Continuing our 20th anniversary retrospective with everyone's favorite pair of completely normal people, Archer and Meg.

Archer started out as Mike Guy, one of several peanut people regular humans transported into the universe, who was just a general slacker and later owner of a deli. It wasn't until the 2014 attempt that I came up with the concept of making him into an impostor syndrome homunculus instead. Also the name Archer itself is just an extremely dumb pun on the name of my friend who came up with the peanuts humans.

2004 Meg was a gremlin with a hammer, meant to be a pastiche on magical girl anime of the time; this theme of "hero who doesn't want to actually be one" remained surprisingly consistent through her development over the years, only recently having the main inspiration for her hero form swapped for tokusatsu heroes during A Distant Sky. Megun/Meg also started as a friend's OC.

Fun trivia: a certain sequence in chapter 3 was basically taken from this earlier interaction between the two I drew for the short-lived 2014 iteration: