Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2017-12-07
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2017-12-07

by shaenon on December 7, 2017 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Unsinkable
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Discussion (31) ¬

  1. gyrre
    December 7, 2017, 12:17 am | # | Reply

    So, several very odd things were happening across the country and people were just shrugging their shoulders and rolling with it? Yeah, that tends to make it harder to Obfuscate anything.

    • awgiedawgie
      December 7, 2017, 2:17 am | # | Reply

      The reality blindness does the obfuscating for them. Instead of seeing the odd things and shrugging it off, people don’t see anything at all.

      http://narbonic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2004/07/040707.jpg

  2. strawberrycocoa
    December 7, 2017, 12:23 am | # | Reply

    Suddenly, having Social Invisibility seems like it could be very useful in some scenarios.

  3. mrinku
    December 7, 2017, 12:26 am | # | Reply

    I really REALLY hope Rhodey comes out of this okay. I have a very low threshold for heartbroken children. Those drawings have really gotten to me.

  4. Tiff Hudson
    December 7, 2017, 12:35 am | # | Reply

    Okay, “Ostentatious Chuckling Extraction” is my new “Big Damn Heroes”.

    • Lady E
      December 7, 2017, 12:14 pm | # | Reply

      Coincidentally, that’s also the name of my Taylor Swift cover band.

  5. Robert Nowall
    December 7, 2017, 12:42 am | # | Reply

    What ho, Rhodey-being,
    What will he do?
    You don’t remember him, lady,
    But he remembers you.
    He’ll wreck so much,
    You’ll cry out boo-hoo-hoo!

    The kids would play with him,
    They used to climb his back.
    He used to be the town mascot,
    And there was no attack,
    And now you’re telling him
    There weren’t no days like that.

    He swam over yonder,
    By the ocean shore.
    But when you didn’t see him plainly,
    He couldn’t take it anymore.
    He’s so upset,
    He’s on a rampage tour.

    What ho, Rhodey-being,
    What will he do?
    You don’t remember him, lady,
    Like he remembers you.
    He’ll wreck so much,
    You’ll cry out, boo-hoo-hoo!

    —from “My Girl Josephine,” Fats Domino. Or “Hello, Josephine,” Johnny Rivers.

  6. awgiedawgie
    December 7, 2017, 2:06 am | # | Reply

    I can just picture it now… Nick lands in the street, and the woman (seeing just an ordinary V-22 helicopter) says, “Hey, I thought you were with the cable company!” And Jonah says, “Oh, that’s just my side job. Normally I work at a donut shop!” And then he climbs aboard and they take off.

    • Mat Zebrowski
      December 7, 2017, 2:20 am | # | Reply

      Alternately: “No wonder my cable bill is so high if they can afford that.”

      • awgiedawgie
        December 7, 2017, 2:28 am | # | Reply

        After which the cable company gets a strange phone call that ends with, “Ma’am, what the fongu have you been putting in your morning coffee?”

        • Max
          December 7, 2017, 4:07 am | # | Reply

          Alternately: “Ma’am, haven’t you heard all services moved to The Cloud years ago? How do you think we get to work each day?!?”

          • MauveCloud
            December 7, 2017, 11:35 am | #

            Wow, that comment makes me want an upvote button.

  7. Riniko
    December 7, 2017, 3:11 am | # | Reply

    I loved those pictures on the fridge, these were soo cute.

    • Robert Nowall
      December 7, 2017, 4:08 pm | # | Reply

      Should we make an educated guess about the artist’s identity?

  8. Daibhid C
    December 7, 2017, 4:59 am | # | Reply

    Has it been stated where they are? Because I was on Google trying to figure out why a sea monster would be named after Tony Stark’s bestie and it turns out there is in fact (well, for certain values of “fact”) a Rhode Island Sea Monster. (One reported sighting, plus a weird serpentine skeleton.) No-one appears to have actually named it Rhodey, but it fits with lake monster names like Nessie, Morag, Champ, etc.

  9. Barking Monkey
    December 7, 2017, 6:39 am | # | Reply

    This is all starting to seem a little connected. Given the suspicious timing of Cerebriac’s malfunction I’d offer two unlikely theories:
    1. Is Panoptica, with a power boost from Cerebriac (thus it’s offline for other uses), a powerful enough psychic to induce reality blindness nationwide?
    2. Is Cerebriac itself somehow causing the reality blindness after having been hacked by Electron – who’s now working for the “private sector company” Anasigma?

    #1 seems more unlikely since Panoptica couldn’t or wouldn’t nudge Jonah into joining AGI, but fiction doesn’t always follow internal logic. If it were to be #1 I’d wonder if anyone has ever seen Panoptica in the flesh – it would be just like Mr. Green to be using her image through mental projection as another puppet.

    • Shikome Kido Mi
      December 7, 2017, 7:31 am | # | Reply

      Well, it’s entirely possible that if it’s Panoptica, inducing such widespread reality blindness is tying up all her power so she can’t do anything else, like telepathically nudge Nick.

      Of course, if it’s Panoptica, she may have sabotaged Cerebriac so it doesn’t tell people what she’s doing, rather than be enhanced by it.

    • awgiedawgie
      December 7, 2017, 8:03 am | # | Reply

      And what about the possibility that Mr Green really is Panoptica? Her name means “all-seeing”, and we know that Mr Green has exhibited a certain amount of omniscience.

    • Towering Barbarian
      December 7, 2017, 9:00 am | # | Reply

      Lets toss in another possibility. I and some others have noted out loud in the past that homicidal behavior isn’t the sort of thing one normally associates with superheroes. Why should we think that whoever is inducing the reality blindness is such a sport that this would be the only mind control they engage in? o_O

      • Robert Nowall
        December 7, 2017, 11:26 am | # | Reply

        We’ve always had reservations about superheroes and their goodwill and motivations. Can we trust either, short-term or long-term? What is a superhero, but a supervillain doing good? What is good and evil, really?

        • Eddurd
          December 7, 2017, 12:13 pm | # | Reply

          As stated in the webcomic “Strong Female Protagonist”: “Supervillians want to rule the world. Superheroes want to save the world. There is no word for a superhuman who wants to change the world.”

          • Robert Nowall
            December 7, 2017, 4:08 pm | #

            A progressive politician.

          • awgiedawgie
            December 7, 2017, 5:00 pm | #

            Note that it wasn’t specified whether they want to change the world for the better, or worse. And depending on whom you talk to, a progressive politician could go either way.

            Frankly, I’d rather not see political commentary in my comics at all. That’s why I try to avoid the comments section of Luann and Dilbert.

          • Bruce A Munro
            December 7, 2017, 9:38 pm | #

            Most supervillains want to change the world – for the worse.

          • awgiedawgie
            December 7, 2017, 10:11 pm | #

            And since they don’t generally step in until someone has begun changing the world for the worse, most superheroes want to change the world back to being better.

            Politicians’ true motives, however — regardless of their stated intentions — are truly a mystery to everyone but they themselves. Of all humans (and mind you, politicians do not come even close to being superhuman, so they don’t answer the above question anyway), politicians — all politicians — are some of the most manipulative, mendacious, malicious, and yes, often stupid, human beings on the planet. And they get paid the most to do it. Heaven help us if a superhuman actually did become a politician, because they would almost invariably be a supervillain.

            Which is why I dislike political commentary on comics. I prefer my comics to be an escape from real life, not to be compared to it.

    • Robert Nowall
      December 7, 2017, 11:23 am | # | Reply

      Remember that the reality blindness appears to be worldwide. Rhodey may just be what caught AG-I’s attention…they need not be the cause of it all, except possibly by accident…

    • Shadowmehr
      December 7, 2017, 9:18 pm | # | Reply

      You are at least partially right about #2. Cerebriac has probably been hacked to keep it off line since written records aren’t affected by the Crown (as evidenced by the drawings all over this house). With AG-I unable to find any reference to the creatures who were integrated into the larger communities, the AG-I can act as the wetwork squad for Anasigma.

      • Candace
        December 8, 2017, 2:00 am | # | Reply

        I think you are likely right about Cerebriac having been hacked. That could definitely explain why they’ve been having problems with it. If that’s the case, then AG-I is probably an ignorant tool, rather than a malicious one.

        • awgiedawgie
          December 8, 2017, 8:33 am | # | Reply

          And looking at the next strip, we see that Cerebriac isn’t even a “supercomputer” at all, but just a dumb terminal.

  10. BrokenEye, the True False Prophet
    December 9, 2017, 5:25 pm | # | Reply

    I just realized that the way you hold your hand when talking on an earpiece looks a lot like the way you hold your hand while communicating telepathically.

  11. jdreyfuss
    January 31, 2020, 8:39 am | # | Reply

    Sometimes the swear filter throws up an adjective that works even better than the profanity would have.

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