June Mailbag
Shaenon: I give Nick a hard time, but he’s transparently my favorite character.
Channing: Many apologies to our increasingly-dismayed Lee. Some of my preliminary pre-strip brainstorming sessions got a little odd at times. Again, as noted, this was pre-strip speculation before I ever began writing her in earnest.
“pre-strip speculation before I ever began writing her in earnest.”
Jeff, I suspect that had you been actually “writing her in earnest” – i.e. writing letters containing your pre-strip ideas, and sending them to a real-life Dr. Lee to see what she thought – she would have burned the letters in her fireplace, and then taken you apart in her dismembrarium.
But that’s just my theory.
Somewhere, there’s a spectacularly damaged tub of Nestletine happiness.
Of what?
Nestletine, the competition to OvalQuik. Authentic Imitation Genuine Nestletine Chocolate drink mix
Also the animating consciousness of the Autons.
Well, I ran across and browsed through Nick’s blog a few weeks back…found him flirting with a helicopter pilot named Georgie…then wondered if she was the Georgia of the epic Kansas fight between Our Heroes and Anasigma’s Villains…
So whatever you guys come up with, you can count on us obsessives to come up with something weirder.
If I may be permitted, (yes, the 8 by 11 in the glass frame will do nicely) Ms Garrity is already aware of the weirdness that permeates Fandom.
In Narbonic, in the sub-arc where Dave was comafied, Helen had Mel host a Narbonic Art Day. Mel’s only comment at the end was, ‘You people are weird’
You have evolved Nick into a genuine hero and a real mensch. I just love him, and he and Ginny are a wonderful couple. Weird and disturbing, but wonderful.
It’s the kind of thing you hope for in a partner – they make you a better person.
… Virgina could just have been said to have taken it a bit too literally.
I am willing to accept this theory until evidence proves otherwise, or something shiny comes by to distract me.
What about a squirrel? Would that be distracting enough? Asking for a friend (she’s a squirrel).
Well that was meant for Awgie’s comment, but you know, yeah.
Jeff, Shaenon, it’s OK. When your characters take on a life of their own – even defy your will – Art becomes Life and the multiverse is richer for it.
… but it gets harder and harder to get them back on the page.
Unicorn tee shirt yeh!!!!
Should Shaenon have a Jacob’s Ladder, Tesla coil, or something else in the background of her Maniacal Insane Mad Laughter pane?
It is one of the best Maniacal Mad Laughter panes we’ve seen yet. Madblood’s moment of awesome beats it, but only just. And it’s a metafictional self-insert!
Now I’m sure Shaenon used a mirror as inspiration for Beta’s Bwa-ha-ha panel back in Narbonic.
Dear ‘Sharers-in-Fantasies’: forgive, but it’s obvious many do not know either
chopper folks nor mad-sci practitioners. It is/was a VERY predictable, typical
romance of those two types.
Still is. Something similar happening RIGHT NOW near you, or out by your airport.
Come on, it’s SPRING.
Everyone in this strip is mad, apparently the authors as well. Some know it, and some deny it.
And some revel in it.
Personally, I’ve always fanciedafancied T-shirt emblazoned with “Sanity / You can’t miss what you’ve never wanted.”
Plus a matching electric blue cape, naturally.
“FOOLS! I WILL DESTROY YOU ALL! (Ask me how!)”
I’ve actually seen a t-shirt that said “Sanity: You can’t miss what you never had”.
Okay, have I not been paying attention, or is “mind-wiping doesn’t exist” new information? I mean, it makes sense, but I don’t remember it being explicitly mentioned before. Maybe I’ve been mind-wiped.
No, no… weren’t you listening? Mind-wiping doesn’t exist. Ergo, you’re just delusional.
According to my CV, I was part of the taskforce investigating an alleged mindwiping incident. Must have been a lot of fuss over nothing- I don’t remember a single thing about it.
Mind-wiping was canonical in Narbonic, and this is the same universe. (Poor Titus!) I think that’s just Shaenon trying to spike Jeff’s plan with a retcon.
Good recall. Yes, Helen did erase Titus’ memories, and also Clone-Dave’s at least once.
It wouldn’t be the first time something in Narbonic got retconned in Skin Horse.
Alternatively, Helen being able to do it doesn’t mean the government can
Lee’s expression in panel six is goddamn amazing.
Yep.
The course of true love has more twists than a bag of Twizzlers.
Ira wasn’t mind wiped: He was faking it.
Unless mind-wiping doesn’t exist in the Skin Horse universe, but Ira hails from Somewhere Else…
I think that’s the point. The reason we don’t ever see anyone else who’s been mind-wiped (as one might expect, if it were actually a thing) is that Ira never really was.
^This.
I do love the “and then they started interacting on page and it blew up all of my carefully laid plans.”
By the byline…should you four be exposing Robin to this line of discussion, what with its use of certain words and gestures?
Robert Nowall: Maybe he’d already seen the penultimate panel?
Spoiler-sketch-speculation:
Dr. Lee gets a sick air-transport body as well, and in a parallel scene they have sloppy aircraft-makeouts 5 miles above themselves having sloppy meatbody-makeouts.
This Is Not A Serious Speculation.
The only thing that concerns me is what kind of effect would it have on their brains if their airborne bodies were to have an accident? Actually, that same question has popped into my head a few times when Nick was flying the helicopter with his meat sack on the ground. I mean, it is linked directly to his brain.
… a touch of jealousy from Channing in the last panel?
I don’t know about refueling jokes, but Howard Tayler has been doing dirty docking jokes for years in Schlock Mercenary. There’s at least one in Kris Straub’s Starslip too.
Jeff and I are both fans of the MST3K episode of “The Starfighters,” with its extremely long and faintly inappropriate midair refueling sequence.
Not gonna lie, I also originally was shipping Tip and Lee. But I’m all aboard on Nick/Lee now.
Ira was, of course, faking being mind-wiped. I still find it hard to believe that some Mad didn’t invent mind-wiping at _some_ point, though.
It’s like seeing UFOs. They’ve got ray guns that zap you and make you forget you’ve seen them. So if you’ve never seen a UFO, you probably see them all the time. (I am indebted to Father Guido Sarducci for this explanation.)
Helen used it at least twice that we know of in Narbonic.
Thanks to Jay above for jogging my memory.
Can I at least claim a nightmare pairing or two, even if NickLee gets the title of OTNP?
What if the brain preservation gel is stored in a cabinet in Nick’s chassis, and there’s turbulence, and Lee falls over, and the cabinet spills open and some of it seeps into Lee’s eardrum? It could be like a Man with Two Brains thing.
Or maybe the brain preservation gel gets over its crush on Nick and drips through the ventilation system into Ira’s nostril as he sleeps. Ira learns over many initially excruciating hours peace, acceptance, and even love. It’s the mind break feel good story of the summer. Except it doesn’t actually end the Great War because the gel turns out to be as ruthless a tactician plotting for human victory as Ira himself was. Brain preservation gel: not engineered to maintain healthy boundaries.
Now I’m doubting myself. Does brain preservation gel actually have the star quality to carry the final act? (Stop rolling your eyes! I can feel you doing it! I mean it, it’s hurting my feelings, you have to stop right now!)
Meanwhile, Panoptica gets an unexpected second chance at the happy ending with Jonah she always hoped for, but she cannot act because the acid in her thoughts has eaten through the fibers that permit work beyond just spinning and pulsing in place. Her consciousness has lost all connection with her body. She is poison that lies in a puddle tasting itself. The paralysis is so honed and practiced, with all points of friction worn away, that her thoughts go nowhere at near light speed. She is dying, and fairly quickly from an outside frame of reference, but internally she has a dozen lifetimes of misery left to experience. The one thought she has besides suffering is to sift through her life choices for any which might explain how she deserved to end in hell. There are none.
Applause!
“She is poison that lies in a puddle tasting itself.” – sheer poetry for the Mad!
This explains a lot of early strips.