So Sydney now has a passport to the galaxy. Sort of. She can’t really go zipping off to just anywhere… Well, she can, she just kind of has no idea where she’s going at the moment, unless she has a pathfinder. Fortunately, the orb’s “history tab” seems to remember some of the locations it’s been to, so she can probably explore and always have Earth marked as a recent travel location.

Unless that so called history tab is actually a bookmarks tab, in which case, Earth won’t appear on it unless she can figure out how to add it.

To Sydney’s point about the Nth leaving out useful features from the orbs, I think a lot of super advanced alien tech would be that way, even if it wasn’t god tier tech. If you were smart enough to do 11th dimensional math in your head, and you were the only person using the gadgets you created, it’s likely that your user interface would be an absolute nightmare to anyone but you. Quite frankly, it’s amazing the orbs are as user friendly as they are. Imagine if before firing the PPO, Sydney had to calculate the power used, the frequency of the wavelength, whether or not it was pure EM radiation or a particle beam what sort of particles to use, density, interval, aperture, distance to target, half-life of particle decay, etc, etc.

Obviously the orb would be less useful as a weapon if it took 5 minutes of fidgeting with it to get it to do anything, which is probably why there’s just a (mental) button to push to get it to work. But underneath the one button interface is probably a host of options that Sydney would never be able to muddle her way through, and if she did ever start playing with the settings, the PPO might wind up firing area effect gamma burst death fields instead of the neato cutting beam.

I’ve updated the vote incentive, but before you click on it, let me say something about it as it’s not my usual fare. I painted over a picture of a fitness gal helpfully showing her physique. The point of the picture wasn’t to impress with my knowledge of anatomy, I was using it to practice drawing shiny Maxima, so I thought I’d save some time and work from an existing picture. Turns out that didn’t actually save me a whole bunch of time, as I wound up repainting almost every part of the woman cause it had that jpeggy dithering all over it and it bugged me and I’m OCD that way.

So, after all that, I’m not too pleased with the results for a few reasons. One, it took forever, which means it’s impractical to do in the comic. Two, honestly it doesn’t look as good as I’d like. Of course, I was comparing myself to paintings like Alex Ross’s pictures of Silver Surfer and Iron Man, and that’s admittedly a high bar. My piece isn’t bad, but it could be a lot better. Whether or not it could be better and be done at a reasonable speed is another question. Three, there’s another problem with making Max shiny in the manner that I did, is that it relies heavily on sort of… subdividing Max by muscle groups and using those edges to cordon off the edges of the reflections. While that’s more or less how it works if you look at a polished chrome or gold statue, it makes make Max look like she’s cut to the bone. She is, like all supers, in very good shape, but she’s not 0% body fat, and I don’t want to draw her looking like that. She has some feminine softness to her, perhaps unless she’s really flexing and making her muscles pop, but the point is that this method of making her look shiny isn’t what I want it to ultimately look like.

But I learned a bit from doing it, plus now we have a kind of cheaty picture of Max to look at, so it’s all good.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.