Kickstarter Sketches
Shaenon: Right now I’m drawing sketches for backers of the Narbonic Kickstarter campaign. As some of them are of characters who also appear in Skin Horse, I thought I’d share.
Nick and Dr. Lee are not in Narbonic. People just like Nick and Dr. Lee.
Channing: I’m immensely flattered by this interest in characters I had a hand in creating, although the lion’s share of their appeal obviously lies in Shaenon’s appealing designs and character voice.
Man, I miss Lovelace. She’s such a well-intentioned mess.
I get a kick out of the thought of man-Artie and gerbil-Artie sitting there talking to each other. Of course, he can’t actually do it… at least not yet. Just like everyone else, he’d have to get bonked on the head really hard to have a conversation with himself.
Dr. Lee’s CNS pendant with pendent spinal cord and branches …
I’d warn Nick that if he sticks his finger out like that, somebody’d cut it off—but Dr. Lee already did, along with much more important body parts.
Jeff, dude, you write the strip. I miss Lovelace, too, but you can do something about it.
Lovelace is currently signed to Marvel, where she plays Suit Lady/Karen.
I’m keenly aware of Lovelace’s absence but I’m even more keenly aware of my lack of any good her-focused stories.
Actually, I would’a thought Nick and Dr. Lee were around in Narbonic, just somewhere offstage.
I kind of want to figure this out now. Artie is a schoolteacher and activist now, has been since before Sweetheart joined Skin Horse, which was several years ago now. Back in Narbonic, he was just starting college as of the epilogue. So Skin Horse takes place upwards of 6 years after the end of Narbonic, probably closer to 20 years. So, where were Dr. Lee and Nick 20 years ago in-universe? Nick was probably a flesh-and-blood nerd, before Project Whirlygig was a thing. And unless I miss my guess, Dr. Lee was probably working for Anasigma, maybe even working on Project UNITY. (There was a comic punchline about midway through Narbonic about Helen selling all her scans of Mell’s brain to a government think tank, so that would point to the timing)
Well, we know that Dr. Lee worked for A-Sig well before the Skin Horse comic started, since Unity was created, escaped, was captured by and put to work for Skin Horse, all prior to the first strip. And Helen didn’t sell scans of Mell’s brain. She sold Mell’s DNA. I haven’t yet read the story that Shaenon wrote during the gap, but so far the only thing I’ve seen that confirms my longstanding belief that Unity was created from that DNA was a fanfic story where Unity and the gang went to spend the holidays with her “sister” Mell. My guess has always been that it’s around 10 years between the two comics. I’ll have to do some research to confirm it.
(Or Jeff and Shaenon could just, you know, tell us)
Rule #1 of serial fiction: never nail yourself down to a hard timeline.
Well… OK. But it’s no fun that way. Or maybe it’s more fun that way. One or the other.
w/r/t Unity’s ties to Mell: In the author commentary on that strip (i.e. the one where Helen mentions that she sold Mell’s DNA to a gov’t think tank), Shaenon mentions it and comes just short of spelling it out. (I can’t pull it up because frigging webcomicsnation had to collapse and frigging tvtropes hasn’t updated their link, and I don’t recall where it is in the archive, blarg).
Thanks. I had forgotten about seeing that in the commentary. Found it.
Most women have little heart necklaces. I love that Dr. Lee has a little brain and spinal column necklace.