Grue’s Is A Floating Black Skull

Is it just me or does she give off Harry Du Bois vibes?

Having an extremely specific problem after trying a traditional pencil crayon look for an older Tattletale portrait. Somehow, during the slow work from grubby sketch to rendering, she became way too hot. And said traditional art style means I can’t change this with regular digital tools, I have to redraw sections of her face entirely.

That I did with optical colour mixing using hatching and a limited palette.

Do I roll with hot Tattletale or do I suffer?

behold! low effort comic recreation of one of my fav parts of the gala fight! didn't feel like coloring, shading ect, but i still like it.

I love the way taylor makes decisions like a cornered animal I love her desperation I love the way she has been slowly whittled down to a viciousness that she can never escape I love her analytic mind I love her willingness to escalate I love the way she will do what no one else will for better or for worse

The interesting thing about Masumi is that for all that her condition is tragic, the story doesn't pull punches on the fact that she's also kind of a self-centered dick.

Shea a person with a continuous need for praise and positive emotions or millions, possibly everyone, dies.

And she chooses to go into art. She goes into a field with tons of competition and purely subjective results and is thereby bringing everyone else on earth, Including 4 of the most powerful people on earth, along for the stroke-my-ego ride.

And no one can tell her no, can tell her to back off, because that conversation might put her over the edge and turn her into a giant monster. She has a girlfriend who cannot break up with her because that would kill her.

It's a tragic situation to be in, it's sucky to know that everyone around you is taking reactions out of fear, but she very clearly isn't helping, and years of being treated that way have not helped.

The Power Cut previews: The Superpowers

Essay and art previews for some of the essays from The Power Cut, an upcoming The Power Fantasy fanzine!

Credits:

Masumi: essay @jkjones21, art @tazmuth

Heavy: essay @idonttakethislightly, art @jkjones21

Etienne: essay @meserach, art @artbyblastweave

Magus: essay @rei-ismyname, art @jkjones21

Valentina: essay @khepris-worst-soldier, art @idonttakethislightly

Eliza: essay and art @idonttakethislightly

These images from J. Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars gestures in the same direction I was gesturing with that Aquaman post- there's a really interesting archetype in superpower fiction consisting of characters who "Step Outside" in the way described here. Superhumans who remove themselves from society- not in a "kneel before me" way, but simply out of recognizing that participating in society in a conventional manner offers them significantly less than it does an average person (though not nothing- insert that MP100 monologue about "can you make a soda can.") Libertarians who fuck off to the moon and carve a Gadsen snake visible from earth, that kind of guy.

Invincible featured the title character gradually sliding into something adjacent to this as he realized that he was just sort of going through the motions by attending college and so on, when his girlfriend can wish a house into existence and the Cecil throws money at him to do stuff he'd do for free. The entire main cast of The Power Fantasy is doing something like this- you're most likely in no danger if you see one of the Superpowers walking down the street but most of them probably haven't paid for a meal in years (unless they insist on paying, which wraps back around to having the same dynamic as not paying.) Superman yo-yos on the topic of how accountable he makes himself to human governments, but I strongly doubt he got a permit for that fuckoff-huge fortress in the arctic. And so on. Obviously not all superhumans can get away with this- Spider-Man is held back from becoming a full-time bank robber by way more than just his conscience. But whether they could get away with this is a great characterization question to ask of any superhuman, and it's a door you can't really close once it's open- any decision they do make from that point forward will be implicitly contrasted against their everpresent option to just Hit Da Bricks.

Thinking about Rachel and Aisha post Behemoth best friendship... :''(

nobody move. i've just successfully articulated the sentiment that taylor's power turns her into a panopticon because she was living in one & explained her trigger in a way i feel satisfied with for the first time in my life

the concept of the panopticon is not just about surveillance, but about creating an environment where people cannot be sure whether or not they are being surveilled, and thus must constantly act under the assumption that they are. which is exactly what happened to taylor--we see from when we first meet her in the school that she's anticipating attack from every possible direction to avoid it, and the one time she lets her guard down a fraction and assumes she's found a safe spot to hide from abuse, she's targeted with the juice spills. and this is after her trigger event, but it's clear she behaves this way because it was beaten into her over the entire course of the bullying. it's what she describes when she recounts the trigger:

“I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.  But I made a friend, one of the girls who had sometimes joined in on the taunting came to me and apologized.  ...  Her approaching me and befriending me was one of the big reasons I could think the harassment was ending.  I never really let my guard down around her, but she was pretty cool about it. “And for most of November and the two weeks of classes before Christmas break, nothing.  They were leaving me alone.  I was able to relax.” I sighed, “That ended the day I came back from the winter break. I knew, instinctually, that they were playing me, that they were waiting before they pulled their next stunt, so it had more impact. I didn’t think they’d be so patient about it. I went to my locker, and well, they’d obviously raided the bins from the girls bathrooms or something, because they’d piled used pads and tampons into my locker. Almost filled it.”

the precise moment when she stopped consciously anticipating and preparing to react to abuse--when she relaxed, when she stopped acting as if the lack of danger didn't mean that she couldn't still be hurt at any time--is when she was brutally reminded that she's never safe. she's still in the panopticon. she isn't literally being watched every second, she isn't literally in lifelong danger of having her vulnerabilities exploited, but it feels like she is. she can never ever be sure she's safe.

so she triggers, and she gets a power that turns her into a panopticon, and lets her watch everyone right back. it lets her regain control by turning her into a source of danger that could attack anywhere, from any direction, any time, fully unexpected.

& the reason her power enables her to watch Everyone--not just a single person, or a few people--but Everyone, is that the other major aspect of her trigger is the trauma of facts like this:

“It was pretty obvious that they had done it before the school closed for Christmas, by the smell alone. I bent over to throw up, right there in a crowded hallway, everyone watching. Before I could recover or stop losing my breakfast, someone grabbed me by the hair, hard enough it hurt, and shoved me into the locker.”

"All I could think was that someone had been willing to get their hands that dirty to fuck with me, but of all the students that had seen me get shoved in the locker, nobody was getting a janitor or teacher to let me out."

for months, for years, she was in a community where everyone regularly witnessed her humiliation and abuse, and everyone, dozens and dozens of kids and teachers, either contributed to it or was knowingly, silently complacent. this is what sticks with her: the idea that she is so universally reviled, so deserving of revile, that any crowd of witnesses would, without hesitation, consign her to the filth of the locker.

what else is she supposed to conclude, but that everyone she interacts with is a threat? that she can't drop her guard ever again, because no one will be coming to help her if she does? of course she has to become the panopticon. of course she has to watch everyone, all of the time, if she wants to stop it from happening again. of course she has to live among the teeming lowly and crawling things she has been taught via one firm shove that she is worth less than, and of course she has to use them to watch everyone back. and it would be inaccurate to say that doing this--monitoring everything with her bugs--makes her feel safe. all it does is allow her to remain in a constant state of paranoia and traumatized hyper-vigilance more efficiently.

Can Heavy yell louder than Masumi? Does it matter?

(This is for @jkjones21, in a way- he asked me to write about a certain page of The Power Fantasy and I'm taking it in a completely different direction than he suggested to me. He did have a good observation about the power lines and cicada as iconic anime/manga motifs, but I don't actually have anything to add to what he said.)

Okay, so from a certain perspective, you could say these two images are proof that Heavy can yell louder than Masumi, because of the way font size works in comics. I think that's an overly reductive point of view, but I want to start with it because it's a simpler version of what I actually feel like is going on, so here goes.

In the third panel of the first image, we see Masumi from so far away that she's barely visible, and her dialogue font is small to show that we can barely hear her. Then in the fourth panel, we see her closer up, and the big font size (coupled with her angry posture) make it clear that she's actually yelling at the top of her lungs, she was just too far away to clearly hear before.

By comparison, in the third panel of the second image, we see Haven (an entire city) from far enough away that Heavy isn't even visible from where he's standing on one of its balconies- but despite the distance, his dialogue font is still really big. If you can clearly hear Heavy yelling from far away, but Masumi's voice gets muted with distance, he's louder, right?

Except nothing in comics is real. You're not visually representing a world that consistently exists, you're representing a story that shifts in emotional meaning. The aesthetic effect of Masumi's voice there (at least, its effect on me) is that for all her emotional ferocity, she's just a small angry blip in an overall peaceful world. In the context of the story, her taking the human-scale perspective of "How could you murder hundreds of people?" is immature compared to Etienne's cynical pragmatism. And the visuals back this up by deflating her anger through making her look small.

And then Heavy... I don't want to say "he's louder because you're supposed to take his anger more seriously," because that's not quite true. This is an out-of-context excerpt as of today (five more days until issue #6!!!!) but I get the sense it's being played for comedy. Heavy's louder than a person that far away has any right to be, because the force of his anger is hyperbolic.

...it's not really about who's literally more loud. It's not even about who's more angry (not that you can measure anger on a scale, even.) It's about how the reader is supposed to interpret each character's anger- and the weird thing is, Masumi's small-font anger and Heavy's large-font anger are both coded as ineffectual. She's not as loud as she seems to think she is, and he's so loud it becomes melodramatic and funny. They've both got very real things to yell about, and I'm sure they take themselves seriously... but the narrative is undercutting both of them, for effect. (Again though- I'm interpreting the second image out of context! Or I guess you could say, the second image's caption is offering a different context from when I'll actually see the whole issue.)

Oh, and my headcanon? Heavy can yell louder in terms of literal decibels, but Masumi has an ear-piercing scream that's like a zillion times more alarming.

it is rlly funny that wildbow thinks so little about legend that he forgot he never gave him a name in worm so ward accidentally canonizes that his son’s name is also his name