Grrl Power

Grrl Power #1469 – Semi Finals Roster

DaveB — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:00:51 +0000

Events include Unlimited Class Charity, where strangely enough, you can’t win by donating all of your organs. Well, unless you have really top-tier regeneration, maybe. Of course, it seems like a terrible idea for someone with massive regeneration to donate an organ, because how would you stop that organ from regenerating the rest of its original body around it, since you’ve implanted it in a place where it’s being kept alive and fed a stream of nutrients? Obviously it would depend on how the regeneration works. Something that required conscious effort would probably be fine, but Wolverine donating half of his liver would probably have dire consequences.

Unlimited Class Paying it Forward (I’m actually not sure how that would be an event. Maybe it’s some sort of… relay?)
Unlimited Class Teaching a Man to Fish
Unlimited Class Condolences
Unlimited Class Writing Something Meaningful on a Work Birthday Card and Not Just “Have a Good One” or “Another Step Closer to the Grave, Hah Hah”
Unlimited Class Hugging but Not For So Long it Gets Awkward
Unlimited Class Maintaining Eye Contact with Someone While They Tell You Some Boring Story They For Some Reason Think is Totally Interesting
Unlimited Class Stealing from the Rich and Giving to the Poor and Also Kicking the Rich in the Balls Until their Genitals go Necrotic – (there is some argument that this last bit isn’t “nice” in a technical sense, but most everyone agrees they usually deserve it.)

What Unlimited Class Niceness Arena events can you think of?

BTW, someone pointed out that Roark-1-8 looks a bit like Goon Squad. Or a lot. Well, it’s not. I guess I have an armor design in my head, and I have to put effort into deviating from it.

Final version is up, both at TWC and Patreon.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

Grrl Power #1468 – Princess Alice of Batenberg’s Gambit

DaveB — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:00:26 +0000

Prophylaxis, in case you don’t know (that includes me, I had to google chess terms) just what it’s called when you “play defensively,” or at least try to deny your opponent whatever strategy he seems to be going for. Like in pool, you want to sink your balls but if possible also leave the cue ball in a bad spot for the other guy in case you miss.

Ryzyl didn’t cast Mirror Image, he cast… I don’t know. Army of Me or something. Basically one of those high level spells that creates actual copies of him that have the same equipment and spells and stuff that lasts all of 10 minutes, or something like that. And when it ends, he gets the memories of each one back. Good for quickly exploring a dungeon, overwhelming an opponent, pooling all their coin and cheating a merchant out of his bushel of apples, that sort of thing. Actually, if the spell was really well crafted, there’d be an option to not absorb the memories, because most of what he’s going to get back from this encounter is a lot of crushing, burning and choppy-choppy.

In panel 2, Max is doing an “X” swipe, followed by a heart stab – hopefully that’s more or less what it looks like – but as I’m posting this, I realize that the heart stab is a little superfluous, because she’s stabbing right in the middle of the X, which has already been thoroughly quartered. She should have stabbed him right in the middle of the face, probably. Although, during her 3 months of hyperbolic time cargo deck training, she probably got up to the point where she was fighting fairly advanced magic wielding opponents – advanced like “has spell in place that allows them to shrug off a single fatal blow somehow” or “upon receiving a fatal wound, this spell rewinds time to just before the injury was received (up to three seconds) and teleports you up to 10 feet in a safe direction.” Which is one of those high level spells that does no good if you get chopped in the femoral artery and it takes you a minute to bleed out. But it’s great against decapitations and boulders, whether launched via catapult or giant. So I guess Max is just making sure her kill shots stick. It’s the sword equivalent of the double-tap.

Sexy bodymod news lady Gail has a special one-on-one interview with Tournament Quarter finalist Saraviah Nightwing! And if you subscribe to Gail’s Space Patreon, (which, due to the vagaries of Earth and Gal-Net’s DNS servers, happens to be the same as the Grrl Power Patreon, go figure) you can see that same interview in the nude! Well, eventually. The nude part of the interview, as well as the version that includes shading will be coming soon. Of course, you can view the interview in the nude now if you take your own clothes off. You know. Technically. Just put a towel on your chair first.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

Grrl Power #1467 – Seismic handshake

DaveB — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:00:54 +0000

You know, for an unlimited class tournament, this is all pretty low-key so far. Max’s previous round started off with quite a bit more action, but maybe it’ll escalate. Probably not to One Punch levels of chopping 1/20th of the Earth off, or nuclear explosion punches so much. As much as I enjoy that level of absurdity, the Grrl -verse is at a slightly lower power level. Admittedly, the apocalypse level attacks do register harder when you can draw a high fidelity long shot of a city buckling under the shock waves, and I can’t really do that. I mean, maybe if I had 40 hours to work on a single panel, but I think around hour 32 I’d just stab myself in the temple with the stylus.

But who knows what will go down during the finals?

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

Grrl Power #1466 – Semifinals go!

DaveB — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:00:57 +0000

I tried to come up with a cooler name for Maxima’s sword than “Mana Vore.” It’s not bad, but it’s a little obvious. But the only other option I came up with was “Weave Nosher,” which sounds like farmer named it.

A fair bit of Maxima’s sword training was learning not to swing it around so broadly that she’d hit her own foot. Which wouldn’t be a problem normally, since her base armor is pretty high, but most swords that get swung at her aren’t backed by someone with her strength and speed, either. It’s also a very long sword, long enough that most people would have to worry about bonking it against the ground a lot, but, again, Max can just drag it right through most floor surfaces.

I think this page played out a little better in my head, or my relative inexperience at drawing high octane manga action is showing. Basically, Max comes in for a swing, but kicks a two-and-a-half-bowling-ball sized rock at the dark elf, and it smashes through his shield and hits his arm, moving his sword out of the way to parry her swipe. I think the real shortcoming of the page is that the bottom left panel is too busy. Instead of making the top two panels big, I should have saved the page space for that bottom one. Maybe put the rock past his arm, and just gone with a simpler speed trail showing the impact?

I’m not in the “shonen action” headspace when thinking about page layouts. I’m still more in the “I wanna draw Maxima leaning forward into a swing and have her boob pillowing against her arm” space. But we’re entering the semifinal match now, so I’ll try and… I dunno, read some One Punch Man before I do the layouts for the especially actiony pages? Or some Masahiko Nakihara manga? He did the Cammy and Sakura Ganbaru mangas as well as some other Street Fighter books, and is pretty decent at action stuff. Maybe I’ll throw in some Dragon Half, which doesn’t have good action, but is hilarious.

The thing I do like about this page though, is while Bluce and Gail seem like vapid eyecandy announcers, they’ve hosted quite a few of these and are capable of some fairly cogent analysis when it comes down to it. They do also have a team of researchers in their earpieces as well. Gail didn’t know all those details about the Mana Vore off the top of her head.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

Grrl Power #1465 – Trope police

DaveB — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:00:07 +0000

It’s hard to see, but there is a door behind Dabbler’s little drafting table, if you need to know where Anvil came from. Anvil obviously can’t teleport or anything, but her Sergeant Sense was tingling. It’s been a low buzz ever since Sydney became one of her subordinates. Dabbler isn’t really one of her direct reports, but she definitely raises the chaos floor, and Maxima has fully authorized Anvil to whoop Dabbler if she’s getting truly out of control.

I’m personally not into the femdom thing… though I don’t know if it’s really femdom when it’s two women. I guess that’s lezdom. In any case, it’s safe to say that Dabbler has most reasonable fetishes. The word “reasonable” admittedly doing some heavy lifting there, as a succubi’s tastes would be considered quite extreme by most people. Their fetishes have both breadth and depth, but usually have hard cut-offs at the fringes. What I’m saying is that there’s plenty of stuff on the Terran internet that Dabbler has seen and gone, “Yeah, I don’t get it.” I won’t give any examples, you’re all “internet worldly.” But we’ve all seen stuff that 1, we’re confused that there’s any sort of audience for, and 2, that there’s someone so into that very specific, particular thing that they took, in some cases, a lot of time to create it and put it out there.

Dabbler did change her top since the last page (or really just glamored up a different design – presumably she’s just enough clothes most of the time so that if her glamor is somehow disrupted, Maxima won’t yell at her, and she changes the style whenever the whim strikes her) because I had the pencils of her in that top panel sitting around from some other picture I’d started but hadn’t found a use for. I just liked the scoop neck that shows off the inside semi-underboob if you get the angle just right.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

Grrl Power #1464 – Hammer quest

DaveB — Thu, 28 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Obviously, Dabbler should run this up the chain of command. As a “civilian specialist,” there is surely a hierarchy she’s supposed to answer to, or there would be if Archon, and Arc-SWAT specifically was the size of a single company. As it stands now, I’m not sure they even qualify as a platoon. (For the non-military types (myself included) a squad is 7-14 troops, a platoon is 3-4 squads, and a company is 2-4 platoons. The exact numbers vary a lot depending on which military and which branch you ask.) But since Arc-SWAT is so small, really she only answers to Maxima, and that’s really only when Max feels like it’s worth taking her to task. Maxima is a wildly, unrealistically permissive commander, and the only way it works as well as it does is because I don’t like writing about the sort of baggage the typical “TV Drama” character has. You know, the police captain only got his position because he grew up best buds with the guy who became the lead gangster of their city, the sergeant is secretly hooked on laudanum, this detective is using a network of unapproved C.I.’s, that one is dating a defense attorney, this one is in a love pentangle… Stuff like that.

Basically nearly everyone at Archon is there because they’re mostly good people who like their jobs and do them. I know it’s not terribly realistic, but I’m writing a funny webcomic, not a super powered spin-off of The Wire. Actually, I guess that’d just be “The Boys,” wouldn’t it?

So, Dabbler in on board. There may be consequences. I guess Sydney finally found something to spend her rich person money on. Heh, I realize I wrote on that page Sydney saying “I’ve gotten used to my fancy new lifestyle,” but she hasn’t changed her lifestyle at all. She’s still driving the same Honda Element I think I’ve put in the comic all of one time. She’s still in that same apartment. The biggest change, besides her job, is the comic shop has moved to much nicer digs, from a strip mall to a repurposed church. (Which is modeled almost exactly after the one my parents dragged us to every Sunday until I went to college. I mean, why make up a different layout that I would undoubtedly accidentally change every time I drew it?) She probably hasn’t even upgraded her internet or anything like that because she’s only spends a few nights a week at her apartment any more.

Dabbler probably shouldn’t wear lavender. It’s odd, actually. Exotically skinned characters are slightly limited in what colors they can wear, because if your skin has a strong primary tone, there are some colors that conflict with it pretty dramatically. Whereas most human skintones… aren’t really a color. I mean, they are, of course, but they’re not bold, saturated colors that clash easily. Obviously, no one should wear something like a lose top that goes halfway down their butt, and then skintight leggings that are the exact color as their skin tone. But that applies to any skin tone, not just a white, brown or black person. Although, seeing a woman with especially dark skin wearing “Caucasian” leggings has definitely made me do a double take a few times. But that’s about something messing with expectations out of the corner of your eye, not about color clashes.

These are some of the things I think about when I’m picking colors for Dabbler and Cora and Altus’s clothes. I guess Sylv too, though he’s a less saturated green, and the clashes usually happen at the more saturated end of the spectrum.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

Grrl Power #1463 – The coy succubus

DaveB — Mon, 25 May 2026 10:00:36 +0000

Sydney, don’t go around the vault full of magic weapons pulling swords from their sheaths without reading the little tags attached to them. Your glasses can translate Dabbler’s notes. The Antagonistic Dancing Practice Rapier does pretty much what its nom de guerre implies.

Sydney has been interested in her own hammerspace since page almost immediately after meeting Dabbler. Well, she’d been interested long before that, but didn’t realize it might actually be a possibility. Of course there’s a difference between a “scabbard of holding” and right proper hammerspace, which may be why Dabbler didn’t think of this solution. Also, as she points out on that page, Sydney’s already well stocked with abilities. Granted, Dabbler has like 50 times the individual abilities that Sydney has, if you include her tech stuff and spells and limited alchemical dabbling. But Dabbler just met Sydney. She likes to get to know people a little before just giving away magic weapons.

Yes, Maxima could admonish Sydney for (wo)manhandling Harem. But Harem could just teleport behind Sydney and stick an ice cube in her butt crack. She’d have to make a pit stop in the kitchen first, but the ease with which Harem could escape this situation basically makes her complicit in not escaping it.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

Grrl Power #1462 – Sword insecurities

DaveB — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:00:21 +0000

Once upon a time, just after Max got her powers, there was an incident or two (or five, several of which went unreported to the authorities – by which I mean her mom and dad) where she would demonstrably point at something a say “Pew!” and there would be a… collateral incident. Once it was at a church, when she was pointing at some pews. Fortunately her energy blasts at that time were a fraction of what they can get up to these days. And by a fraction, I mean like 1/12,000th, not 19/20th. Or 10/1. That’s a fraction. Obviously, in English, saying something is “a fraction of…” implies less, but 1/1 is a fraction. Any number over any other number is a fraction. Possibly except x/0. I mean, it is still written as a fraction, but much like telling NOMAD “I am lying.” or “print open parenthesis openquote does not compute closequote closeparenthsis,” it does not compute.

Harem’s shirt does say something, in a language/script I made up as I was drawing this page, though I’m not sure if or when it will be revealed in the comic, cause it’s kind of a lame joke and I’d probably have to dedicate a half a page to it. The way things play out in my head is a lot like jokes from 30 Rock or Parks and Rec, with a lot of back and forth camera shots, some of them just capturing a quick expression before cutting back to the person saying or doing the weird thing that prompted the expression. Some days, it’s a lot of work to edit all that down to comic format.

Speaking of 30 Rock and Parks and Rec, have you guys seen “The Muppets”? Not The Muppet Show, CBS did a one short season, like 10 or 12 episode run of The Muppets, and it’s basically 30 Rock, where Piggy is a late night talk show host, but she’s naturally a short fused attention diva like Jenna Maroney, but with Ms. Piggy’s penchant for cartoon violence, but it also has Parks and Rec energy because it’s filmed diagetic mockumentary style, with asides and mini interviews to a tagalong camera crew. Honestly it’s very well done and pretty funny and I’m kind of furious that it only got the one season.

Yes, I’m aware of the new single episode of The Muppet Show produced by Seth Rogan, which was so true to the original format I was having nostalgia flashbacks to when I was… damn, 1976 to 1981? That would have made me 4 to 9? I must have been watching in syndication when I was around 10-14?

Anyway… Sword fighting!

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

Grrl Power #1461 – Body composition issues

DaveB — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:00:20 +0000

And fade to black. Or a dark, low saturation blue. Cause that’s the color of her sclera. I think in real life, dark sclera might be quite off-putting, but that’s because 99% of us would assume its an indication of a terrible medical condition. As a purely cosmetic effect, though, I think it’d look cool.

Oh, look, there’s such a thing a scleral contact lenses. I mean, I knew there were, they use them in movie makeup, but apparently now you can just get them online. I feel that’s one thing I would definitely not shop at Temu for, though. Well, my list of things I wouldn’t buy at Temu does in fact include everything, since I don’t shop there. I don’t understand how they’re in business, actually. “Getting a deal” is one thing, getting something that only vaguely resembles what you ordered is not usually how commerce works. At least not for long, but I guess that’s the world we live in these days. I guess it’s possible there are actual deals there, but the only thing I know about Temu is the demonstrably false advertising/bait and switch they do when they show the picture of the cool T-Shirt that looks like it has a spiraling hole through it and when it arrives it’s just a plain T with a badly spray painted asterisk on it and stuff like that.

It’s possible Deus has an exoticism fetish. Exotiphile? I suppose anyone who draws sexy alien or fantasy girls has a little bit of that as well. >cough<

Sciona probably knows an illusion or glamor spell that could accomplish exactly what he’s asking for, but she’s not above playing up girly insecurity to get a guy to give her free stuff maybe. She actually is concerned about losing her cool new powers, but the crossed arms and “I don’t want to admit vulnerability” side glance is her hamming it up a little. At least she didn’t go, “I’m scarwed of woosing my pow-pows, can you hewp widdle ‘ol me, mister stwong man?” I suspect Deus might immediately see through that.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

Grrl Power #1460 – Chemical opposites

DaveB — Thu, 14 May 2026 10:00:37 +0000

Edit: Okay, I fixed the typo in panel 2, and I did another pass on the looked-like-a-strap-on in panel 3. It was admittedly a little distracting once it was repeatedly pointed out. I don’t blame you guys. It did look like Sciona was about to give him what for.

How do Sciona’s bangs get longer when her hair is down? Magic, probably. Don’t worry about it.

Deus sure gets a lot of mileage out of that “I’m going to be a jerk but it’s because I respect you so much” bit. He used it on Maxima, though I honestly couldn’t tell you what page that was. Ironically, the more intelligent the person is, the fewer times he could pull it off with them, even if he was being mostly sincere.

You know, if Sciona… sorry, if Escorpia really was a sicario/narcotraficante, she probably would have had a lot more tattoos than just the… temple tattoo? It’s more like a “mohawk negative space tattoo.” Not that I’m aware of any comprehensive audit of female merc/drug runner tattoo coverage. I guess Sciona lucked out that Escorpia was content with just the one on her skull. Presumably if she can permanently change her hair color and length with a spell, she could probably remove or at least hide tattoos. Really the only reason she still had the one on her head under the hair she was growing out was for you guys’ benefit. (guys’s?)

Sciona usually does not “take smug.” She’s murdered for a lot less than that. But Deus is too important of a potentially exploitable resource to her. He’s also pretty good in bed, which isn’t a deciding factor, but it is a factor. She knows that if she killed him, the Alari from the colony ship would almost definitely assume control of Galytn, which would probably be both good and bad for her plans, and Deus can more or less run interference for her regarding them.

Sciona’s original final line was “I am seriously reconsidering fucking you.” Which I think is more pithy than what I changed it to, (Actually the very first draft read “sleeping with you” but that didn’t feel right either) but the more I thought about it, the more it sounded like she was planning on sleeping with him for his sake, like some sort of transactional reward. I suppose for being good at it the last time, maybe? So not some selfless sacrifice on her part, certainly, but there was something vaguely “It’s a man’s world, and I’m very sexy, which is mostly for the benefit of men, and he deserves his prize” in the sentiment. Yes, it’s possible to over analyze these things, but it doesn’t hurt to occasionally step back and do a paradigm check. The comic is mostly female characters, and while I certainly can’t claim any special insight into the female mind, I do at least attempt to consider that perspective… Even if a lot of them do have fairly typically male behaviors and hobbies. But I write what I know, and would the comic would be any better if I did some deep dive into typically feminine hobbies so Sydney could launch into the occasional dissertation about… quilting? Not that women couldn’t be into literally any hobby, of course, but the point of all this would have been to “feminize” some of the female characters, and saying that Harem is into restoring vintage tractors doesn’t really accomplish that. Although… she was raised on a farm… Hmm.

Anyway, I edited Sciona’s lines mostly because I don’t want all the characters to sound the same, and my first draft felt more sit-commy, and less “sociopathic blood mage.”

I sort of feel guilty when I post a page with only 4 panels. I mean, not that guilty, but for all I gripe about cramming way too many panels on a page and having to draw tiny faces, when I get to the occasional page that just wouldn’t benefit from wedging three more panels in there, it does feel a bit… light? Oh well, I’ll get over it.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.