Page Commentary No. 162 (Patreon)

Gunwild: Oh no, talking about this page's writing might make me emotional. Let's talk about the fpoon in panel two instead!

Psu: That was probably the dumbest adlib joke I ever put into this comic. And therefore it's one of my favorites. Actually this page has a lot of them! I like the iMac clock and of course Nizka's shirt is another winner.

Gunwild: I wonder how breakable the plates are, anyway. You'd think in the space-future we'd have ones that don't shatter at the slightest drop. But people still drink out of glass every day, for whatever reason.

Psu: I like to imagine if they do break, they do that thing where it breaks into easy to pick up shards with no sharp edges. Well anyway... we should probably talk about the story content here. I think neither of us expected to do a story with the kids so soon after the Big Race. But it was probably like the Vanaa museum story. Once we introduced these characters, we weren't ready to say goodbye to them. So we gave them an episode.

Gunwild: Exactly. Although by this point I think we'd decided that if characters were gonna show up, we'd do something with their status quo. We're not like one o' them fancypants monthly print comics who can spin their wheels for twenty pages!

Psu: Oh yeah, around this point we started talking about how we wanted to get things moving and changing. We've got some ideas for the Space Orphans as well, but starting from this point you will be able to track a sort of "progression" in the comic by what happens around the Space Orphans and Vraxiopeia. Spoilers, they go to Vraxiopeia at the end of this story. And from then on, you can sorta see time passing as the colony expanded every time we revisit it.

Gunwild: I like to be vague about how much time is passing, I mean given the release schedule we can't be specific with dates and stuff. But the idea is that it's still there as a kind of marker to remind you that the setting as a whole is still moving forward in time even if any given character has not gotten to appear for a hot second.

Psu: Kids grow up really fast. I think just before this webcomic started, my Niece was going into first grade and now I spent a day listening to her talk about her favorite Percy Jackson Fan Fiction.

Gunwild: Is there one where Percy isn't named Perseus, since he's Poseidon's son, and Perseus was Zeus's boy, so that doesn't make sense? Because that one will be my favorite!