Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2022-03-10
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2022-03-10

by shaenon on March 10, 2022 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Phantomwise
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Discussion (71) ¬

  1. Towering Barbarian
    March 10, 2022, 12:03 am | # | Reply

    As long as SF fans and otaku exist there will always be plenty of weirdness. πŸ™‚

    • D. Walker
      March 10, 2022, 12:10 am | # | Reply

      …plenty of non-awful weirdness, anyway.

      There’s staggering amounts of of weirdness in places like Florida and Texas, it’s just all the kind of weirdness you’d rather didn’t exist in the world.

      • Gfrogs
        March 10, 2022, 12:38 am | # | Reply

        As a Texan, not all of Texas is weird in that way (the shear variety of non-native parrots and our endangered psychedelic cacti come to mind), but I’d have to admit I’d much rather Ted Cruz blast away off the planet than any zombie or talking dog.

        • Towering Barbarian
          March 10, 2022, 4:32 am | # | Reply

          @ Gfrogs,
          “The Woke shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us will colonise the Universe!”. πŸ™‚

          • Rob Loughrey
            March 10, 2022, 9:55 am | #

            Awesome! Have a good trip!

          • Towering Barbarian
            March 10, 2022, 10:41 am | #

            @Rob Loughrey,
            Thank you. And in return I wish you good luck in trying to discover fire. πŸ™‚

        • John Campbell
          March 10, 2022, 10:55 pm | # | Reply

          I’ve been operating on some time on the theory that Ted Cruz is actually a lizard person from Zeta Reticuli in a human suit.

      • Candace
        March 10, 2022, 1:36 am | # | Reply

        Not all of Texas is weird in a bad way, and not all Texans are weird in a bad way. I count myself among the Texans who are weird in a good way, and I’m not the only one. (At least, I *hope* I’m weird in a good way…)

        • Towering Barbarian
          March 10, 2022, 4:37 am | # | Reply

          @ Candace,
          Our political alignments seem very different but based upon what I have seen of your posts over the past five years or more I would say that your hope has been completely fulfilled. πŸ™‚

          • Candace
            March 10, 2022, 1:49 pm | #

            @Towering Barbarian,
            Thank you! πŸ™‚

      • Towering Barbarian
        March 10, 2022, 4:29 am | # | Reply

        “It’s just the sort of weirdness you’d rather didn’t exist in the world.”.

        Yeah, your assessment of Austin in Texas and Dade County in Florida are completely correct. πŸ˜›

        • Steverino
          March 10, 2022, 7:34 am | # | Reply

          Don’t just pick on Dade County. All of Fl is weird. Think The Villages or Tallahassee. Or even The House of Mouse.

        • Aname
          March 10, 2022, 8:16 am | # | Reply

          Ricky from IT (Internet Today) is a Floridian and even he reckons Florida is not quite right. He loves the place as his home … but, yeah, nah.

        • jdreyfuss
          March 10, 2022, 11:59 am | # | Reply

          I take it you’ve never been to Houston either, if you think Austin is the only part of Texas that doesn’t agree with your politics.

          • Towering Barbarian
            March 10, 2022, 9:27 pm | #

            Ya got me there! But Austin is the one that *advertises* itself as weird. As in “Keep Austin Weird”. The joke in some conservative circles was that Austin is where Californians move when they get too liberal by Californian standards. πŸ˜€

          • Candace
            March 11, 2022, 1:17 am | #

            @Towering Barbarian: “The joke in some conservative circles was that Austin is where Californians move when they get too liberal by Californian standards.” Well, that’s actually more or less factual. Probably somewhat of an exaggeration, and not the full story, but not really false. Of course, people also tend to leave California (and other states) for Texas because of the lower cost of living, and lower real estate costs here. I get the impression that Californians do tend to favor the Austin area. And yeah, Austin is weird, and getting weirder. ;-D

      • CBob
        March 10, 2022, 1:19 pm | # | Reply

        And then there’s Jersey (as in New). At best, it can be used as a warning to others. A mildly radioactive benzene soaked warning of just about everything done wrong. On a generous day, I’ll give some credit to “they meant well”. Most days? Nope. Epic examples of greed/ambition/idiocy from every part of the political spectrum are the norm.

  2. David B Huber
    March 10, 2022, 12:23 am | # | Reply

    Nera and Jonah look like I feel. Bewildered. Dismayed.

    But Tip sounding the alarm echoes my deepest disconcertment: “Come back!”

  3. alphaghoul
    March 10, 2022, 12:29 am | # | Reply

    Well there will be eventually more weirdness, since normal humans become mad scientists and those create sentient nonhuman constructs, among other things. So what does Nera’s shirt say? β€œI grow Spock”?

    • TheWreck
      March 10, 2022, 12:30 am | # | Reply

      The t-shirt is “I Grok Spock”. You get a better view of it in yesterday’s strip.

      • Foradain
        March 10, 2022, 1:24 am | # | Reply

        And if you don’t grok the term “grok”, check out Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.

        I don’t know of many other words found in English dictionaries that we’ve looted from a Martian language…

        • khn0
          March 10, 2022, 3:58 am | # | Reply

          thanks for giving the source of this term, I’ve seen it since some times already and as a non native speaker had no idea it was an Heinlein artifact (and now I will likely refrain from using it).

        • Robert Nowall
          March 10, 2022, 5:39 am | # | Reply

          Can’t vouch for Martian, but Heinlein also coined the word “waldoes.”

          • Sheik
            March 10, 2022, 10:09 am | #

            And now with the advent of 5G, remote physical work via waldo is almost an inevitability.

          • David B Huber
            March 10, 2022, 11:08 am | #

            Very true, Sheik.

            I look forward to the day when the AI robot, having replaced its bricklayer trainer by learning the smooth economy of movement ingrained into the human-operated waldoes, is in turn replaced by the 3D printer… πŸ˜‰

          • Forrest M Davis
            March 10, 2022, 2:48 pm | #

            Robert Nowall:
            RAH didn’t just coin the term “waldoes”, he created the very concept of them and has been recognized as their point of origin by those who eventually built them based on his descriptions in the book “Waldo”.
            Further trivia – he also came up with the idea of water beds before they became the hip new thing, although Heinlein envisaged them as a way for long-term spacers to ease their re-acclimation to earth’s gravity.
            There was at least one other major real-world scientific advance that he came up with but I can’t dredge whatever it was/they were out of my uncooperative memory at the moment.
            Yes, I’m a fan, and have been since about third grade in the mid 60s when I started reading his preteen and teen oriented stories. Didn’t take me long to graduate to the deeper and somewhat more socially relevant stuff!

          • Robert Nowall
            March 10, 2022, 3:56 pm | #

            Re: Forrest M. Davis: I don’t think Heinlein can be credited with the concept, just the name. Others were already trying to manipulate by remote control before he wrote “Waldo.” Naming is important, though.

            You can credit Heinlein with deducing the nuclear weapon face-off in “Solution Unsatisfactory.”

            He also describes cell phones in “Space Cadet.”

            Yup, I’m a fan, too, also starting in third grade when I was looking at the Margueritte Henry books and my eye drifted to Heinlein. (I owe her a great deal for that.) Every so often I’ll dig out my copies and reread them, or do something like work out the “video game” at the beginning of “Space Cadet,” or trace out on a map the route taken by the characters in “The Year of the Jackpot.”

  4. TheWreck
    March 10, 2022, 12:32 am | # | Reply

    I see that Tip is taking this with dignity and grace.

    • efogoto
      March 10, 2022, 2:03 am | # | Reply

      Well … all the dignity and grace he can muster anyway.

  5. Owlmirror
    March 10, 2022, 1:13 am | # | Reply

    Whack idea:

    Tigerlily is not really from Lovetron. Berenice was born on Earth, and went Mad. But the bees noticed her, because of her particular style of spring-powered clockwork Madness, and implanted the idea of her being a Princess of Lovetron in her mind.

    Because Lovetron runs on spring-powered clockwork, and Lovetron needs technicians around with thumbs.

    But her attitude needed to be adjusted. Can’t have a spunky sassy spark who might throw a spanner in the spinning gears. No, they wanted a smiling Stepford spark, a sub to their oh-so genteel dom.

    Further whack idea:

    Gavotte, having endured the unpleasant experience of having been mind-controlled against her will, decides to unleash the full Tigerlily, to wreak funky cosmic chaos.

    • Frank
      March 10, 2022, 4:21 am | # | Reply

      This checks out with what we know. Pavane did introduce herself by trying to implant an idea in Sweetheart’s mind, then went on to implant a different one in every other non-human

    • Daibhid C
      March 10, 2022, 1:13 pm | # | Reply

      I’ve said before that my issue with the whoie Bernice-of-Lovetron-is-a-scam theory is that I can’t see what Pavane gets out of it.

      Now that I can, I am ranking it as “plausible”.

  6. Christian Rose
    March 10, 2022, 1:49 am | # | Reply

    So…
    Boggle anyone?

    • Xdgvy
      March 10, 2022, 1:51 am | # | Reply

      Actually, that’s a good point.
      What happens to the next batch of super- mutant Ur-girbils that are created?

      • awgiedawgie
        March 10, 2022, 7:09 am | # | Reply

        Whaddya mean “next batch”? There’s an island full of them, and I don’t see any of them here waiting to board.

        • Rob Loughrey
          March 10, 2022, 9:56 am | # | Reply

          Plus the contents of hundreds of mad scientist labs all over the world.

  7. Marie
    March 10, 2022, 4:31 am | # | Reply

    What if Tip became a werewolf again to be with Tiger Lily.

    • awgiedawgie
      March 10, 2022, 7:14 am | # | Reply

      The problem isn’t whether he can be with her. Last week, she said “I’m glad you made it,” implying that he’s welcome. The problem is that she’s not the same Tigerlily any more.

  8. Robert Nowall
    March 10, 2022, 5:14 am | # | Reply

    She’s very definite that *all* the cryptids are going away. Are they?

    • Sheik
      March 10, 2022, 10:14 am | # | Reply

      That’s what I was wondering.
      She seems to have an unwarranted faith in the efficiency of the Lovetron operation.

      • Robert Nowall
        March 10, 2022, 11:10 am | # | Reply

        I was thinking of Tigerlily’s clockwork robot army. They offered to try to figure out how to upload them to Aimee’s Whimsey Wonderland, but they wanted to stay in this world. For them, why would going to Lovetron be any different?

        (Come to think of it, does it matter to Aimee whether her server is on Earth or on Lovetron?)

    • BMunro
      March 10, 2022, 2:19 pm | # | Reply

      I was wondering myself how the sentient whales were supposed to get to Kansas.

      • s854
        March 10, 2022, 3:48 pm | # | Reply

        BMunro: The whales probably got to the saucer in the same way Renard and #12 did at the end of Muddled Duddled Fuddled Wuddled Fox. It can’t be much fun for them on such a small spaceship, though.

        I don’t think they’ll ever run out of NHIs in a world where where radiation is basically magic, and there are irresponsible people at all levels. If reality blindness returns, they may find them harder to locate.

      • John Campbell
        March 10, 2022, 11:01 pm | # | Reply

        They’ve got their own ride β€” a Klingon warship.

  9. gwen
    March 10, 2022, 8:04 am | # | Reply

    New mad scientists are born every day. There will always be non human sentients. Just fewer in the U.S. for a little while. And I don’t think Gavotte is going.

    • Daibhid C
      March 10, 2022, 1:16 pm | # | Reply

      New mad scientists are indeed born every day, which is exactly why A-Sig didn’t bother declaring war on nonhumans until it had a solution for that in place as well.

      The Cure ain’t just Robert Smith’s band.

  10. Urlance Woolsbane
    March 10, 2022, 8:12 am | # | Reply

    Oh snap, I only just noticed we’re 3 strips into a new chapter!
    Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon was so long that I thought it might be the very last one

    • Robert Nowall
      March 10, 2022, 8:51 am | # | Reply

      “Phantomwise” comes at the *end* of “Through the Looking Glass.”

    • Daibhid C
      March 10, 2022, 1:16 pm | # | Reply

      Likewise.

  11. Robert Nowall
    March 10, 2022, 9:03 am | # | Reply

    Nera has really skinny ankles here. She should always wear boots. Or at least hightops…

    • awgiedawgie
      March 10, 2022, 9:08 am | # | Reply

      Hey, at least she’s not wearing those ultra-skinny jeans that make girls look anorexic.

  12. jwghaller
    March 10, 2022, 9:46 am | # | Reply

    The best weird is homegrown anyway. [looks longingly at flying saucer]

  13. Robert Nowall
    March 10, 2022, 12:45 pm | # | Reply

    With the cryptids about to depart, it tears Nera’s longings apart. If weirdness is through, just what will they do? Board game reviews, for a start.

    • David B Huber
      March 10, 2022, 1:07 pm | # | Reply

      Nice!

  14. Shadowmehr
    March 10, 2022, 1:04 pm | # | Reply

    Cheer up, Nora. It ain’t over yet.

  15. OneUniverse
    March 10, 2022, 1:12 pm | # | Reply

    When will “The Complete Skin-Horse Chronicles” become available for delivery and how much am I gonna shell out for them?

    • Forrest M Davis
      March 10, 2022, 2:55 pm | # | Reply

      Shaenon and Jeff, I second this question! I’m finally in the position to resume a little discretionary spending and the Skin Horse books are very high on my list (possibly even the number one option after replacing the leaky kitchen sink). Not sure if I should start buying them individually or hold out for an omnibus edition…

      • shaenon
        March 10, 2022, 3:01 pm | # | Reply

        I don’t know if we’ll ever do an omnibus, but there should be two more volumes coming soon…

        • Forrest M Davis
          March 11, 2022, 2:47 pm | # | Reply

          Thanks for the reply, I appreciate how responsive you always seem to be to questions from your fan base!

          Individual books it is, at least for now – Looking forward to reading through the whole thing once again (5th time? – 6th time?) in an offline mode. I’ve reread your series (all of them) more times than any other that I follow. The nearest followers are probably Questionable Content and Too Much Information, and it looks like Andy’s health issues are bringing the latter one to an incomplete end unless they can find someone to take it over. Sad to see it go, many of his characters had become as alive and relatable as your main characters are.

    • David B Huber
      March 10, 2022, 5:09 pm | # | Reply

      I’m content to finish my collection of individual volumes – especially given the stretch goals and extra stories! πŸ˜‰

      That said, a bundle of all volumes would make for excellent gifting…

      As for “The Complete Skin-Horse Chronicles Omnibus Edition” which includes *everything* (even Nick’s journal and the dossiers + wallpaper from Patreon) there definitely should be one. Only one, collectibility assured by NFT. So Shaenon and Jeff can retire to their own island!

  16. BMunro
    March 10, 2022, 2:22 pm | # | Reply

    Move to Europe. We’ve never seen A-sig doing anything abroad..
    (I love this comic, but you gotta admit it’s sort of America-centric.)

    • Robert Nowall
      March 10, 2022, 3:47 pm | # | Reply

      There was once mention of the Sistine Chapel, Unity and Sweetheart, and double-excommunication…

      • Bruce A Munro
        March 10, 2022, 10:26 pm | # | Reply

        That’s a mighty frail peg to hang any framework of speculation on. πŸ™‚

    • Towering Barbarian
      March 10, 2022, 3:49 pm | # | Reply

      Well, sure. That’s, what A-sig *wants* you to think! ^_~

  17. Robert Horton
    March 10, 2022, 4:26 pm | # | Reply

    Were ALL the Madbloodbots destroyed? Will we be seeing any, or Bruce the Protocol Droid, entering the craft?
    I HOPE the final scene does not include the phrase “It’s a cookbook!”

    • David B Huber
      March 10, 2022, 5:11 pm | # | Reply

      Unless it’s Unity exclaiming it! πŸ˜‰

    • awgiedawgie
      March 10, 2022, 8:50 pm | # | Reply

      All we ever were told was that two dozen of the androids went north to meet with the hamsters. And we didn’t see even that many after the hamsters… repurposed them.

      That leaves well over 14,000 that may very well still be roaming around somewhere (and I’m pretty sure we saw a few of them in the crowd at the robot deathmatch). And none of them really has much reason to want to leave. They look human enough that with a little effort, they could blend into human society, whilst still retaining their autonomy as machines.

      And Bruce and his buddies work for Dave and Helen, so I really don’t see them wanting to leave (if only because they value their circuit boards).

      • Towering Barbarian
        March 10, 2022, 9:31 pm | # | Reply

        Must have been plenty of them left because they threw a reunion party for Mad blood in the closing Narbonic montage as I recall. πŸ™‚

    • Robert Nowall
      March 10, 2022, 9:09 pm | # | Reply

      Some Madblood robots were seen at the “Green Noah” Battle of the Robots that Nick won.

  18. DarknessShallFall
    March 10, 2022, 5:33 pm | # | Reply

    Considering Tip was an Ex-were-Chihuahua dog thing, I think he has a chance on the spaceship lol.

    • awgiedawgie
      March 10, 2022, 9:33 pm | # | Reply

      Berenice did tell him “I’m glad you made it.”

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