, cause I put in a shitty looking crane on the edge so you can tell it’s still under construction sort of. Hopefully they’re still working on a lot of the trim around the lower parts. Also I realized I put landing pads on the roof but there’s nowhere doors. We’ll just say there’s stairways that are flush with the roof. Only, you can see the skylight, and we know what the room underneath that looks like. Oh well. Honestly constructing this building was the first thing I’ve done in Sketchup in more than a year, I’m surprised it came out as good as it did. Don’t be too surprised if this page receives a few stealth tweaks as I build a more refined model.

The team doesn’t occupy the whole building, they have some garage and basement space, and the top few floors along with the roof, and some offices somewhere below that. At least, this is where the bulk of the intelligence gathering and the command structure is, and where the main team deploys from. Floor 1, 2 and -1 is basically a mini mall, and there is retail offices space throughout the rest of the building. The areas the team occupies is physically separated from all that though, separate elevators, garage space, entrances/exits, all that.

Why is the team in a high rise instead of some… fort? Well, they’re really small at the moment. Less than 100 people including intelligence and all the other office people, and… I don’t know, that’s just how I always imagined it. Hopefully I’ll be able to justify it at some point, cause I imagine it’ll come up in the comic.

OMG we’re finally free! We’re leaving the parking lot behind us! I could have done more there and kept it entertaining I think, like Achilles breaking free of the gurney so that the ArcSWAT ‘regulars’ could show off their stuff, making Sydney think she had to finally reveal what’s in the tube to stop him only to realize the top is locked making me wonder what her plan was in the bank and yadda yadda etc. BUT, we’ve lingered here long enough so let’s move forward eh?

Some of you may have noticed that I modeled our yet unnamed general after a certain actor, in an attempt to make my male characters a bit more visually distinct. I was banking on my inability to do a decent likeness to keep that from being too obvious, but it would seem that one of the disadvantages of drawing a comic every week is that your art improves a bit, go figure. I may have to go back and revise him cause honestly it’s a little distracting.

And while I pat myself on the back for my mad art skills, it looks like Maxima was played by 4 different actresses on this page. Oh well.

I saw some other webcomicers on twitter post some year over year stats, so I thought I’d do the same. I’ve got roughly 5X the traffic since this time last year, so thanks for sticking around everyone. Still, a year ago the comic was only a few months old so while my current traffic level isn’t bad for a relatively young comic, it’s not something I’m going to be making a living off any time soon. So my goal for this year is to get another 5x increase in traffic. I don’t know how realistic that is, but I really would like to escape the cube farm and do this for a living, which of course means more comics each week, so at some point I’ll probably add some ad banners to the page (I know, ads suck but I won’t allow any annoying flash ads or any epilepsy inducing gifs) and that’s not going to pay my mortgage, but at some point my host will probably say “Hey I know we said ‘unlimited’ bandwidth, but… here’s a bill anyway” so the ads might defray that cost and maybe even pay for some advertising of my own.

I don’t have a donate button or any other source of income off the page yet, except for a few T-shirt sales… I should really link the store at some point… but if you enjoy the comic and want to help out, for now the best thing you can do is share it with your friends, facebook, twitter, whatever, and hopefully people will find it and decide to stick around.

Maxima’s oh so mature disciplinary action here, as has been pointed out in some of the previous comments, isn’t something she’s allowed to do – good news for anyone in any of the services in the real world obviously. This probably isn’t over for either of them but we’ll get to that later.

So Harem has one mind for (up to) 5 bodies. There’s a little confusion over how that works, and while she can do disparate things, reading 5 different books at once or eat, exercise, watch TV, etc, there is a sensation threshold at which something happening to one body will spill over to the others. Knocking her funnybone, even getting tickled, hearing a really funny joke, or any number of other situations. I’m sure you can think of plenty, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing many of those over the course of the comic. Getting flashbanged would be interesting, while it would blind and deafen one of them and disorient them all, it wouldn’t blind of deafen the rest of them (assuming they were out of range) If she saw herself get flashbanged, through a strong window or something, the observing one could spot for the blind one, although from 3rd person she’d lose a considerable amount of coordination.

Oh also, new month, new year and all, if you’re so inclined, give me a vote at topwebcomics.com. I’ll try and have a vote incentive ready in time for the next comic, but, you know, vote for this one too.

Who needs to teleport when you can fly that fast? I mean obviously it doesn’t get you through solid objects or into places without being noticed what with the sonic booms and shockwaves and all, but as far as getting across a city quickly, Max could probably beat Harem. (Although I haven’t quite figured out what Harem’s range is, so maybe it’s a closer race than you’d think)

This page is evidence that I’m still hugely amateur when it comes to drawing interiors. They’re supposed to be in a two story room but that ceiling looks awfully low to me. I guess I need to take some snapshots of the insides of malls or something to figure out what I’m doing wrong.

Speaking of which I’ve made the hilarious mistake of putting them in a supposedly high security location… with a flipping skylight. I just have too many scenes in mind there the heroes fly in and out of the place to do away with it. I guess the explanation will be that there’s nothing of critical importance on that level… except that Leon’s office is right there and he has access to everything. I guess the door is normally closed and there’s always a dozen super powered types milling about.

When you hear of someone with the power to make copies of themselves, the first thought is “what if one of them dies?” Don’t worry the comic isn’t going to get all dark all of a sudden – I don’t even have a storyline remotely in mind where we find that out with Harem. However, her little prank won’t be without consequences.

Now, Sydney’s made Max look foolish more than once already, so you may be asking why Max is suddenly so lit up. One of Sydney’s unofficial superpowers is that she’s strangely disarming, she didn’t make Max look like some sort of sexual deviant (and with no way to explain it without possibly spilling something about the, let’s call it gray ops, going on right under the press’s nose, and she’s not Maxima’s subordinate. Though really it’s the second thing. Max is a little wound up when it comes to anything pertaining to her sexuality. She doesn’t even like the word sexuality in the same sentence as her name. As far as she’s concerned, if you wouldn’t say it about a guy, she doesn’t want it said about her, and the word sexuality is almost never used when talking about guys.