*Pop*
on 31 August 2026
at 22:30
Chapter: Volume 3; Schooled
Characters: Aura, Blackbird, Conjurer, Idol, Mentelle, Migrant, Princess Paragon, Quarterback, Silverback, The Venerator, Trackstar
Location: Egress
Superspeed didn’t do much to help her there I guess, maybe the rest of the team will have better luck
Owwwwwww. Ow ow ow. OW.
I’ve already said what I think about the gore and blood, so I won’t insist too much.
That being said, I seem to remember that killing someone by crushing their skull is both extremely painful and not very efficient. (Decapitation, for instance, takes much less force.) So I wonder why the Venerator does it. There are many potential motives: terrorizing the opposition, inflicting intense pain on that one enemy (I understand that some people like that), showing off one’s power, goading the others into avenging their teammate in an unconcerted effort…
But of course, the question remains of the Venerator’s leeway for action. Does it act merely as an extension of Mother Mantis’s will? Does it serve her strictly as she wants (implying that the choice to crush Trackstar’s skull was hers)? Does he have more freedom of choice than that? Is there even a way to find out?
Those questions aside, I’m impressed by the variety of expressions on the heroes’ faces. (Particularly Trackstar’s wide open eye in the fourth panel.)
On that note, the last panel leads me to suspect that Quarterback may well be next to fall, rushing headstrong into the Venerator in a raging move for vengeance. (It would be slightly smarter to attack Mother Mantis, but I guess the Venerator wouldn’t let that happen, fast as it seems to be. To quote Chiang in Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, “Perfect speed, my son, is being there.” (Yeah, I’m quoting a more or less hippie book in the context of a particularly violent superhero action page and enjoying that.)
I still think the best course of action right now is for Magnifica to grow enough to scoop the others in her hand and throw them out of harm’s way. After all, she probably is among those who have lived thgough the first Venerator war. So she knows that no matter their raw powers, these largely untested heroes don’t stand a chance and wouldn’t even slow the thing down.
Last, I wonder if the Venerator’s legs aren’t a little short compared to the rest of his body. Or maybe it’s because his armor pieces make them look particularly broad?
As… unpleasant as that is, the range of powers in a supers story should result in that sort of thing* fairly regularly – the power differential is such that, if you set it up that tier 2 can do THAT to tier 1 and tier 3 can do that to tier 2, etc, there are about… what, 20 tiers or more? At *least* 10.
Even just misjudging your strength compared to their durability would lead to this kind of thing* “on the regular”. For very strong supers, misjudging on the low side gives the target another chance to do bad things, and the level of force being used is already **well** into “lethal force” areas, so… stop the threat, yeah?
Audiences don’t like that, so it’s magically toned down, but it’s very… inconsistent with other things that are shown in such settings.
“killing someone by crushing their skull is both extremely painful and not very efficient. ”
Depends on the strength differential. A 50 ton block on concrete falling on a living person’s head (and just the head) with a concrete backing behind it would instant and painless. It that’s the level of strength being used (and by description, it could be higher), ANYTHING it does is pretty much equally wasteful of power, “inefficient”. It’s like worrying about “efficiency” when you are crushing a small origami construction in your hand – anything you do crushes it totally with no possibility of any other result.
* “this kind of thing” not necessarily being “deliberately crush the skull to paste” but “use enough force to produce extreme gore”.
As usual, I almost agree with you.
Power differential in superhero stories is a long-time issue. By theoretical physics, a fight between Batman and Superman should last about 4 seconds, the time it takes the latter to throw the first into orbit. Except, of course, theoretical physics can’t describe Superman. (And they can’t usually describe Batman’s equipment either, or the Punisher’s ability to almost never get hit by a bullet, to refer to another ‘street-level’ character.) So I see two sides to take: accept that a superhero story that respect the laws of physics becomes a vigilante story, not that there’s anything wrong with that but it’s still different, and handwave the issue as “Marvel/DC physics”, or dismiss the story as unrealistic (with numerous stances in between, such as accepting Marvel physics but deriding DC for making Green Lantern vulnerable to the color yellow — which I once did in my younger age).
That said, it’s become a staple that überpowerful heroes need to keep their power in check so as not to hurt the opponents they only need to defeat (not to mention a temporarily possessed teammate). Alternately, Invincible, one of the best superhero series ever by my reckoning (despite its frequent gore), has high-tier super-powered people punch holes through their enemies on a regular basis.
And then you get the JLA/Avengers effect. When the same team has Superman and Green Lantern side by side with Batman and Black Canary (or Thor/Iron Man with Hawkeye/Black Widow), you need to give the less powerful characters something interesting to do anyway, so the power differences get ignored or flattened for whatever reason. To the extent that the Claremont/Byrne X-Men had a team that was vastly overshadowed by their own Jean Grey/Phoenix, yet faced enemies such as Magneto or Proteus as a team because the lady hadn’t yet come to terms with the sheer magnitude of her powers. Conversely, a powerless Storm later led the team because she had the ability.
I wholeheartedly agree that, taking the decades-old example, any fight where Wolverine pops his claws looks like it should end with blood splattered all around. I also accept that Wolverine, despite his willingness to kill, often refrains from seriously injuring his enemies, possibly because of his training as a secret operations agent (where stealth is primary, and the more people you kill or maim besides your intended targets, the greater the risk is that inquiries will be made, hindering future operations).
Note that something similar happens with their ancient forebears, the mythical heroes. By rights, fighters the mettle of Achilles, Ajax the Greater or Diomedes should have wiped out almost single-handedly the Trojan army in less than ten years. (Unless possibly Hector managed to meet them at every turn, but even so Agamemnon can send one with the left wing, another with the right and the third in the center and Hector has to run like the Ceryneian Hind to catch up.)
As for the Venerator being able to crush Trackstar’s skull like I crush an origami in my hand or a falling block of concrete crushes someone’s skull, it’s entirely possible; the Venerator might well be strong enough to do that. However, it’s not what I see happening here. It takes at least a few seconds to crush her skull, as evidenced by the fourth panel that has cracking noises while she’s moving, fighting, and realizing what’s happening to her. (YMMV.)
Please note that I had already accounted for your reflection on relative power in my original post, by envisioning the motivation for the act as a possible “showing off one’s power”. So yeah, we pretty much agree on that too.