Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2022-04-26
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2022-04-26

by shaenon on April 26, 2022 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Phantomwise
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Discussion (57) ¬

  1. John Campbell
    April 26, 2022, 12:05 am | # | Reply

    Not “we didn’t mean to do it”, “you weren’t meant to see us do it”. Yeah, not a lot of ground for trust here.

    • Aname
      April 26, 2022, 1:42 am | # | Reply

      More and more it feels like Pavanne is just Ira in a bee suit.

      • khn0
        April 26, 2022, 2:53 am | # | Reply

        Ira’s plan bee?

        • waynezombie
          April 26, 2022, 11:00 am | # | Reply

          I would say maybe Pavanne’s Ira’s puppet, but that would be one wicked complicated set of controls and an awful lot of strings!

      • skullthetroll
        April 26, 2022, 9:36 am | # | Reply

        I think Pavane is Ira’s non-human counterpart. Same viewpoint with an opposite orientation. Just like Ira they cover up the “downsides” of their plans without considering the implications.

        • StClair
          April 26, 2022, 1:30 pm | # | Reply

          You should still do what they say, though, because they know better than you. Really.

        • khn0
          April 26, 2022, 1:34 pm | # | Reply

          I thought HT was Ira’s non-human care-for-nothing-but-self counterpart?

          • skullthetroll
            April 26, 2022, 3:55 pm | #

            Ira doesn’t care for nothing, his view is that he’s protecting humanity. He’s convinced its “us or them” between humans and NHS’s, and is willing to do pretty much anything to “win the war.”

          • Robert Nowall
            April 26, 2022, 4:49 pm | #

            “I love humanity! It’s people I can’t stand!” —Linus Van Pelt.

        • M. Alan Thomas II
          April 26, 2022, 8:40 pm | # | Reply

          Magneto vs Apocalypse (with Gavotte as Professor X)?

  2. thejoemoose
    April 26, 2022, 12:07 am | # | Reply

    Ah, someone is manipulating things!

    • Proxiehunter
      April 26, 2022, 12:19 am | # | Reply

      Possibly the man behind the curtain.

      • archiveaspirant
        April 26, 2022, 12:41 am | # | Reply

        Yeah, sudden tech glitches seem right up Goldbug’s alley.

    • OneUniverse
      April 26, 2022, 12:36 am | # | Reply

      Reynard? Baron Mistycorn? Gavotte?

    • Colonelsam
      April 26, 2022, 12:38 am | # | Reply

      Lovelace?

    • Duane B.
      April 26, 2022, 2:08 pm | # | Reply

      Moustachio has been there from the beginning, And was always at the center
      of things.
      He is even spring powered, like much of Lovetron technology.

      Much like Mr. Green playing the part of Ira, Moustachio could be Gold Bug.

  3. Moe Lane
    April 26, 2022, 12:09 am | # | Reply

    Well, at least she didn’t *say* “among his own kind.” She was just, you know, thinking it.

    • Towering Barbarian
      April 26, 2022, 12:31 am | # | Reply

      That makes it ever do much better.

  4. The Flower Cosmic
    April 26, 2022, 12:11 am | # | Reply

    How indeed…is there dissension in the ranks?

  5. BMunro
    April 26, 2022, 12:32 am | # | Reply

    “They’re limited by evolution.”

    How do we explain Mads then?

    • OneUniverse
      April 26, 2022, 12:42 am | # | Reply

      People where solidly in the middle of the food chain ten thousand years ago and shot to the top like a tin pot dictator, and thus have the same insecurities, making us liable to attempt eradication of any rivals: We (presumably you,too) humans are unsafe at any speed.

      • Aname
        April 26, 2022, 1:45 am | # | Reply

        Our nuts aren’t done up tight enough. At any time it’s possible that the wheels will fall off of civilization.

      • Aname
        April 26, 2022, 2:54 am | # | Reply

        Ug say, fire and pointy sticks best thing since sliced mammoth

        • Robert Nowall
          April 26, 2022, 6:33 am | # | Reply

          “Fire good?” “No, fire bad!”

          • davidbreslin101
            April 26, 2022, 7:15 am | #

            That was the original flamewar…

          • Robert
            April 26, 2022, 5:38 pm | #

            “Tastes great!”

      • BMunro
        April 26, 2022, 4:22 am | # | Reply

        We’ve probably been at the top of the food chain or close to it for at least seventy thousand years, when we first developed bows and arrows. The real current problem is that we are evolved for a hunter-gatherer existence, which does not suit us for living together by the hundreds of millions in cities: civilization is an improvisation always complicated by the fact that our brains are running on Caveman 2.0, 3.0 at best. We haven’t even developed a good Agricultural State Societies operating system (the Organized Religion, Universalized Ethics and other patches were partial solutions at best), let alone one for Technological Civilization.

        In any case, that’s kinda irrelevant to what I said, which is about _mad Scientists in this fictional universe_, not the limitations of humans in the so-called “real” world. They seem to be something otherwise normal humans seem capable of developing into, and they can accomplish things constructs are unable of – heck, they’re the _source_ of constructs.

        • Aname
          April 26, 2022, 9:59 am | # | Reply

          I see what you did there.
          Agricultural State Societies

        • Paulagee66
          April 27, 2022, 5:46 am | # | Reply

          You mean SK isn’t real?!

      • David B Huber
        April 26, 2022, 3:13 pm | # | Reply

        Both Ira and Gavotte took notice of Mads creating new life “just because they could”. Ira considered it hubris, Gavotte enchanting.

        Even in our reality we have experience relating to NHS. We call them “takoyaki”.

        • Candace
          April 27, 2022, 1:20 am | # | Reply

          We do?

    • belboz
      April 26, 2022, 1:33 pm | # | Reply

      Well, it’s easy to see how a gene for mad science could be evolutionarily beneficial, and if you accept the basic presence of the comic it can probably be caused by random mutation. So mads are still “bound by evolution”, in that they’re just what evolution made them. Someone like Unity, by contrast, could probably never have evolved; therefore she’s *not* bound by evolution.

  6. efogoto
    April 26, 2022, 1:43 am | # | Reply

    Poor Unity. Left behind, she couldn’t get to the bottom of the fundamental question.

    • Frank Hightower
      April 26, 2022, 1:56 am | # | Reply

      You could even say her hinds were quartered

    • jdreyfuss
      April 26, 2022, 8:06 am | # | Reply

      She worked her ass off too.

    • Robert Nowall
      April 26, 2022, 11:50 am | # | Reply

      Took a lot of cheek to say that.

    • Shadowmehr
      April 26, 2022, 2:45 pm | # | Reply

      Come now, gentlemen, let us not make her the butt of all these jokes.

      • Duane B.
        April 26, 2022, 3:45 pm | # | Reply

        Behind you all the way……motto of the Procrastinator’s Club of America (really)

        • Marisa Mockery
          April 26, 2022, 10:00 pm | # | Reply

          I thought about joining that, but I put it off.

          • Duane B.
            April 26, 2022, 10:56 pm | #

            Paying your dues on time can be grounds for expulsion.

  7. Frank Hightower
    April 26, 2022, 1:56 am | # | Reply

    ah, unity. We can always count on you to bring quirky irelevancy to the situation

  8. Dewy
    April 26, 2022, 2:59 am | # | Reply

    Any antagonist that starts a sentence with “Trust me”…DON’T. And yes, while Pavanne isn’t currently a villian, she checks every box for an antag.

    • Robert Nowall
      April 26, 2022, 6:16 am | # | Reply

      That kinda happened with Artie at the end of “Narbonic.”

  9. Robert Nowall
    April 26, 2022, 6:18 am | # | Reply

    Of course we’ve seen it from the other side and Tip seems all right.

    • 5-tons-of-flax
      April 26, 2022, 9:26 am | # | Reply

      He was only mussed up when he landed. Sexily so, even.

      • Candace
        April 27, 2022, 1:24 am | # | Reply

        Yes, but Sweetheart and Unity don’t know that, and if Pavane is aware of Tip’s survival, she hasn’t pointed it out. Instead, she’s trying to rationalize her action. Usually, when people start rationalizing, it’s because they know at some level that they did something wrong.

  10. codebracker
    April 26, 2022, 7:06 am | # | Reply

    I mean arguably, Tip is part werewolf

    • Bubble181
      April 26, 2022, 9:27 am | # | Reply

      Good point. As someone else already pointed out – at what point do you go from “human with prosthetics” to “augmented/non-human”?
      The same is true here. What part non-human do you have to be to qualify? Quadroon? Octoroon? (no racism intended, unless from the POV of Pavane I guess)

  11. Daibhid C
    April 26, 2022, 7:21 am | # | Reply

    It’s interesting that we’re getting absolutely no new information about Pavane’s motives here: Lovetron is for non-humans only, because humans are the problem they’re trying to escape from, is something she’s been entirely upfront about since this started. And yet, every time she says it, it seems a bit more sinister than the time before, somehow.

    • Daibhid C
      April 26, 2022, 7:22 am | # | Reply

      I mean, yes, okay, this time it’s because she’s saying it after dropping a human from a great height.

      • Moe Lane
        April 26, 2022, 8:29 pm | # | Reply

        A human who has risked life and limb multiple times to rescue nonhuman sapients from harm, while Pavane was busy funking off on Planet Lovetron.

    • bergerjacques
      April 26, 2022, 9:52 am | # | Reply

      The extremes on both sides wind up being exactly the same. I don’t believe Ira and Pavanne are in league with one another. They hate the other because they think they stand on opposite sides glaring at THEM. What Ira and Pavanne don’t notice is that they are standing back-to-back.

      • StClair
        April 26, 2022, 1:31 pm | # | Reply

        Horseshoe theory is a wonderful terrible thing.

  12. Robert Nowall
    April 26, 2022, 11:49 am | # | Reply

    It’s a fractious and stress-filled chat session. Pavane launches into digression. Sweetheart wanted to know, did she deliberately throw, but Pavane fails to answer the question.

  13. DWVR
    April 26, 2022, 9:23 pm | # | Reply

    Wait. Doesn’t one always have choices? That’s a running message through the story. So here we have Sweetheart and all these other sapients giving up their power of choice by submitting to Pavanne… I sense a rebellion.

    • Candace
      April 27, 2022, 1:30 am | # | Reply

      There’s no evidence (yet) that any non-human sapients on board have given up their power of choice. They chose to board, and they don’t appear to be enslaved or coerced into anything at this time. Was Pavane apparently trying to withhold information? It looks that way, but that’s not exactly the same thing as removing someone else’s free will.

      • DWVR
        April 27, 2022, 3:02 am | # | Reply

        They boarded the ship and put themselves in Pavanne’s, er, hands. I suppose technically you’re right, any one of them can commit suicide, or at least try.

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