Grrl Power #1489 - Target audience (Patreon)

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

Ahhhh! Done with the fight scenes for a few pages at least, and back to the characters being goobers. The meat and potatoes of this comic. Feels good. Also not having to draw a bunch of speed lines feels good too. I mean, obviously I have some huge speed line templates that I cut and paste, because there's usually no point to doing a unique radial burst for each panel, but still. There's more to good speedlining that just laying lines over or under some action, as I'm realizing, but hey, that's the job. Still, I wouldn't say no to 3 or 4 Japanese interns who put in 16 hour days doing mind-numbing background work. Man if I could get that for a single page... well, that page would probably just be an establishing shot of a massive city, because that shit is tedious. That or a lot of rubble. 

There was some debate on the previous page about whether Max qualifies as a "Mary Sue," which in its current common usage, is a term I generally don't like. Because the original Mary Sue was specifically a female character who is great at everything, but most importantly, also an author self-insert. Unfortunately, the current common usage seems to have become "any competent female character." Without the author self-insert part, it almost always feels like the person complaining about a female character being good at stuff is really zeroing in on the female part of the equation, and that becomes extremely evident when you ask them, "Is Batman a Mary-Sue?" Because Batman is a billionaire playboy who is better at literally every single physical activity than Olympic equivalents, is also the world's greatest detective, can outfight like 20 ninjas at a time (dudes who have spent their entire lives training only to be deadly fighters and don't waste any time on that detective stuff or solving riddles) has all the gadgets, up to and including his own fighter jet armed with a variety of missiles, which is probably illegal for a private citizen in a much bigger way than vigilante justicing some thugs in an alley, has his own space station with orbital strike capabilities, which, again, probably illegal in a way that the entire U.N. might care about, etc, etc. The Mary Sue-accusers usually say, "No, because Batman loses fights all the time." Right, he loses fights, (usually so he can get thrown in a deathtrap only to quickly escape) but never the war. If a female billionaire playgirl gadgeteer, etc got her back fucking broken rather famously, then recovered and was basically completely fine afterward and proceeded to beat up Bane, I feel like they would get "Mary Sue" lobbed at them. What about James Bond? What about Iron Man? Riddick? John Wick? Mary Sue or just the main character of a franchise who necessarily has to win in the end so the franchise can continue?

But here's a serious question. If Maxima is a Mary Sue (the non-author insert kind, obviously) because she's powerful and wins fights… is Saitama? (From One Punch Man if you didn't know his name.) Saitama is probably exempt because his strength and battle record are almost entirely played for laughs. Also he's male. I guess the real question is if Maxima was Maximus, would anyone even think of accusing him of being a non-author-insert Mary Sue? Cause I've never seen anyone accuse Batman of being a Mary Sue out of the blue, it only ever happens when someone asks the guy who's accused a female character of being one if Batman is also one, and accuser guy suddenly feels defensive about getting called out for being sexist.

If you think seeing Maxima win a bunch of high-level fights with relative ease is a little boring, that's fine. That's a totally valid criticism - even taking into account that she entered specifically because she analyzed previous tournaments and was fairly certain she could probably win with relative ease. That's still a valid criticism, because it's on me to relay an entertaining version of those events.