More Iron Thumbnails
Shaenon: More thumbnails for Nick strips. I drew some of these a loooong time ago.
Channing: I’ve known about some of these strips for almost a decade now, and it’s a very weird experience to finally see them air in final form.
Skin Horse
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
I’ve seen that chair Nick is sitting in before somewhere, but where? What move or TV show?
Are you thinking of this scene from Men in Black?
No, never sat through more than a piece of the movie, but I could have seen a picture (or somebody else used those chairs).
It’s on the DVD cover for Men in Black II, so you wouldn’t have had to have seen any of the movies.
It was also used in that old British show “The Prisoner”. The “Number 2” of the day was often sitting in it.
Definitely seen that.
My first thought as well. Says something about our age, perhaps…?
And mine–although I’m a fair bit younger than The Prisoner, so it doesn’t necessarily correlate with age.
It’s an Eero Aarnio ball chair. I…I’m into modernist chair design. You should have seen me flipping out at the Eames show at the Oakland Museum a couple of weeks ago.
A quick internet search revealed several vintage pictures from movies and elsewhere. One picture even had Doris Day sitting in one.
Pricey things, though.
Imagine Dragons – Believer has a similar chair for the kid
That first panel feels super weird, what with the Christian references being both directed at, and made by, a Jew.
Which now makes me wonder… was there a concept of Nick at some point where he wasn’t Jewish?
Nick never takes the Lord’s name in vain, but he will cuss with “Jesus” or “Christ.”
I’m reminded of the joke about the Christian Horse.
Yeah, my grandfather used to do the same. Chalked it up to him growing up in a Catholic town.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard that “second coming” analogy made in reference to how excited a Christian is about something. And unfortunately, not the first time I’ve heard a Christian take the name of the Lord in vain. So while I agree that it sounds weird (it sounded weird in real life, too), it’s not unrealistic.
I’ve been taught it’s OK to take the Lord’s name as long as distribute it heavenly.
Sorry for the pun.
Well, Virginia sorta established that we would use Christian figures-of-speech here, and Nick just sorta went along with the established metaphor.
If I recall correctly (the “Notary” story?) Virginia’s Korean (vs. Chinese or Japanese), which raises the interesting possibility that she could have been raised in a Christian church. Christianity is a competitive religion in Korea.
Even if you discount Nick’s or Virginia’s own religious affiliations (whatever they be), they’ve both spent their lives surrounded by a Euro-American culture that has been majority-Christian long enough for some Christian terms to function as generic figures of speech without necessarily requiring specific theological content.
Thus Virginia can use the term “Second Coming” the way she does in the first panel and Nick can understand her reasoning without either of them having to make significant mental effort to piece together its meaning. And “Sweet Jesus” has functioned like a generic exclamation for so long that Nick may be saying it out of sheer habit, without connecting it in his mind with any particular meaning at all, let alone with Virginia’s “Second Coming” reference.