Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2015-07-25
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2015-07-25

by shaenon on July 25, 2015 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Looking Glass Land
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Discussion (23) ¬

  1. Alphaghoul
    July 25, 2015, 12:01 am | # | Reply

    I meant to say this several strips back, it’s nice to see that Unity is opening up to Dr. Lee like that, since they are technically mother and daughter. And this doesn’t even need to be said but Unities reasons for hating Dr. Lee are nonsensical, especially since she’s a remorseless canniballistic serial killer.

    • BrokenEye, the True False Prophet
      July 25, 2015, 2:29 am | # | Reply

      Well looking at it that way, wouldn’t that make Nick and Ginny’s relationship technically incestuous?

      • Rex Vivat
        July 25, 2015, 7:08 am | # | Reply

        Of course not. Nick was born, raised, and aged to at least his teen years before he ever met Dr. Lee; sure, she transplanted his brain to his real body, and oversaw the (failed) project to acclimate him to it gradually, but that’s miles away from being his creator and/or mother.
        Unity, on the other hand, was literally brought into being by Dr. Lee, created and raised by her and other tutors until the funding ran out and she had to be abandoned. Even if her body was adult shaped from the beginning, it’s more than clear that she was a child then (hell, she was barely less childlike at the start of the comic).

        • Barking Monkey
          July 25, 2015, 7:28 am | # | Reply

          Nonetheless, I suspect if pressed Dr. Lee would consider herself perhaps UNITY’s nanny but not mother or stepmother. I also don’t get the impression that UNITY regards Dr. Lee as even that – a ‘creator’ certainly but that’s a whole other category.

          • Robert Nowall
            July 25, 2015, 9:43 am | #

            Well, Unity refers to Dr. Lee as her “creator,” but what connotations that has, I can’t say.

          • WJS
            July 26, 2019, 7:38 pm | #

            It really depends on the individual. Artie never called Helen “mum” once during Narbonic, and while he has adopted the Narbon name he may still not call her that. Zeta, on the other hand, called Helen that without hesitation when they finally met.

      • jdreyfuss
        January 27, 2020, 1:27 pm | # | Reply

        It would be Oedipal, though not incestuous, if she’d appeared to him as herself in the whirligig VR program. As it is, it’s more like a teacher and student dating after the latter graduates.

  2. B
    July 25, 2015, 1:08 am | # | Reply

    Every super genius in this setting is simultaneously an English major and a theoretical physicist and a biologist if not an engineer too. Its kinda getting too ridiculous.

    • Dewy
      July 25, 2015, 1:11 am | # | Reply

      No. Sergio has been like this since grade school.

    • Frank
      July 25, 2015, 1:41 am | # | Reply

      ANTONIO SMITH forensic linguist was not a theoretical physicist

      • Rachel
        July 26, 2015, 7:39 pm | # | Reply

        I miss ANTONIO SMITH, FORENSIC LINGUIST.

        I feel like he was a character who wouldn’t have been out of place at Tesladyne over in Atomic Robo. They’ve probably got an Action Linguistics department, right?

        • Prodigal
          July 27, 2015, 4:31 pm | # | Reply

          Somebody’s got the write the style guide for how to document a thing’s position on the Zorth axis, so almost certainly.

    • BMunro
      July 25, 2015, 1:51 am | # | Reply

      It’s a mad science setting. People knowing more than anyone could reasonably expect to learn in a lifetime sort of goes with the territory.

    • mnemex
      July 25, 2015, 2:04 am | # | Reply

      Actually, pretty much everyone I know is a bit like that. Most people in my circle (science fiction fandom/gaming) that I interact with regularly have at least a solid understanding of science (if they are not professional scientists, computer programmers, or both, which some/many of them are), can make puns in multiple languages whether or not they speak multiple languages, write poems and more than passable short stories (or songs), etc, are highly literate as a matter of wide tastes, etc.

      The difference in Skin Horse/Little Mel/Helen is that it’s a mad science world, so when you’re a genius with science, you can do the impossible, not just the improbable. But even in the real world, genius doesn’t fit into little boxes.

      I get the impression that a bunch of the people in Shaenon’s world are inspired by, among others, people she met at Vassar. And yeah, I know a bunch of those people, and they’re pretty much like that.

      • kicking_k
        August 8, 2015, 7:43 pm | # | Reply

        Yeah, my husband is a computer programmer by trade but he also has a First in German literature from Oxford. And many of his computer-science tutors seemed to have a background in languages or philosophy or something.

    • Yhera Invictus
      July 25, 2015, 10:25 pm | # | Reply

      It’s the super genius thing. Not just regular genius.

  3. Frank
    July 25, 2015, 1:42 am | # | Reply

    Is he implying the sestina is a step below a poem because of the “used to complain” thing? (see wikipedia article)

  4. greenknight
    July 25, 2015, 3:40 am | # | Reply

    Back to the old office, eh? Should be interesting, by now the basement dwellers have probable colonized the whole building.

    • Freddie Freelance
      July 25, 2015, 12:39 pm | # | Reply

      Or at least full of Tigerlilly’s attempts at getting her mojo back. With any luck Sergio will help with *that* in some small way.

      • Frank
        July 25, 2015, 4:45 pm | # | Reply

        “Now close your eyes, and concentrate. Let your energy flow through you. Breathe in, breathe out”
        “Gawd you ARE the man!”

  5. Robert Nowall
    July 25, 2015, 7:41 am | # | Reply

    Maybe Sergio could write Nick a check…

    • Frank
      July 25, 2015, 4:52 pm | # | Reply

      But then he’d spend it all on porn video games!

  6. Shadowmehr
    July 25, 2015, 10:10 am | # | Reply

    Wouldn’t mixing Nick and Sergio be the socio-psychological equivalent of combining matter and antimatter? The meltdown should be seen for miles.

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Skin Horse by Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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