Obviously there’s no way I could have a team of super ladies at a construction site without a bunch of construction workers doing what they do best. If this was a slightly darker comic, I could have had Max take offence, but it’s a fair bet she didn’t hear them.

Max, like all women (or just anyone who gets harassed on the street) has to continually decide whether to 1) confront and get called a humorless bitch behind her back, (or sometimes to her face if the guy in question has a real lack of self-preservation skills) 2) let it slide so as not to develop such a reputation or simply because engaging isn’t worth her time, 3) skulk away cause it’s not worth the confrontation, or 4) fire back and give as good as she gets. Max is obviously not a skulker. The big difference between her and most women is that it’s basically impossible for her to be remotely physically intimidated by a guy, and once she got her powers it understandably happened less and less to her within earshot. She used to confront people and get in their face, since cat calling from up on some scaffolding isn’t exactly an obstacle for her, but someone pointed out it was the equivalent of threatening a baby with a tank.

Now she usually either ignores it in a real “acknowledging your existence is beneath me” way, but sometimes she does like to fire back a few withering comments. The kind that tends to get the insecure sort of guys who do stuff like that angry and defensive. Again, not a problem for Max, but in the real world that sort of tactic can go awry. Well, it can go awry for Max as well. If she lays into a guy so hard he tries taking a swing at her, and he busts his hand on her face, a butt hurt loser like that might try to sue her for whatever he can come up with. Hurt feelings, lost wages, assault via tricking him into assaulting her. There’s probably a legal term for that, like “too much testosterone.”

Without meaning to, I put all the recruits in field dress and everyone else is basically ready for a picnic. Really, doing PR work like this on team time, they should all be in field dress, but 1) Arianna wants them to quickly establish their casual style and public personas, not that Max is heavily swayed by such arguments, but also 2) Max is obviously not a huge stickler for that stuff either. Yes, when enforcing those laws, she requires everyone to be in uniform, but the instructions for today were “stuff you’d paint your house in.” Also 3) I like numbered lists.

Edit: Well, I managed to misspell Ottawa, canoeing, and flotation. I don’t think that’s a record for me, but it’s close.

Patreon supporters can view this page at twice the size! (as soon as I wake up and post it then immediately go back to sleep since Patreon doesn’t have a way to schedule posts yet.) $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like :)

Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.