Cute and funny penultimate installment here, with only the slightest hint of Bandit’s social issues giving it a little bit of weight. I’m pretty sure she’s sincerely unaware of her friends’ preferences, despite the story Jason tells so delightfully in the backgrounds of the last two panels. We’ve stretched the ascetic Gravedust in a lot of ways, but I think this is the only time we saw him go full Cookie Monster.

We got freer and freer with the “dire” label as Guilded Age went on. Had the series lasted 100 chapters, we probably would have ended up with dire goose, dire platypus, dire whale…

While this story was running, we were also doing the 2014 Axemas special, which was also themed around celebrations that didn’t go so well, actually. The difference is that none of the participants had Bandit’s blissful ignorance.