Grrl Power #1483 - Rocky mountain high? (Patreon)

Thank you for the support! You guys and grrls are awesome!

Okay, website seems to be humming along now, but I lost some time dealing with it, so the final versions of the vote incentive will probably go up next Monday. 

One of the big problems with doing a huge arena battle in a comic like this is… well, there's a lot less humorous antics going on, which is largely the meat and potatoes of the comic. The other problem is that if this were a Shonen manga, none of these competitors would really go down this easily. They'd each all be big fights that lasted dozens of pages, if not spanning multiple volumes, in which the protagonist has to learn some new ability or apply an existing one in a suspiciously flexible way. Or just flexed his power slightly harder. It would probably involve a flashback. For instance, Zerathax (the obsidian golem) would definitely be able to use his fire side to create thrust, Iron Man style, and fly around setting the battlefield on fire. Being broken in half really does very little to threaten his life, it robs him of his ice powers, but is mostly an inconvenience. And he can melt sand down to make new obsidian to reform his body, which may or may not be quite how it works, but is close enough for a 13 year-old Shonen manga main character to deliver an expository speech about while watching Zerathax convert sand and add it to his body, and most readers just go, "Eh, I don't feel like searching for a refresher course on igneous rock right now. Besides, the person the MC is explaining this to is a stick-with-boobs who is inexplicably wearing a bikini top in this battle arena scene." But I really don't want to make each and every fight some hyper extended battle where the protagonist barely scrapes by but learns and grows along the way. Lore-wise, it's because Max isn't 14 and didn't just get her powers. She's a 20 year vet with them at this point, and all her fights have been against other supers. (And sometimes against foreign military hardware) It's why she thought whatever she did to Eat-Chicken might have a chance of working the way it did. Non-lore-wise... uh, real world-wise, it's because this UCBA storyline would take me 8 years to draw if every fight was done shonen jump style. Maybe if I could put out 5 pages a week, I'd extend the fight scenes a little, but instead I guess I'm going for something in between a typical Shonen and the one-punch fights of One Punch Man. It feels like half-measures either way, so I'm considering how to work the final round so that it doesn't take 6 months to get through, but still have some cool moments.