Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2017-08-31
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2017-08-31

by Jeffrey C. Wells on August 31, 2017 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Sure as You're Born
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Discussion (51) ¬

  1. Robert Nowall
    August 31, 2017, 12:07 am | # | Reply

    What kind of spear could you fashion from Tip’s thumbs? (Did alt-Sweetheart have this problem when she was President?)

    • awgiedawgie
      August 31, 2017, 1:31 am | # | Reply

      Ummm…..

    • Towering Barbarian
      August 31, 2017, 2:35 am | # | Reply

      My guess would be bone-tipped unless he’s been doing some cyborging on the side. ^_^

    • awgiedawgie
      August 31, 2017, 12:34 pm | # | Reply

      You guys do realize that she isn’t going to fashion spears from Tip’s thumbs, right? She needs him to fashion the spears, because she doesn’t have any thumbs… Makes it really hard to hold onto things. She’s built more for ripping people’s throats out and eating their spleens rather than making weapons.

      If it were Unity, on the other hand, she might use Tip’s thumbs as hors d’oeuvres.

      • Robert Nowall
        August 31, 2017, 4:30 pm | # | Reply

        Sure, kill the point of my joke…

        • Trivena
          August 31, 2017, 6:43 pm | # | Reply

          With a bone-tipped spear?

        • awgiedawgie
          August 31, 2017, 8:50 pm | # | Reply

          Was the “point” of your joke fashioned out of a thumb? 😉

  2. ngmatt
    August 31, 2017, 12:07 am | # | Reply

    riiiiiight, I forget sometimes just how badly she panics when it comes to breaking rules

  3. Frank Hightower
    August 31, 2017, 12:14 am | # | Reply

    so much for the volcano having “cured” her

    • D. Walker
      August 31, 2017, 3:05 am | # | Reply

      The volcano is the only reason she’s acting this way.

      She may not like doing this and may be panicking in doing it, but before the volcano she WOULDN’T have done this, full stop.

  4. Bruce A Munro
    August 31, 2017, 12:17 am | # | Reply

    Of course, for this to work the local press can’t be reality-blind. Hopefully there’s at least one major local news outlet that knows the actual score.

    • darkstarling
      August 31, 2017, 1:57 pm | # | Reply

      There’s a certain freelance reporter and her giant indestructible foot that I’d like to see make a return…

      Not that it makes sense here, but when has that stopped us?

  5. Thenardyr
    August 31, 2017, 12:44 am | # | Reply

    You know, the more I think about it, the more I want to see H.T. win and find out how much being in charge sucks.

    • Towering Barbarian
      August 31, 2017, 2:34 am | # | Reply

      I think he’s already gotten a taste of it thanks to our furry Madboys. But that said, I would enjoy seeing him get further doses especially as I’m starting to see him as the sort of character who would grow with responsibility. ^_^

      • D. Walker
        August 31, 2017, 4:12 pm | # | Reply

        …are you people insane?

        H.T. is on record as stating he intends to start a war and commit mass genocide!

        And yet you’d want him to win, so you could get some weird satisfaction out of the possibility that he might not LIKE being in charge? Or hope that he might “grow with responsibility”?

        He wants to murder people. And I don’t just mean “people” as in “random strangers” or whatever. I mean, he literally wants to destroy people, as in the human species.

        Hitler was charismatic too, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t still a monster. (Or if you want to cry foul on the basis of Godwin’s Law, then Khan Noonien Singh instead!)

        • Towering Barbarian
          August 31, 2017, 9:59 pm | # | Reply

          D. Walker, the fascination here would be to see H.T. pause in time and turn aside from that genocide. You *do* have a point but given some of the homicidal things we have seen done by all sides in the Narbonverse I am not convinced there’s any such thing as good guys in this series with the possible exceptions of Panoptica and Jonah Yu and his girlfriend. If we were applying morality to this series would you really consider Ginny to be all that different from Dr. Mengele? o_O

          • awgiedawgie
            August 31, 2017, 11:02 pm | #

            With the exception that Virginia did not, and probably still does not realize the scope of what she was doing at A-Sig. Moustachio/Hitty was the first “living” robot she had encountered in her routine of dismantling robots, and she refused to dismember them, instead smuggling them back to Annex 1. She believed she was giving Nick a better existence by taking his brain and sticking it in a helicopter, and as it turned out, he agreed.

            Mengele, on the other hand, didn’t care one bit about the quality of his subjects’ existence, because he believed them to be something worse than animals. And when the war crimes people came for him, he ran off like a frightened worm to South America, which means he actually knew he was guilty, and had no intention of facing the music (and, in fact, never did face it).

          • Towering Barbarian
            September 1, 2017, 12:55 am | #

            Sure, Nick agreed that it was a better existence *after he had been conditioned to do so*. And it’s been lampshaded more then once that she cares more about robots then she does about human beings by Sergio as well as by others so I’m not as sure as you are that this releases her from having been at the same moral level as Dr. Mengele and the Japanese Experimental Unit 731. @_@

          • Towering Barbarian
            September 1, 2017, 12:57 am | #

            BTW, did you really mean to imply that if Dr. Mengele had believed he was helping his guinea pigs while he did what did then suddenly everything he did would become completely OK? o_O The saying that good intentions can be a paving material for the road to the Netherworld is not without merit for the results of an action do matter no matter what the intent behind them may have been.

          • awgiedawgie
            September 1, 2017, 4:30 am | #

            1) Nick agreed he was better off after he was told that he was not merely a brain in a jar, but was in fact a brain in a jar in a helicopter. The conditioning hadn’t worked at all. It was only after Virginia told him he could actually fly that he decided he liked his new “body”.

            2) While you can draw a couple sketchy parallels between the experiments of Mengele and Virginia, the fundamentals of the experiments themselves, as well as how the two scientists considered their “subjects”, and their intentions, are completely different. If you don’t think so, then apparently you don’t know just how horrible Megele’s tortures were. He performed horrific experiments without anisthetic just to see what would happen. There was no objective – no end goal. He did unspeakable things not out of a desire to better anyone. He did them because Hitler said he could, not because he was told to.

        • BRGR
          September 2, 2017, 5:40 am | # | Reply

          Despite your misgivings, Mr Spock, history remembers Khan Noonien Singh quite favourably.

    • Robert Nowall
      August 31, 2017, 9:49 am | # | Reply

      It *is* the little sidekicks that cause the problems. (Who said that? Somebody back a couple of storylines?)

      • Shadowmehr
        August 31, 2017, 8:47 pm | # | Reply

        (raises hand)

        That was me.

  6. Towering Barbarian
    August 31, 2017, 12:47 am | # | Reply

    OK, I clearly did not give Sweetheart nearly enough credit for being able to make the hard decisions and forthwith give her a public apology for my doubts. ^_^

    (Mind you, I don’t know how much good an apology of this sort does for a fictional webcomic character but I forthwith tender it to her anyway! ^_~).

  7. Urlance Woolsbane
    August 31, 2017, 1:34 am | # | Reply

    “Fair is foul and foul is fair! Hover through fog and filthy air!”

    • MisterTeatime
      August 31, 2017, 8:48 am | # | Reply

      I’ve met some umpires like this.

    • Andy4Hire
      August 31, 2017, 7:14 pm | # | Reply

      Ever since Prairie Home Companion‘s “Ten Minute Macbeth” skit, I can’t hear this line in any voice other than Ross Perot’s (well, a Ross Perot impersonator’s).

  8. Bruce A Munro
    August 31, 2017, 2:01 am | # | Reply

    Now it occurs to me that HT’s strategy is made more effective by the fact than any votes on non-human issues will get a low human turnout, since weirdness-blind humans won’t even know it’s happening.

    And now my inner Sweetheart has a legal issue to worry about if HT runs for office: can weirdness-blind voters be said to have had the opportunity to make an informed choice if they cannot properly perceive a candidate or his voting base (possibly to the extent that they are unaware they even are candidates and voters?)

    (Yes, I know this comic is too goofy by nature for any of that to really matter if the authors want to put HT into the White House. But I’m a bit compulsive about world-building).

    • joycemelton
      August 31, 2017, 2:41 am | # | Reply

      What do you mean? Isn’t HT already in the White House? Somebody large, orange and self-absorbed is.

      • Bruce A Munro
        August 31, 2017, 5:45 am | # | Reply

        Now there’s an insult to HT’s intelligence.

        • darkstarling
          August 31, 2017, 1:58 pm | # | Reply

          It’s all an act. HT is a very good actor.

    • Sheik
      August 31, 2017, 2:37 pm | # | Reply

      And this is different from the present “informed” public, how?

      • Bruce A Munro
        August 31, 2017, 5:41 pm | # | Reply

        The weirdness-blind aren’t _intentionally_ ignoring reality.

  9. Pygar
    August 31, 2017, 3:52 am | # | Reply

    I love her “five minutes till nine” ears!

    • Frank
      August 31, 2017, 9:12 am | # | Reply

      Oh good. That means doomsday is still three hours and five minutes away

    • markhh
      August 31, 2017, 1:20 pm | # | Reply

      It looks more like 10:45 to me

      • awgiedawgie
        September 1, 2017, 7:46 pm | # | Reply

        Kind of hard to say one way or the other, since both of her ears are the same length.

  10. Kate Cunningham
    August 31, 2017, 9:03 am | # | Reply

    Oh, please. Tip would never fashion “crude” spears. Tip’s spears would be exquisitely crafted works of art.

  11. Kaydrien Iceclaw
    August 31, 2017, 9:10 am | # | Reply

    … Why would she need spears? How would she *use* spears?

    • s854
      August 31, 2017, 11:13 am | # | Reply

      At the moment, I think Sweetheart’s plan makes more sense than Tip’s does. She can give the spears to small children to poke people with. He can talk to the press, who will take his claims as seriously as the position they’ve already taken dictates.

      And that’s assuming that the “Fixers” don’t actually have long sharp claws and a dislike of anyone doing whatever it is Tip thinks he’s doing now.

      • Kaydrien Iceclaw
        September 1, 2017, 8:11 am | # | Reply

        You may have a point there.

  12. Edward A Gedeon
    August 31, 2017, 1:05 pm | # | Reply

    Raaaampaaaaaage …

  13. joycemelton
    August 31, 2017, 1:51 pm | # | Reply

    “I’ll need your thumbs…” is just not a phrase that comes up very often.

  14. Chrisn
    August 31, 2017, 2:09 pm | # | Reply

    Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

    • Shadowmehr
      August 31, 2017, 8:49 pm | # | Reply

      Don’t you mean dogs and cat-eared zombies?

      Also, you stole my line, darn it!

  15. Daibhid C
    August 31, 2017, 2:26 pm | # | Reply

    Have the Fixers been mentioned before? Because they don’t sound ominous at all…

    • Bruce A Munro
      August 31, 2017, 5:44 pm | # | Reply

      Any proper evil secret organization above a certain size has some sort of clean-up crew. Those witnesses aren’t going to disappear themselves, after all.

    • This Guy I Know
      September 1, 2017, 1:27 pm | # | Reply

      This is the only reference I recall: http://skin-horse.com/comic/she-awesomely/

      Also, not a direct reference, but it appears Anasigma has some clout with them: http://skin-horse.com/comic/with-the-heads/

      (Crossing my fingers that the links don’t get this marked as spam…)

  16. awgiedawgie
    September 11, 2017, 12:06 pm | # | Reply

    Wait… Sweetheart isn’t technically violating her own fraternization policy. There’s a loophole here, in that Sweetheart and Unity already live together, and she did in fact say that “existing relationships can stay”.

  17. WJS
    August 2, 2019, 11:08 am | # | Reply

    OK, is Sweetheart deliberately alluding to President Fancy’s spear-wielding pint-sized goon squad, or is this a sign that she’s still at risk of going that way herself even after seeing where it ends?

    • awgiedawgie
      August 6, 2019, 11:24 am | # | Reply

      It’s Sweetheart’s own personal disorder. That’s why she’s so adamant about going by the book.

      She’s taking the whole “rule-breaking” thing to its worst possible conclusion. You break a rule or two now, and before you know it society has collapsed, the world is in ruins, and everyone is using prehistoric weapons, such as spears.

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