The Big Reveal (Take 1), week 1
Channing: Hey there, fans. As you well know, recently there was kind of a big reveal in the strip which we had been planning literally since the strip started; it just took us this long to get there. Though we always knew where the story was headed, there was some ambiguity as to how the reveal would eventually drop. My original idea is that this whole shebang would take place at the end of the storyline we called “The Hundred Dresses,” and you can see my first stab at that reveal below. This was a four-week stretch of (almost) entirely cut content, so we’ll be breaking it into halves and doing the first half this Sunday and the next half next Sunday.
As a final warning, if you’re not caught up on the strip and are just reading this Sunday for the first time: major spoilers to be found in the link below!
Shaenon: I always feel bad about cutting or changing Jeff’s scripts, but I had a clear idea of how I wanted the Ira situation to go down. Thanks as always to Jeff for going along with just about any ridiculous idea.
Nera’s last name is Vivaldi?
Yeah. That came up in another Sunday installment not too long ago.
Must’a skipped reading it that weekend.
It also appears in canon: http://skin-horse.com/comic/todays-comic-1018/
Now that one I know I saw.
I had actually forgotten about that one.
Darn. I that was the second BIG REVEAL!!
Really enjoying the revelation. I’ve only ever read the comic on a day by day basis, and I’ve lost track of some of the long-running threads. This is a good excuse to go back and read from the beginning. I *knew* owning these in book form was going to be handy at some point, beyond supporting some of my favorite creators 🙂
Revealing that Mr Green = Ira would have been cool in the strip, but the reveal with the text from The Wizard of Oz interlaced with strips from the run was utterly fantastic. No offense Jeff, but I’m glad you bowed to Shaenon on this one.
It occurs to me that Ira being Mr. Green explains how he knew Manifesta would become a dragon. Though I’m still fuzzy as to how her car traveled back in time. Did the Department of Temporal Anomalies cause that?
I hope this isn’t the end of Skin Horse!
Well, at the very least, meeting the man behind the curtain wasn’t quite the end of Dorothy’s adventures. (Although I categorically refuse to read the ones that might have Wheelers in them, so I don’t know the specifics.)
What do you have against Wheelers? Story-wise Ozma of Oz is one of my favorites. It’s the first one where we knew it’d be a series.
They were too scary for little me — my version of UNITY’s Purple Smurfs. It’s difficult to overcome that sort of thing even when you grow up, I’m afraid.
Jeff uses Windoze? I thought all creative types use Macs.
If it helps your cognitive dissonance, most of my actual writing is done on an iPad,
Many, many, many moons ago, there was a much wider gap between Apple computers and IBM-compatible PCs. IBMs were well suited for business functions, like word processing, while Apples were better suited for – as you say – “creative types” like artists and musicians. Now, 40 years later, that gap has been closed almost completely. What with the advent of Windows, faster processors, cross-platform software, etc., you can do pretty much anything on either machine. Of course, there will always be the two “my laptop can beat up your laptop” factions, but nowadays there’s a lot less actual disparity between the computers themselves.
My brother is a musician, and – having grown up in that pre-dawn era – he still uses his Mac for his music, and uses his Windows PC for pretty much everything else. I personally use Windows for almost everything, but I also have an iPad for portability.
I started giving up on Macs when I got an iPad for my birthday — but then couldn’t find a Mac computer that ran the required OS 10.5 to turn it on and use it for under $1k! (I’d already spent almost that in gift and my own money to get the iPad in the first place!) Then I found a small netbook that ran Win8 (which could also be used) for about $200 and found that to be as easy as using the Macs that I’d become used to. So I decided to go to the Windows side. (Sorry, Apple; *YOU’RE* the one who priced *ME* out of your market…)
FWIW, I wouldn’t have an iPad myself if it weren’t a gift. Apples have always been too rich for my blood. The ONLY money I’ve invested in it is for a bluetooth keyboard, because I can’t stand using a screen keyboard.
But I’m curious… Why would you need a Mac to run the iPad? An iPad is an independent computing device. I can use mine just fine, and I don’t have a Mac.
My uncle theorized (but never actually proved) that if you shuffle a deck of cards enough times, they will eventually arrive back in perfect order.
Ira reminds me of my uncle. And he sees Tigerlily as a deck of cards. She’s so incomprehensibly unpredictable that she has become completely predictable. And that makes her invaluable. Of course, it helped that he could see into her future. Perhaps if my uncle had been able to see into the future, he could have gotten that deck of cards sorted out.
Eight perfect riffle shuffles return a deck to its original order; see ‘Shuffling’ in Wikipedia. Given perfectly random shuffles, you can’t guarantee an eventual return to an original state, but the with enough shuffles you can make the probability of no return smaller than any given nonzero value. Also, with 52! shuffles you can guarantee that at least one order will be repeated.
8E67 is a lot of shuffles. At 4 seconds each, that’s about 10^61 years. Not to mention they’d have to be pretty durable cards.
So was the sole purpose of Tip losing his wardrobe to set up the reveal that never happened?
I think it is to set up the reveal, rather, that Ira has known all along who Tip is. He is so used to calling him “ma’am” that he is doing it now out of habit, even though Tip’s appearance no longer looks feminine.
Right, but what I’m saying is, now that the reveal has changed, did that obviate the point of that entire plot?
Of course not. Do reread the last storyline, and notice that everyone’s given Tip some part of his lost wardrobe. This is building up to something else.
PANEL THREE
Tip: Tigerlily Jones has been running the *entire shadow
government* from this building and you didn’t notice!
Ira: Ma’am, are you questioning my ability to perform my duties?
~~~
This made me chuckle.
I love that the two universes converge at the moment that Tip confronts Tigerlily Jones. I have a feeling that the return of their mojos will figure greatly in the endgame.