Grrl Power #1466 - Semifinals go! (Patreon)

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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.