Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
  • About Us
  • Cast
  • Store
  • Extras
  • Original Art for Sale
  • Our Patreon
RSS
2018-10-31
‹‹ First ‹ Prev Buy! Comments(39) Next › Last ››

2018-10-31

by shaenon on October 31, 2018 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Figgs and Phantoms
Comments RSS

Discussion (39) ¬

  1. palenoue
    October 31, 2018, 12:07 am | # | Reply

    Who’s the DJ?

    • Shadowmehr
      October 31, 2018, 7:27 pm | # | Reply

      It’d have to be Dr. Lee herself, since the others have to be in the dance. Which might be more fun than it sounds.

  2. Urlance Woolsbane
    October 31, 2018, 12:07 am | # | Reply

    That sure is a purty opening panel.

    • Pygar
      October 31, 2018, 9:06 am | # | Reply

      Shaenon is capable of *startlingly* amazing artwork; see her recent Zombie Gnomes book!
      I was distressed to go on Thingiverse and find no Skin Horse figurines… I can’t afford a 3-D printer, but if Unity et. al. show up there I *will* find a way! Especially if Virginia is in her battle armor… Uh, because it lets her fly like her boyfriend. Yeah, that’s why! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

      • Kirala
        October 31, 2018, 9:12 am | # | Reply

        Shaenon *is* capable of startlingly amazing artwork, but I think it’s Pancha’s coloring that really makes that particular panel gorgeous. Amazing work, Diaz! (And kudos to both on the disco glowsticks. Amazing.)

      • Shaenon
        October 31, 2018, 12:21 pm | # | Reply

        Thank you, but the art in the Zombie Gnome Defense Guide is by Bryan Heemskerk!

        • Pygar
          October 31, 2018, 1:19 pm | # | Reply

          “A friend is a person who, when you make a fool of yourself, does not feel you’ve done a lasting job!”

        • Ogden Wernstrom
          October 31, 2018, 3:38 pm | # | Reply

          You have opened my eyes to a new way to be evil. “It’s your best work!” for the kid’s drawing on the fridge. (Just make sure the drawing isn’t actually any good. You don’t want to cause collateral flattery. I’m not actually insulted when somebody compliments clothes my wife bought for me, even though people rarely compliment clothes I bought for myself.) “I didn’t realize you had that much insight” in response to a famous quotation.

          If you show up at a comics convention and somebody tells Jeff he draws well but needs to hire a writer, that’ll be me.

          • casimir
            October 31, 2018, 11:58 pm | #

            I will save “collateral flattery” for future use.

          • Mental Mouse
            November 4, 2018, 11:54 am | #

            Remember how Asimov was plagued by “Nightfall”? For most of his career, if he asked someone what their favorite story of his was, the answer was always “Nightfall”. Which was his first published work…

  3. Owlmirror
    October 31, 2018, 12:09 am | # | Reply

    Interesting that there seems to be a day/night cycle. I had the notion that the beach was eternally in daylight.

  4. K. Iceclaw
    October 31, 2018, 12:32 am | # | Reply

    Oh my gosh she did go there. Went BEYOND even.

  5. Leandro Toniut
    October 31, 2018, 12:52 am | # | Reply

    Tigerlily would be proud

  6. Bear
    October 31, 2018, 12:52 am | # | Reply

    That whole “Latent Mad” thing?

    Not so latent any more, Virginia. We need to get you a subscription to the Journal of Malology and an invite to the annual conference, stat.

    But hey! Better latent than never!

    • WuseMajor
      October 31, 2018, 1:20 am | # | Reply

      Actually getting a hive of bees to dance together is a perfectly logical and sane course of action.

      • Daibhid C
        October 31, 2018, 2:55 pm | # | Reply

        As the person who normally shoots down people saying Ginny’s gone Full Mad, I have to point out that many madfolk start out with perfectly reasonable goals such as “get the bees to dance” or “be accepted by the Kennel Club”. They then take a sharp left turn from what the rest of us would consider a reasonable method of achieving these goals. And “The bees must dance, therefore we need to simulate a warehouse party in Ibiza” is definitely on that path.

        • Towering Barbarian
          October 31, 2018, 4:19 pm | # | Reply

          It depends. If she’s considers disco music more likely to cause a desire to dance then the other forms of music she knows then this might still be reasonable. Remember that it’s been specified that her own sense of dance so this might be a manifestation of poor taste instead of madness. A bit like Akane Tendo finding her cooking talent be called upon for the organizing of a potluck supper. ^_^

          BTW, with your “sharp left turn from what the rest of us would consider a reasonable method of achieving reasonable goal” definition of what distinguishes Sparks from normal geniuses how sane would you consider the viewpoint character of this song in a world where mainframes are still the primary computers? o_O

  7. rinku
    October 31, 2018, 2:02 am | # | Reply

    I’ve said before… since this is VR, she can do WHATEVER, and no matter how bizarre it is or how much it breaks physics, it doesn’t mean anything in regards to her being a Mad. Especially if she has already started hacking he system.

    It’s Matrix rules.

    • awgiedawgie
      October 31, 2018, 10:31 am | # | Reply

      The ability to do things in VR does not prove she is Mad. But the ideas she gets (as well as everything she did before she was ever in the VR), are pretty convincing evidence that she has been, for quite some time, quite Mad.

      • Estevon Golden
        October 31, 2018, 11:26 am | # | Reply

        This is something that people keep getting confused about. Virginia is mad and a scientist but shes not a “Mad Scientist”. Mad Science is generally impossible to replicate for non-mad scientists. Virginia is capable of replicating it, which would be a good indicator of mad science, but she also turns it into something that can be replicated by normal scientists, which means she definitely isn’t. That doesn’t preclude her being crazy, Mad Science is a particular form of insanity that she doesn’t have. That still leaves every other form of insanity on the table.

        • awgiedawgie
          November 1, 2018, 3:37 pm | # | Reply

          She claims to be a sane scientist, but the fact that she can so easily comprehend Mad Science, and can — under fire — create something she called a “sensible brain vending machine”, are pretty strong evidence that she really is a Mad Scientist, and she’s just in denial about it.

  8. JET73L
    October 31, 2018, 3:07 am | # | Reply

    Hey, Apis! Glowstick and rave are totally English, and disco is a perfectly valid loanword! Heck, “rave” is of British English origin!

    • Doghouse
      October 31, 2018, 4:11 am | # | Reply

      Well…

      If you haven’t heard of them, “glowstick” is only English in about the same way as, say, “wobbledesk” or “tackydog”. Each conveys something vaguely resembling a concept without necessarily telling you very much.

      As for “disco” – that’s actually an interesting one, if words pique your curiosity. A borrowing and repurposing of a word which was itself a neologism (“discotheque” came by analogy from “bibliotheque”, the French for “library”, and was originally somewhere you could borrow records – the sense of “venue playing music” came later, and the American shortening later still). But Gavotte, if that’s who we’re dealing with here, ought to know all that.

      • emusam
        October 31, 2018, 8:55 am | # | Reply

        Mayor Queen knows but cannot retrieve the memory; Apis could find the memory if she had access to it, but will not until the big dance.

        If Ginny partakes of the dance, will that throw off the hive mind, or will they just correct her pronunciation?

      • Mental Mouse
        November 4, 2018, 11:58 am | # | Reply

        “If you haven’t heard of them, ‘glowstick’…” How about if someone’s waving them in front of you as they speak?

        • awgiedawgie
          November 4, 2018, 5:19 pm | # | Reply

          Perhaps one is “temporarily dull.” The last time we saw it was when Gavotte was in supersedure… or to put it in more simple American terms, “in heat.” This time, her mind is basically in pieces, so it’s not all working together. Something might normally make perfect sense, but her mind at present cannot, shall we say, connect the dots.

          • Owlmirror
            November 4, 2018, 8:06 pm | #

            Hm.

            I see that “supersedure”, technically, means “The replacing of an old queen bee by a new one.”

            Also, I am pretty sure that she did not intend “in heat”, since she had already sent off the mating swarm, and rather meant something more like “post-coital”.

          • awgiedawgie
            November 4, 2018, 10:31 pm | #

            Well, since the new queen bee does an awful lot of mating at the very beginning of her reign, at this stage – even though Gavotte did say she got herself “a bit o’ bendy” – the new queen is almost certainly still more or less “in heat”. (And during supersedure, the workers will kill off the old queen by causing her to overheat and die, so it is quite literally “in heat”)

            But whether “in heat” or “post-coital”… or simply “I lost half my population to the mating swarm”… the point is that she wasn’t thinking clearly.

    • Rimwolf
      October 31, 2018, 8:42 am | # | Reply

      If she’s not familiar with the cultural references, it sounds something like “shinerod circulo rant”.

  9. Alphaghoul
    October 31, 2018, 3:26 am | # | Reply

    Weird, right when she said disco rave this beat came on my computer that seemed to fit. It wasn’t mysterious, I was listenning to a monstercat video.

  10. Robert Nowall
    October 31, 2018, 9:52 am | # | Reply

    Watch out—Dr. Lee’s favorite movies feature Patrick Swayze.

  11. keecoyote
    October 31, 2018, 10:02 am | # | Reply

    Ok. lets say why this is not crazy in two words. Bee dance. It is the way they communicate in nature.

    • BRGR
      November 3, 2018, 9:39 am | # | Reply

      But a rave to disco music?

  12. rylen
    October 31, 2018, 10:28 am | # | Reply

    Gavotte and Pavane and fairly organized dances. A disco bee could be named “Boogie”. I’m not up on recent dance names, so I’m not sure what a rave bee mind might be called.

    • awgiedawgie
      October 31, 2018, 10:34 am | # | Reply

      Raven?

  13. Kaymyth
    October 31, 2018, 1:55 pm | # | Reply

    Given that I am currently dressed as a disco version of Princess Leia, I think Ginny and I are sharing some groovy wavelengths today.

    • Shadowmehr
      October 31, 2018, 7:29 pm | # | Reply

      For Halloween or just on general principle?

    • Kaymyth
      November 1, 2018, 1:37 pm | # | Reply

      Technically for Halloween, but you better damn well believe this costume will be making convention appearances in the future.

  14. Mister Steel
    August 2, 2020, 1:53 pm | # | Reply

    This immediately came to mind;

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

More by Jeff

  • The Scrivnarium

More by Shaenon

  • Horror Every Day
  • Li'l Mell
  • Monster of the Week
  • Narbonic
  • Shaenon.com
Creative Commons License
Skin Horse by Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.skin-horse.com.

©2007-2022 Skin Horse | Powered by WordPress with ComicPress | Subscribe: RSS | Back to Top ↑