Grrl Power #1403 - Matrioshka brains are the ultimate man caves, right? (Patreon)

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There's a lot of stuff I have yet to reveal about the Grrl-verse, and there's this weird temptation to just sit on canon secrets forever, so occasionally I have to remind myself that, oh yeah, I'm telling this story, and un-revealing stuff is part of the storytelling process. 

I would have to say I'm not a huge fan of Jack Kirby's art. Don't get me wrong, I respect the hell out of the guy and I more or less assume that he's the single most prolific comic artist of all time, and his art style basically defined all modern superhero comics. It's just that if I was looking to emulate someone's style, he wouldn't be my first choice. I do kind of like Kirby Dots though. Do an image search for that or Kirby Krackle. That's why I threw a little in there on the first panel. 

That said, when trying to draw large amounts of nebulously high tech stuff, I can easily see where his distinctive tech noodling arose from. When you've got to fill a bunch of space with "tech," and you're not some insane manga artist who has a staff of background guys who you can assign to draw gears and wires, certain designs kind of happen without too much effort. Not that this page in particular has a lot of high tech noodly design work on it, but I mention it because this page kind-of-should-have had lots of tech that's so high-tech that it's barely identifiable as tech. But the other way to go with insanely high tech stuff is to say it's unobservable. Not invisible, but more that it resides in another dimension or in a microverse or is otherwise beyond normal perception. 

Now, taking all that into account, when designing this guy, part of me was tempted to give him a high tech looking outfit. Some kind of armor or holofoil spandex or something, but then I thought, is there any tech that would be better than a nice sweater? I mean, yes, probably. Cora's hard light holograms are already pretty high tech, but combine them with molecular fidelity and a system that keeps them and the wearer at the perfect humidity and tempurature and never has a lose thread or a scratchy tag and never gets that waxy deodorant buildup in the armpits even if you launder the shirt after every wearing. Eventually there's going to be some wear and tear. But still, a nice cable knit sweater is hard to beat. 

How he gets the turtle neck over his head plate thingy is where the real tech-as-magic comes in. It's either some kind of distance de-relativeizer distortion field, or there's some buttons on the back.