I enjoy good small talk. My favorite scene in all of Django was where the guys were all talking about how shoddy their hoods were. It added nothing to the plot but it was amusing and gave dimensionality to otherwise flat characters. Same thing in the movie Amadeus, with the guys in Emperor Joseph’s court bickering about what language the opera should be in. It’s all just flavor text. I say this because I could write a dozen more pages of them sitting around the table and just talking, but I figured a few weeks ago, it would be funny to have my first big fight start right on page 200 so people can say “I like that comic but it took 200 pages for anything to happen.” since superhero comics are measured by the fights. Hence the tongue in cheek title for the page. There’s nothing in those small talk pages that won’t work if saved for later, so that’s how we’ll roll. I would like to do a page I thought of that starts with Harem saying “You know what the only thing that sucks about being a girl is?” and Sydney immediately rebutting “The ONLY thing?” I could do a dozen pages on just that.

I may be breaking some rule by turning one of those “wink wink” jokes intended only for observant readers into “the joke” for a page. (By which I mean Harem’s prophetic soda selections.) Even Peggy seems to be in on it now. Maybe there’s a trope named after that sort of phenomenon, but it’s funny how throwaway gags can become a thing. The prophetic soda happened because I needed something to color in on the can on that first page. It was just a “hee hee” moment for myself, but then it happened again, making it a thing. I guess it’s an official unofficial power of hers now.

Get ready for some action. Buckle your… buckley things. Pilgrim hats I guess. You know with all the buckles we attribute to the pilgrims it makes me think they were into hard S&M. Too bad the whole buckle thing is one of those widely held misconceptions. Still, I prefer my image of the pilgrims greeting the natives in gimp suits.

Here’s a bonus mini comic for you guys to celebrate page #200: (You can click to embiggen)

<– I’ll just leave this here, you know, in case you’re curious.