Grrl Power #1022 - Pressed to impress

Thanks so much for your support! For serious!

This page was supposed to show Deus working out alongside a bunch of soldiers, and I kind of started to do that there in panel 3, but in my head, there was like a line twenty deep behind him and ten lines next to them. I realized I wouldn't have time to draw all that but I was hoping to make it look a little more like he was being a man of the people. (Whether that was just PR theater or a genuine thing would of course be left unsaid.) My initial vision also had them all standing in a flat field using kind of beat up looking weights, but that was just my brain being like "All I really know about Africa is that it's a destitute dustbowl and the north part has pyramids and the south part had apartheid and also that's where District 9 took place man can you believe that movie only came out in 2009 it seems like it's so much older than that and it's crazy Sharlto Copley had basically never acted before and he fucking nailed it" so I had to revise that image in my head. Also, Galytn and Mozambique are closer to the equator than Texas, and there's no way I would touch metal weights that had been laying out in the Texas sun, so I added the tent/pavilion thing.

In my 30's, I was a pretty regular gym rat. I lacked the mass of someone who'd been doing it since they were 14 - if you look at the dudes who become Mr. Olympias or at least WWE crash test dummies or jacked actors (jackedors, as I call them) they're all huge by they time they're 17 or 18 - BUT, I did get my military press up to about 225. (That's the bar plus two 45 lb plates on each side.) I never liked doing deadlifts though, because I was pretty terrified of messing up my back, so I never would have been able to clean* the weight like Deus is doing here. I used a rack with all the safety catches but still managed to fuck up my shoulders. *By 'clean' I mean hopping the weight from the ground to the shoulders. It's half of the clean and jerk, an exercise clearly named before modern slang made giggling mandatory when talking about this.

All that to say I figure someone who's got that teenage foundational bulk could handle 315 lb military press. (Bar plus 3 plates per side) Of course, even if he's pushing the Olympic record, it would be a weird way to try and impress someone who had military pressed and then military thrown a tank a hundred yards. Maxima might intellectually recognize the effort as impressive, but to her, 315 pounds is like an empty dixie cup.