Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2017-10-05
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2017-10-05

by shaenon on October 5, 2017 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Unsinkable
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Discussion (52) ¬

  1. Robert Nowall
    October 5, 2017, 12:04 am | # | Reply

    If we’re not yet seeing him—well, Mr. Green of Anasigma fame comes to mind, though we did see him fairly thoroughly back in Sweetheart’s drone-and-VR adventure…

    • Urlance Woolsbane
      October 5, 2017, 1:17 am | # | Reply

      He’s *too* obvious, IMO. It’ll probably wind up being Ira, Shelby, Artie, or someone else along those lines…

      • Seph
        October 5, 2017, 4:29 am | # | Reply

        Tip?

        • aantia
          October 5, 2017, 8:21 am | # | Reply

          That’s my bet.

          • Robert Nowall
            October 5, 2017, 9:36 am | #

            It would have to be somebody Jonah Yu doesn’t know. I suppose that lets out Echo Bravo.

          • casimir
            October 5, 2017, 7:38 pm | #

            I’m thinking Tremontino. His shop was creepy, plus, he uses a cigarette holder. That’s a dead give-away.

          • Robert Nowall
            October 5, 2017, 11:34 pm | #

            That’s another connection with the Roosevelts. And Poughkeepsie (on the board, remember?) is right next door to where they’re from.

      • BrokenEye, the True False Prophet
        October 5, 2017, 9:41 pm | # | Reply

        Shovelhead

    • Rex Vivat
      October 5, 2017, 2:47 pm | # | Reply

      We didn’t, actually. We saw the VR form he showed Sweetheart, which is not necessarily his real form. Remember when Dr. Lee was a fat old guy?

      • Landis963
        October 5, 2017, 3:52 pm | # | Reply

        We also saw him in disguise, talking to Nick’s superhero boss, and he was pretty clearly Dr. Ao in a green mask and jumpsuit.

      • Robert Nowall
        October 5, 2017, 5:53 pm | # | Reply

        We saw him at the end of it, after Sweetheart jumped into the volcano and ended it—he looked the same. Unless everybody is still in a VR world.

    • OneUniverse
      October 5, 2017, 11:51 pm | # | Reply

      Dave? One of the Daves? Since Nera says he’s a man, that eliminates my first guess of Mell.

      • awgiedawgie
        October 6, 2017, 7:54 pm | # | Reply

        Then again, “this is our man” is a common phrase used when you ID your target — male or female. So Mell isn’t totally out of the question. She may not have become POTUS (yet), but President of the Shadow Government is more her style… President in secret, and violent assassin in public.

        Of course, Dave is also a good candidate.

    • OneUniverse
      October 5, 2017, 11:53 pm | # | Reply

      On the other hand, we haven’t accounted for all the Madblood robots.

  2. Sir William
    October 5, 2017, 12:08 am | # | Reply

    This reminds me of the justice league episode where the flash and lex Luther switch bodies and lex is all “at least I can finally find out the flash’s secret identity” and then he takes off the mask and looks in the mirror “I have no idea who this is”

  3. Clifton
    October 5, 2017, 12:49 am | # | Reply

    “I’m just relieved it’s not my mom” – wasn’t there fan speculation at one point that Nera’s mom is Mel? In which case, yeah. Or was that disproven later?

    • darkstarling
      October 5, 2017, 12:55 am | # | Reply

      I don’t think it was ever disproven, and in at least one alternate timeline Mel is the President. Thus being one of the few alternatives that could maybe be worse than the current situation.

      So yeah, until otherwise proven? Her mom is Mel. I wonder who the dad was.

      Note ‘was’. I assume Mel has much in common with a preying mantis.

      • void
        October 5, 2017, 12:01 pm | # | Reply

        Probably Caliban unless I’m forgetting something?

      • Adept Arcanist
        October 5, 2017, 12:50 pm | # | Reply

        Wait, would that make Nera and Unity technically half-sisters?

        • Shadowmehr
          October 5, 2017, 8:58 pm | # | Reply

          Very technically. In the sense that only U.N.I.T.Y. might take it seriously, and start hitting up Nera for cash and spare parts. (And ignoring that her “sister” can’t afford to lose any of her factory originals like she can.)

    • Urlance Woolsbane
      October 5, 2017, 1:13 am | # | Reply

      It was never disproved, as such, but the chronology doesn’t add up. Mel was in college circa 2000, and Nera is 16 in “Choose,” which presumably takes place around 2012. Barring some temporal jiggery-pokery, which is well within the Narboniverse’s realm of possibility, she can’t be Mel’s child. But just about everything else points to that, so who knows?

      • darkstarling
        October 5, 2017, 3:23 am | # | Reply

        Mel getting Helen to use cloning to skip over the first four years (what I’ve heard referred to as the larval stage) is definitely something I can see her doing.

        Out of curiosity, how do we know Choose happens in 2012?

        • Urlance Woolsbane
          October 5, 2017, 5:26 am | # | Reply

          We don’t, hence “around.” But I haven’t seen anything that suggests otherwise, and Skin Horse seems to try to stay relatively contemporaneous. There is definitely some chronological ambiguity though, as I mentioned in my comment on Monday’s strip.

        • Rex Vivat
          October 5, 2017, 2:56 pm | # | Reply

          I think the first time we got a glimpse of the timeline was in Mixed-Up Files, where Imogene confirmed that the difference was in real time when she said she was 25. There have been other hints after that, but it’s usually a safe bet to assume that every chapter starts around the date when the first strip appeared.

    • WuseMajor
      October 5, 2017, 11:50 pm | # | Reply

      I still feel like the comic wouldn’t have conspicuously avoided showing us Nera’s mom unless there was a decent chance some of us would recognize her.

      On the other hand, they did do the same thing for Mr. Green for a long time too and none of us would have recognized him, so I suppose it could just be par for the course.

  4. Towering Barbarian
    October 5, 2017, 12:55 am | # | Reply

    So this is the episode where Ivan the Security guard’s cover gets blown! >_>

  5. radlein
    October 5, 2017, 12:55 am | # | Reply

    He’s not wrong, though. Björk WOULD be pretty cool

    • 5-tons-of-flax
      October 5, 2017, 6:22 am | # | Reply

      Bjork’s not a Muppet? That’s news to me.

    • Barking Monkey
      October 5, 2017, 6:55 am | # | Reply

      If David Bowie can lead the Guild of Calamitous Intent, why not Bjork? You never know what those experimental-rock types will get up to.

      • Daibhid C
        October 5, 2017, 1:43 pm | # | Reply

        David Bowie also ruled a group of villainous Muppets! It all adds up!

        (The Muppet geek in me wishes to self-pedant and point out the goblins were technically Creatures, not Muppets.)

    • D. Walker
      October 5, 2017, 10:51 pm | # | Reply

      He IS wrong. Our current president is a Muppet, and it’s horrible.

      • Pygar
        October 5, 2017, 11:55 pm | # | Reply

        When given the choice between horrible and Apocalyptic, we went for Door #1.

        • D. Walker
          October 6, 2017, 7:05 pm | # | Reply

          …what?

          Seriously, what in the world are you even talking about?

          Is this that bizarre and inexplicable alt-right notion that Clinton would have lead us to war for some unexplained imaginary reasons? Because maybe you haven’t been paying attention, but Trump has been repeatedly antagonizing the North Koreans as if daring them to start a nuclear war…

  6. mrinku
    October 5, 2017, 1:43 am | # | Reply

    There’s always the possibility that she’s Mel’s sister. Or niece. My guess would be the former.

    The other thought would be that Nera is chronologically younger than she thinks she is. The Dave clone was freshly decanted but thought he was decades old.

    Doesn’t have to be a dad with Helen on the job, though I’d tend to think Caliban if she is Mel’s spawn. Nera doesn’t particularly look like Mel, so I don’t think she’d be a clone.

    • Robert Nowall
      October 5, 2017, 7:24 am | # | Reply

      Doesn’t “This is our man!” eliminate Mel or Mel’s sister?

      • Daibhid C
        October 5, 2017, 1:46 pm | # | Reply

        I think mrinku was speculating about the identity of Nera’s mom, not ShadPres.

  7. Otakubouzu
    October 5, 2017, 2:11 am | # | Reply

    Just finished Narbonic few days ago.
    Damn, how i miss many reference when i first reading Skin Horse (yeah, i read Skin Horse first and only started binge-reading Narbonic after catching up).

    Before that i must tip my hat to Shaenon for making a sequel who managed to be mostly self-contained but still retain links to previous title.

    …its been awhile but is the problem with robot strikes in earlier strips can be blamed to Artie?

    • shaenon
      October 5, 2017, 3:07 pm | # | Reply

      Yeah, it’s the same Machine Union Artie started, and it’s still largely run by Madblood robots.

      • Dawnk41
        October 5, 2017, 5:29 pm | # | Reply

        Thank god, all this time I thought that the hamsters had taken apart ALL of the Madblood robots. A few escaped the cull!

        • Andy4Hire
          October 5, 2017, 8:18 pm | # | Reply

          I believe the hamsters just got the robots that Dave, Zeta, and Artie took to Canada. There were 15,000 originally, and only around 24 made the trip north; Artie observes at one point that a U-Haul would have been big enough to carry them.

  8. emusam
    October 5, 2017, 4:52 am | # | Reply

    It’s ominous that there’s something Jonah doesn’t know. Or is he lying to Nera? Or the information is not important, and he last heard about it a lifetime ago.

  9. Robin Paulus
    October 5, 2017, 5:44 am | # | Reply

    My bet’s on Dave. Not necessarily Helen’s Dave, but *a* Dave.

    • kag
      October 5, 2017, 2:39 pm | # | Reply

      The Dave Conspiracy was conspicuously absent from the org chart.

      • jimhenry1973
        October 6, 2017, 7:51 am | # | Reply

        They’re just that secret.

  10. Barking Monkey
    October 5, 2017, 6:54 am | # | Reply

    Well, we may not be able to see who’s in the picture, but at least we can rule out Bjork and all muppets, so that narrows it down quite a bit. (Unless our intrepid investigators have been deceived by Bjork in glasses ala Clark Kent.)

  11. Eddurd
    October 5, 2017, 12:00 pm | # | Reply

    (TUNE: Theme to “The Muppet Show”, Jim Henson & Sam Pottle)

    It’s time to dig up secrets!
    We’ll dig and not relent!
    We’ll probe the darkest reaches
    Of the shadow government!

    Those politicians, lying,
    Won’t tell us what they meant!
    We’ll be identifying
    Who’s the Shadow President!

    These two you cannot fool, no!
    The truth they will uncork!
    (It would be kinda cool, though,
    If it was really Björk.)

    Soon secrets we’ll be stealing!
    Our task they can’t prevent!
    The truth we’ll be revealing
    Of conspiratorial, dictatorial,
    Territorial, immemorial,
    Su-per se-cret sha-dow gov-ern-ment!

    • Robert Nowall
      October 5, 2017, 1:17 pm | # | Reply

      Excellent!

    • Daibhid C
      October 5, 2017, 1:47 pm | # | Reply

      applause!

    • reynard61
      October 5, 2017, 7:53 pm | # | Reply

      Nice to see you back in fine musical fettle!

    • Andy4Hire
      October 5, 2017, 8:20 pm | # | Reply

      This is one of your better ones, Eddurd–which is saying something pretty impressive.

  12. Pharmakeusubik
    October 5, 2017, 3:26 pm | # | Reply

    No he’s done it. Tip will appear with his puppets in hand.

  13. Whatever
    December 11, 2017, 4:00 pm | # | Reply

    The president of the Shadow Government is actually Gerald Fnord.

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