Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2019-04-30
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2019-04-30

by shaenon on April 30, 2019 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Green Noah
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Discussion (42) ¬

  1. awgiedawgie
    April 30, 2019, 12:03 am | # | Reply

    Virginia, you are so naïve it’s adorable.

    • David B Huber
      April 30, 2019, 12:50 am | # | Reply

      She’s adorable for *many* reasons.

    • Rimwolf
      April 30, 2019, 12:51 am | # | Reply

      “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. — Upton Sinclair

      Adjusting for gender, this might explain Virginia’s particular flavor of reality blindness. For her it’s likely not the salary per se but the kind of work she wanted to do, that caused her to more or less tune out the implications of what her work was being used for.

      She’s not totally blind, with varying degrees of awareness from “I think I’m technically evil” to identifying with Sycorax. And she’s not with Anasigma any more, of course. But it’s evident she’s still compartmentalized a lot of her experience there.

      • warpzone32
        April 30, 2019, 11:00 pm | # | Reply

        Wait you mean all that stuff was meant to be taken at face value?

        I thought she was *joking* all this time! Defensive humor about the horrible company she worked for!

    • M. Alan Thomas II
      April 30, 2019, 4:51 am | # | Reply

      Like how The Maw research facility in old Star Wars EU thought that it was turning out useful stuff for use on uninhabited planets and star systems.

      • mickeyjf
        April 30, 2019, 6:41 pm | # | Reply

        Boy oh boy, have I been there.

        • warpzone32
          April 30, 2019, 11:01 pm | # | Reply

          Wow.

          What were those uninhabited planets and star systems like?

      • Guesticus
        May 1, 2019, 4:50 pm | # | Reply

        Well, when you are completely and literally isolated from the rest of the universe, it’s understandable to believe what you are told

        Look at it from their view: think of how much time, effort and resources (people and machines) it would take to manually mine a planet, compared to blowing it up and sifting through the rubble
        The people at The Maw never got to leave or know what the Death Star or Starkiller (and fairly sure they would have had a different name for them) were actually used for

        Remember, Nobel invented dynamite as a peaceful aid for mining, he had no way of knowing what it would eventually be used for

  2. Colonel Sam
    April 30, 2019, 12:19 am | # | Reply

    Can I get panel 3 as a t-shirt?

    • Robert Loughrey
      April 30, 2019, 9:12 am | # | Reply

      I was thinking coffee mug, but yeah.

  3. David B Huber
    April 30, 2019, 12:49 am | # | Reply

    Let’s hope the safe phrase is “Avocado Blintz”…

  4. rinku
    April 30, 2019, 1:11 am | # | Reply

    Emerald City denizens.

    • David B Huber
      April 30, 2019, 1:56 am | # | Reply

      Neat connection! Or maybe Mr. Green’s shock troops? Or just because green=environmentally friendly? (“We plug ’em, you plant ’em!”)

  5. Bruce A Munro
    April 30, 2019, 2:02 am | # | Reply

    “I thought it was meant to be an ironic name!”

  6. dexitroboper
    April 30, 2019, 2:11 am | # | Reply

    What’s the pastry equivalent of ‘You’re just a pack of cards!’

    • abb3w
      April 30, 2019, 10:55 pm | # | Reply

      Strudel?

  7. Shaw
    April 30, 2019, 3:55 am | # | Reply

    You know what? I looked back a few strips, and it really is a nice shade. Good job, doc.

  8. Barking Monkey
    April 30, 2019, 6:47 am | # | Reply

    Given her neuroscience specialization and role in Unity and NIck’s programs, it seems likely her function was to suppress the soldiers free will so they could more easily be enslaved and controlled. That and picking out the color.

    • awgiedawgie
      April 30, 2019, 8:58 am | # | Reply

      She is a cyberneticist. She undoubtedly had something to do with tying their armour into their nervous system. Maybe like installing little sub-dermal micro transmitters and sensors so they can actually remove their armour and take a shower once in a while. She may be evil, but she still values good hygiene.

  9. K. Iceclaw
    April 30, 2019, 7:49 am | # | Reply

    …. How are we not classing Dr Lee as a mad scientist, again?

    • K. Iceclaw
      April 30, 2019, 7:50 am | # | Reply

      I know we had a reason, but then there are moments like this when I can’t seem to remember it.

    • Regret
      April 30, 2019, 11:57 am | # | Reply

      Her science is reproducible by non-mad scientists.

      She is somewhat mad, and definitely a genius scientist, but that is not enough to be a ‘Mad Scientist’.

      • bryceanderston
        May 1, 2019, 12:09 am | # | Reply

        Pretty sure that just makes her a more successful mad scientist. Reality stays warped where she’s gone.

    • darkstarling
      April 30, 2019, 1:01 pm | # | Reply

      She’s a Gageteer, not a Deviser

    • John Campbell
      April 30, 2019, 2:28 pm | # | Reply

      Dr. Lee is a scientist, and possibly not altogether sane, but she’s something stranger and more rare than a mere mad scientist.

      See, “mad scientist” is a misnomer. They’re not pushing the boundaries of sapient understanding through reproducible experiments. They’re doing the impossible through means they barely grasp and no one else can reproduce. What they’re doing isn’t science; it’s magic. They’re not scientists; they’re wizards whose trappings are technology.

      Dr. Lee is uniquely capable of taking the magical devices mad scientists produce and figuring out how they work so that they can be reproduced by non-wizards. She turns mad science into just plain science.

      Agatha Heterodyne tells us that any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science. Dr. Lee doesn’t do magic. She does the analysis.

    • Daibhid C
      April 30, 2019, 4:19 pm | # | Reply

      At times like this Virginia reminds me of the not even slightly mad scientist who’s the main character in The Leaky Establishment by David Langford. He works for a nuclear weapons development lab. And he gets up in the morning by working as hard as possible to avoid thinking about why he works for a nuclear weapons development lab, and what a nuclear weapons development lab actually does. He just focuses on interesting applications of atomic physics, and pretends the rest of it isn’t happening.

      (Depending on your definition of mad scientist, you could apply the term to either those of his colleagues who do think about what they’re doing, are horrifyingly enthusiastic about doing so, and use terms like “megakills”, or to the one who campaigns to get the whole place shut down and is secretly building a reactor under his house. Neither of these are exactly mad scientists in the Skin Horse sense, though, although the latter comes close.)

      • Shadowmehr
        April 30, 2019, 8:47 pm | # | Reply

        Yes, that sounds exactly like Dr. Lee. She is so focused on the pixels (the tech she’s building) that she doesn’t see the entire picture (the why she’s building the tech).

        Now that she’s out of A-Sig’s lab, she’s getting her face shoved into the picture. If she wasn’t mad before, this little adventure might drive her over the edge. Which makes me fear for Nick, now that I think about it.

      • Terry Hunt
        May 3, 2019, 5:46 pm | # | Reply

        As it happens, I worked for a time at the same Establishment, as of course did Dave Langford some time before me. During my period a major activity was actually dismantling and disposing of weapons: also, my efforts were more directed towards maintaining the infrastructure (including fixing leaky taps and replacing dud lightbulbs), so I wasn’t required to display mad genius and, honestly, didn’t feel any angst about the work.

  10. Sleepy John.
    April 30, 2019, 8:44 am | # | Reply

    Do these green soldiers have the big flat pad connecting their feet? Because that would really be awkward.

    • awgiedawgie
      April 30, 2019, 8:49 am | # | Reply

      Makes it really hard to run away. You can only “wobble” away.

    • darkstarling
      April 30, 2019, 1:02 pm | # | Reply

      Joke’s on you, it’s actually a flying platform hoverboard thing.

      • dexitroboper
        April 30, 2019, 7:00 pm | # | Reply

        The Department of Jetpack Suppression won’t let them have those.

        • warpzone32
          April 30, 2019, 11:05 pm | # | Reply

          The Hoverboard Disambiguation Committee disagrees with the Department of Jetpack Suppression’s improper classification of repulsion-and-antigravity-based levitation platforms as “Jetpacks.”

  11. Dr. Steve
    April 30, 2019, 9:12 am | # | Reply

    An elegant blend of art… science… and wanton destruction.

  12. Evan Geng
    April 30, 2019, 10:06 am | # | Reply

    this isn’t a very subtle allegory is it

    • JET73L
      April 30, 2019, 5:43 pm | # | Reply

      Allegory for what, the Manhattan Project? “Once the rockets go up, who cares where they go down? It’s not my department” Nazi scientists? (Von Braun wasn’t naive about the uses of his rockets, from what I understand, he just didn’t care.)

      • warpzone32
        April 30, 2019, 11:13 pm | # | Reply

        I think the general consensus among scientists working on the Manhattan Project was something along the lines of, “if the good guys didn’t get nukes first, the bad guys will be the first to use them.”

        I don’t remember if Feynman agreed or disagreed with this philosophy. If he mentioned it at all in his memiors, it was in passing between more pressing details like how he cracked top-secret safes and and annoyed 5-star generals.

  13. Robert Nowall
    April 30, 2019, 10:12 am | # | Reply

    Maybe they’re new green recruits.

  14. Schismatism
    April 30, 2019, 1:56 pm | # | Reply

    Every so often, a character gets a sentence which encapsulates them wonderfully, and today, Virginia Lee gets hers.

    • warpzone32
      April 30, 2019, 5:10 pm | # | Reply

      Virginia Lee has gotten hers literally every time she talks about work.

      Also, it’s Dr. Virginia Lee. She didn’t spent 6 years at Evil Medical School to become thank you very much.

  15. Rimwolf
    April 30, 2019, 2:11 pm | # | Reply

    I hope Virginia installed an override command in these cybernetics as well. “Pistachio ice cream” perhaps?

  16. warpzone32
    April 30, 2019, 5:07 pm | # | Reply

    “It’s literally called Hunter Green!”

    “No it ISN’T! It’s a subtle variant on Hunter Green called Olive Of Doom!”

    “Can confirm that the fabric those guys were wearing was a little off-color for Hunter Green. It also clashed with their laser-eyes. Impressive thread count though.”

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