Sydney’s rather collected attitude here surprised even me. When I sat down to write this page, I’d intended for her to be a lot more scared. Even though she knows less about Sciona than you guys do at this point, she just saw her cuddly jaguar buddy hanging ten in the corner, so she she should be a lot more concerned or angry, but sometimes characters write themselves.

That said, Sydney has literally no idea how to arrest someone other than telling them they’re under it. Maybe handcuffs are involved, and Miranda Rights (though do supernatural creatures get Miranda Rights? She doesn’t know.) And then what? Stuff her in an uber and drive all the way back to Archon headquarters? And what kind of tip do you leave for that? I mean, luckily she has a radio and can ask someone. (Also Harem and Pixel both know what to do) It’s just that she hasn’t thought through the steps at this point.

Sydney isn’t totally out of options here, but in the future she might reconsider the distribution of some of the stuff on her utility belt. Her wrist com doesn’t have an extendable blade for example. We know this because she definitely would have stabbed herself or someone else if it did. And not that such a thing would necessarily help in this particular situation, but who knows, maybe a taser would, or a jet of tear gas. Both of those would probably affect Sydney as much as it would her assailant, especially if their skin was touching the taser bits and her skin at the same time, but presumably if she was ready prepared, it could give her a slight edge. I’m sure Arc-SPARQ will have its hands full rejecting all her crazy requests.

So yeah. Page 500. Took 6 and a half years but here we are. Not an especially auspicious page to mark the occasion. There’s nothing wrong with it, but page 100 was Dabblers introduction… at least her introduction to Sydney. Not the first time she’d been in the comic up to that point though. Page 200 was the start of the fight at the restaurant. Book 2 almost started on page 300, but I thought if I try and hold myself to arbitrary page counts like that I’d wind up with odd filler here and there to pad stuff out, so I just went with the flow.

So I don’t say this enough (or hardly at all, cause I’m bad at the mushy stuff) but I want to thank everyone for reading, and sticking around when I take Sydney on some extended meet and greet scene. :) I will try and be better about that in the future, but like Sydney, this is all still new and exciting for me, and I get caught up in it.

Of course thank you so much to everyone who supports the comic on Patreon as well. If I still had a full time job we’d be only around page 300-350 now, which is a slightly depressing thought. I’d still love to take the comic to 3 pages a week, but I’m barely keeping up with it at 2 right now. Still, after three years of doing this full time now, I still think how amazing it is that I can buy a gallon of milk or some dumb thing on Amazon because I draw a comic about a super dork and her pals. So again, thank you all!

I asked around a few places online to see if anyone wanted to do some celebratory fan art for page 500, but I’m a terrible self promoter and I only got a few responses. They’re over at this post so check them out!

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Today’s milestone page is free for everyone!