Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2020-04-18
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2020-04-18

by shaenon on April 18, 2020 at 12:01 am
Chapter: The Dreadful Future
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Discussion (53) ¬

  1. Tiff Hudson
    April 18, 2020, 12:05 am | # | Reply

    Pancakes with extra innuendo, please!

    • Robert Nowall
      April 18, 2020, 7:25 am | # | Reply

      So she’s coming…for him. Could be. How did she spell it?

  2. Jon
    April 18, 2020, 12:58 am | # | Reply

    You know, it’s nice seeing the crew just getting breakfast together. Or maybe this counts as brunch? Tip does have a mimosa, it seems.

    • awgiedawgie
      April 18, 2020, 1:02 am | # | Reply

      Breakfast isn’t just for breakfast any more.

    • Daibhid C
      April 18, 2020, 6:04 am | # | Reply

      I was about to say I thought it was a buck’s fizz, then I looked it up and they’re basically the same thing, except the buck’s fizz has more champagne.

      And now I’ve got “Making Your Mind Up” stuck in my head.

      • Daibhid C
        April 18, 2020, 6:14 am | # | Reply

        And then this happened:

        You gotta scary dream,
        All the non-humans have found,
        But Nick hasn’t noticed while he and Dr Lee,
        Play around.
        The time is right to give them a fright,
        By messing their minds up.

        All of their creators
        Say they’ll come and find.
        It’s an unsettling vision,
        Somehow pushed into their mind.

        Remy’s doing voodoo tests,
        To see if he can find out more,
        But it’s still not clear exactly what it is he’s,
        Looking for.
        We still don’t know who’s behind the show,
        And messing their minds up.

    • Ysabet
      April 18, 2020, 11:40 pm | # | Reply

      It’s ALWAYS Mimosa time! (Try it with a little lemon-juice and sugar around the rim; mmmmm!)

  3. WuseMajor
    April 18, 2020, 2:38 am | # | Reply

    Ok, it’s odd that Sweetheart wouldn’t be having dreams of Captain Bram

    • awgiedawgie
      April 18, 2020, 3:05 am | # | Reply

      As has been mentioned a few times now, she may have indeed been having dreams about the Captain, but since she remembers even the bad things he did to her fondly, she wouldn’t think of them as nightmares.

      Many people don’t remember their dreams unless they’re particularly traumatic, so Sweetheart could have had the dreams already, and simply not remembered them when she woke up.

      • Owlmirror
        April 18, 2020, 3:30 am | # | Reply

        Sweetheart has already had a nightmare about Captain Bram coming for her . . . with a rolled-up newspaper and a “Bad dog!” scold.

        I suspect that if she had something like that again, she would wake up in existential terror.

        I note that Sweetdaddy Jupiter also had the “nightmare” (when do spring-powered robot spiders sleep? How do they even dream?), even though his relationship with Tigerlily Jones has been only positive.

        • BMunro
          April 18, 2020, 3:45 am | # | Reply

          “when do spring-powered robot spiders sleep? How do they even dream?”

          Only Tigerlily knows, and even if she were willing to tell only another spring-oriented Mad would be able to make sense of it.

          The fact that zombies and cyborgs and wind-up robots are all getting the dreams does seem to argue for a supernatural force: it’s hard to see even Mad science being able to affect so varied a set of targets without regular humans picking up something too.

          • casimir
            April 18, 2020, 10:28 am | #

            Do they dream of spring-powered sheep?

          • Moe Lane
            April 18, 2020, 10:42 am | #

            I want to say ‘Mobius sheep,’ but although I like how that sounds it’s not entirely right for this.

    • kiralamouse
      April 18, 2020, 10:28 am | # | Reply

      I wonder. Find me the MOST vulnerable. Maybe Sweetheart isn’t being counted as such?

      • Robert Nowall
        April 18, 2020, 11:42 am | # | Reply

        Yup. You’re on to something.

      • awgiedawgie
        April 18, 2020, 12:19 pm | # | Reply

        So why is Unity? She may be a mite unstable, but I wouldn’t call her exactly vulnerable.

        • Thenardyr
          April 19, 2020, 12:14 am | # | Reply

          What if the thing that makes Sweetheart and Nick different is that they believe they fulfilled their creators’ goals? Babe invaded the USA. Nick became gun using plane. Unity ran away from home though. Pretty sure every other NHS we’ve seen knows that they have ‘disappointed’ their creators. “Find me the most vulnerable.”

          • awgiedawgie
            April 19, 2020, 1:26 pm | #

            But Virginia has told Unity that she belongs with Skin Horse, and basically (although maybe not in so many words) that she is proud of her.

      • Andy4Hire
        April 18, 2020, 2:23 pm | # | Reply

        Possibly the dreams are a way for A-Sig to assess which is the most vulnerable, by gauging everyone’s reactions to them? Or by gauging everyone’s reactions to the fact that everyone else is having the dreams?

      • Andy4Hire
        April 18, 2020, 2:30 pm | # | Reply

        Anyway, I’d be inclined to put Nick pretty high on the “most vulnerable” list because of his attachment to Ginny. If Mr. Green wants to get to him, he just has to go after her–although clearly he already knows this.

  4. awgiedawgie
    April 18, 2020, 3:16 am | # | Reply

    So, Nick has had the dream, but as many of us have suspected, he took it completely different.

    • Owlmirror
      April 18, 2020, 3:37 am | # | Reply

      I’m not sure we can infer that.

      Nick may well have just been flustered by the phrasing, as Tip says. “Screaming that she’s coming”.

      If Dr. Lee had actually appeared in a vision outside the context of sexing up, Nick might well have been creeped out.

      I guess we’ll see.

      • soft
        April 18, 2020, 10:55 am | # | Reply

        “I didn’t know it was a nightmare” tells me that he has.

        • Owlmirror
          April 18, 2020, 9:25 pm | # | Reply

          But he might be referring to something that happened when he was awake.

          • soft
            April 20, 2020, 12:04 am | #

            He was asked specifically about visions in panel 3.

    • Stephen Rose (@TreeSquirrel84)
      April 18, 2020, 8:08 pm | # | Reply

      Okay! That explains Unity’s hands changing colors between the strip of her waking up and the strip of her storming Nick and Dr. Lee’s bedroom. They’re back to base waking colors now in the diner, so that strip was us watching Nick’s dream. Presumably, Unity stormed in with her ‘waking’ colored arms, Nick chased her out, then relived the recent events once he managed to fall asleep again, only with the altered colors that appeared in the strip and with off-panel added dialog from Dr. Lee snuck in at the end that he understandably didn’t see as being suspicious.

  5. nebulousrikulau
    April 18, 2020, 3:24 am | # | Reply

    She accidentally made Nick telepathic, and everybody’s been misinterpreting HIS dreams?

    • Owlmirror
      April 18, 2020, 3:32 am | # | Reply

      Heh. The dreams/visions don’t seem to have even a hint of eroticism, which they would if Nick were broadcasting them.

      • nebulousrikulau
        April 18, 2020, 9:10 pm | # | Reply

        Many sophonts would find the erotic dreams of an attack helicopter to be somewhere between disquieting and horrifying.

        Especially if you’re 500 meters up and you hear the ground say, “I’m coming for you!”

  6. Ray Radlein
    April 18, 2020, 4:13 am | # | Reply

    I know he’s, um, had some work done, but I’m not sure Nick IS “nonhuman”

    • Simberto
      April 18, 2020, 4:26 am | # | Reply

      He identifies as a helicopter. I’d say he would classify himself as nonhuman. He’d probably use other words, like “posthuman” or “way cooler than human”, but the general idea still stands.

      And if he doesn’t see himself as human anymore, i am inclined to follow.

      • s854
        April 18, 2020, 6:06 am | # | Reply

        Nick identifies as a helicopter, but AG-I always identified him as a human. I don’t know whether either of these facts is relevant to the dreams.

    • jdreyfuss
      April 18, 2020, 10:56 am | # | Reply

      He identifies as a helicopter with a human brain for a CPU, rather than as a human with an elaborate prosthesis. He is indeed an NHS or else he wouldn’t have been eligible for Skin Horse’s protection.

    • Fiona
      April 18, 2020, 11:27 am | # | Reply

      Skin Horse was legally allowed to help him, so legally he is not human. He doesn’t identify as human, or didn’t, or perhaps only identifies partly as human, that seems like it may be in flux recently but who knows. Also the question of whether a cyborg is human is an open one. He is a brain in a jar, even if the jar is a helicopter, the internet, and a cloned human body.

  7. Seph
    April 18, 2020, 5:35 am | # | Reply

    Virginia didn’t create Nick; she just rehoused him.

    • casimir
      April 18, 2020, 12:49 pm | # | Reply

      …and aroused him.

      • davidbreslin101
        April 18, 2020, 3:17 pm | # | Reply

        …and may yet espouse him?

        • Robert Nowall
          April 18, 2020, 11:36 pm | # | Reply

          …perhaps if she deloused him.

  8. Kaos
    April 18, 2020, 7:21 am | # | Reply

    I think this whole arc was a setup for this joke.

    • Brian Louis Pickering
      April 18, 2020, 10:25 am | # | Reply

      I wouldn’t put it past them that the whole COMIC was a setup for this joke! 🙂

  9. Robert Nowall
    April 18, 2020, 7:29 am | # | Reply

    Five of them at the IHOP for breakfast. Since they’re now a rogue agency, who’s picking up the tab?

    • Shadowmehr
      April 18, 2020, 8:30 am | # | Reply

      Given that U.N.I.T.Y. fought through a horde to get to the table, the staff might be meekly hiding when not needed and waiting for authorities to arrive.

      • Moe Lane
        April 18, 2020, 10:51 am | # | Reply

        I wonder if they still have government-issued credit cards. Those can take forever to ‘cancel.’ (And no time at all to trace, which might be one reason why they haven’t been.)

  10. David B Huber
    April 18, 2020, 9:15 am | # | Reply

    Nick’s comment in the fourth panel implies he *has* had those dreams, but interpreted them differently.

    And Ginny’s little smile of satisfaction is just adorable!

  11. Sean K.
    April 18, 2020, 11:31 am | # | Reply

    There seems to be a frowny face on Tip’s pancake. I wonder if he requested a specific emoji or if it was an unhappy accident.

    (in fact, it may be a three-eyed frowny face – perhaps a Narbonic reference?)

  12. Robert Nowall
    April 18, 2020, 11:40 am | # | Reply

    I see bacon on a plate. Nick’s gotta be careful—it’s not kosher.

    • awgiedawgie
      April 18, 2020, 12:16 pm | # | Reply

      The bacon appears to be directly in front of Sweetheart, so I don’t think Nick has to worry.

      • Robert Nowall
        April 18, 2020, 3:02 pm | # | Reply

        Strictly speaking, you’re not supposed to eat food from a kitchen that’s not up to standards.

        • casimir
          April 18, 2020, 4:37 pm | # | Reply

          Very observant of you!

          • Robert Nowall
            April 18, 2020, 5:08 pm | #

            Comes from asking a lot of rude questions when I was a kid.

  13. davidbreslin101
    April 18, 2020, 3:16 pm | # | Reply

    Well. Played.

  14. D. Walker
    April 18, 2020, 8:10 pm | # | Reply

    I was thinking that perhaps the fact that Nick wasn’t really CREATED by Dr. Lee, but was merely modified by her might be significant.

    The same seems to be true of Sweetheart and her pack – Captain Bram genetically altered them, but arguably didn’t CREATE them.

    Maybe the distinction is that only beings that were created “from nothing” are being affected? Unity didn’t exist until Dr. Lee created a bunch of nanites. Bubbles is the same way, as are the other robots who have been affected.

    —

    But then there are outliers who seem to break the pattern.

    There’s Leo, who is described as a “genetically augmented African lion”, which at first brush sounds like he’s in the same boat of Sweetheart. But then again, Leo was also said to have been “grown in a lab” – which is pretty ambiguous. Could it be that the difference is Leo was grown in a test tube while the Bram dogs were bred?

    There’s also Alfie (and presumably the other cobras as well), who seem to break the pattern even more.

    They were originally introduced as being “literal cobras”, “not a peaceful, enlightened race of genetically-enhanced cobra-like beings or anything”, and “just cobras”. But then they ended up being able to talk, and also it is revealed they were introduced to combat genetically-enhanced mongoose-like beings.

    Their exact origin is unclear though – did they mutate from eating the non-mongooses? (Or from eating the experimental mice that they claimed was their primary food source once there were no longer non-mongooses to eat?) Or were the robots that described them as “just cobras” simply wrong? (They should have been aware that the cobras could talk, to be honest…)

    Or maybe my theory just doesn’t hold water. Still unclear.

    • Robert Nowall
      April 18, 2020, 11:34 pm | # | Reply

      Only Alfie. We don’t know for sure where the other cobras are, except they’re no longer at the safe house where they were last seen.

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