Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2020-09-18
‹‹ First ‹ Prev Buy! Comments(57) Next › Last ››

2020-09-18

by shaenon on September 18, 2020 at 12:01 am
Chapter: The Lee of the Stone
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Discussion (57) ¬

  1. Moe Lane
    September 18, 2020, 12:06 am | # | Reply

    Oh, Sergio, you are going to have a wonderfully horrible time of it soon.

  2. Barbara K
    September 18, 2020, 12:07 am | # | Reply

    Robert Nowall and Awgie Dawgie called it right! Sergio appears! Things are gonna get hot in here…

    • awgiedawgie
      September 18, 2020, 12:47 am | # | Reply

      Don’t give me any credit for that. It was all Robert.

      • Andy4Hire
        September 18, 2020, 11:05 am | # | Reply

        And I misjudged his skin tone, apparently. Good call, Robert.

        • BarGamer
          September 18, 2020, 8:18 pm | # | Reply

          Apparently, being on the run does wonders for your melanin.

  3. thejoemoose
    September 18, 2020, 12:08 am | # | Reply

    Oh hey, it’s Sergio! I forgot he faked his death.

    • John
      September 18, 2020, 9:34 am | # | Reply

      I’d forgotten him entirely. We need a character guide/wiki…

      • myaapplesauce
        September 18, 2020, 11:27 am | # | Reply

        That cast page needs to get updated.

        • John
          September 18, 2020, 11:54 am | # | Reply

          Arguably. But I find that cast pages for comics are rarely totally complete in terms of the more fringe characters. It’s just too hard for creators to keep up, I suppose.

      • D. Walker
        September 18, 2020, 12:23 pm | # | Reply

        Well in a comic that has been running 13 years so far, it’s easy to forget the secondary characters who don’t get seen frequently.

        I mean, seriously… how along ago did we last see Sergio? Has it been years?

        • jflb96
          September 18, 2020, 4:45 pm | # | Reply

          Unless I’m mistaken, he last showed up in Choose, which was back before they invented colour.

          • awgiedawgie
            September 18, 2020, 4:56 pm | #

            He was featured in Looking Glass Land, and faked his own death at the end. I think this is the first time we’ve seen him since then, so it’s been 4 1/2 years.

  4. David B Huber
    September 18, 2020, 12:08 am | # | Reply

    Kudos to Robert Nowall!

    • Robert Nowall
      September 18, 2020, 12:25 am | # | Reply

      Look, it was just a thought.

      • casimir
        September 18, 2020, 7:50 pm | # | Reply

        I usually get spooked when my guesses turn out right.

    • Ahno neemus.
      September 18, 2020, 11:42 am | # | Reply

      Robert Know-All!

      • Candace
        September 24, 2020, 12:04 am | # | Reply

        +1!

  5. casimir
    September 18, 2020, 12:09 am | # | Reply

    Hey hey hey! Back in the box while you’re on BART buddy. And don’t try that therapy animal b.s.

    • davidbreslin101
      September 18, 2020, 7:55 am | # | Reply

      My therapy animal is a saltwater crocodile. He removes many sources of commuting stress.

      • Shadowmehr
        September 18, 2020, 1:05 pm | # | Reply

        Well, that’s one way of cutting down on pet food costs . . .

  6. Alphaghoul
    September 18, 2020, 12:14 am | # | Reply

    So human speech skills but basic cat intelligence or lower.

    • Marisa Mockery
      September 18, 2020, 12:59 am | # | Reply

      I think a bit smarter than that. More like how Sweetheart is intelligent but still acts and thinks like a dog.

      • awgiedawgie
        September 18, 2020, 1:03 am | # | Reply

        You can give them intelligence, but you can’t eliminate instinct.

        • D. Walker
          September 18, 2020, 12:26 pm | # | Reply

          Humans sure are proof of that!

          “Okay, apes, you’re smart now! Stop going to war with other tribes of apes over stupid shit, stop procreating through violence and coercion, stop rewarding thugs and bullies who rule as tyrants, and stop being irrationally angry and emotional balls of aggression and cruelty.”

          “lol no u”

          • Adam M
            September 18, 2020, 12:48 pm | #

            The problem is that unjust wars, violence, coercion, tyranny, aggression, and cruelty are all failures to be good, not failures to be smart.

    • jdreyfuss
      September 18, 2020, 9:25 am | # | Reply

      Human level intelligence, but still a cat. It’s very anthropocentric to assume that giving a non-human human level intelligence automatically means it will have a human personality or thought process. It’s been one of the long running themes of the comic.

      • Daibhid C
        September 18, 2020, 6:17 pm | # | Reply

        There’s a line I read a long time ago that was something like “Animal intelligence researchers ask if the cat can build a better mousetrap, forgetting that it doesn’t need to”.

  7. Robert Nowall
    September 18, 2020, 12:26 am | # | Reply

    Artie! C’mon out! You’ll like this guy.

    • awgiedawgie
      September 18, 2020, 12:58 am | # | Reply

      True. Artie does have a thing for slim, bronzed, Latin men.

      • Robert Nowall
        September 18, 2020, 1:19 am | # | Reply

        And Sergio’s papers on early 20th Century Venezuelan poets was probably a big turn on, too.

      • Sleepy John
        September 18, 2020, 8:27 am | # | Reply

        He also has no pants.

  8. tuiteyfruity
    September 18, 2020, 1:00 am | # | Reply

    IT’S HAPPENIGN!!! IT’S AHPPENING!!!

    • Seph
      September 18, 2020, 3:50 am | # | Reply

      By which you mean Sergiartie? Or should that be โ€˜Argioโ€™?

  9. Robert Nowall
    September 18, 2020, 1:19 am | # | Reply

    Say, are cats and gerbils allowed on the BART?

    • palenoue
      September 18, 2020, 2:36 am | # | Reply

      Why not?
      https://www.lovemeow.com/feline-1708143982.html

      • Sheik
        September 18, 2020, 2:59 pm | # | Reply

        Ikebukuro?
        Well I suppose it’s par for the course in a town that sports it’s own dulahan

  10. palenoue
    September 18, 2020, 2:32 am | # | Reply

    The cat’s ears are still up, so it’s probably a ploy for more skritches.

  11. greenknight32
    September 18, 2020, 5:06 am | # | Reply

    It’s not all instinct, the trying to look big seems to be a conscious tactic. We had one cat, Moose (big fluffy cat), when challenged by another tomcat would make himself small, flatten himself against the ground and growl.

    Seemed to confuse the other cat, but they’d eventually take the bait and pounce on him. He’d roll over real fast and be out top, biting. The other tom would scramble out of there and run for his life, it was all over in a couple seconds.

    • greenknight32
      September 18, 2020, 5:14 am | # | Reply

      That was intended as a reply to awgiedawgie’s remark about instinct.

    • awgiedawgie
      September 18, 2020, 4:40 pm | # | Reply

      In my experience (we’ve owned nearly 40 cats over the years), puffing up to look bigger is the predominant instinctive behaviour. All of our cats have done it.

  12. Foradain
    September 18, 2020, 8:27 am | # | Reply

    Better make myself look big!
    .
    .
    .
    Fearsome! I was Fearsome!

    • Andy4Hire
      September 18, 2020, 11:07 am | # | Reply

      Sounds like you and I jumped to the same Red Dwarf reference!

      • Foradain
        September 19, 2020, 12:09 am | # | Reply

        To be fair, it was Cat’s first appearance. ^_^

        Also, in one of our local D&D games, a mermaid friend is playing a Tabaxi based on Cat.

        • Andy4Hire
          September 19, 2020, 3:39 pm | # | Reply

          That sounds like a fun character!

      • Manifesta
        September 19, 2020, 6:54 pm | # | Reply

        My favorite Cat scene is him walking around the spaceship, touching everything and saying โ€œMine,โ€ because that is the cattest thing ever.

  13. jdreyfuss
    September 18, 2020, 9:26 am | # | Reply

    This is definitely a conversation I’ve had with my cat before.

  14. John
    September 18, 2020, 9:31 am | # | Reply

    “This is mine… and this is mine…”

  15. Jadriam
    September 18, 2020, 9:47 am | # | Reply

    Quick, open a can of fancy cat food! it’s the safest way to defuse an cat in ‘scary puffed’ mode.

    • D. Walker
      September 18, 2020, 12:29 pm | # | Reply

      In a pinch, a can of pineapple will work, although they’ll be disappointed once you set it down for them to sniff. Still, better a sulky cat than an angry one.

  16. BMunro
    September 18, 2020, 6:17 pm | # | Reply

    And I thought he meant Artie in the second panel. ๐Ÿ™‚

    I don’t think Jeff and Shaneon are trying to give us an imaginative look at non-human minds: they have sentient animals acting in often absurd instinct-driven ways because it’s _funny_. (See, Gary Larson).

    • awgiedawgie
      September 18, 2020, 6:39 pm | # | Reply

      Great… now I have a craving for whipped cream.

    • Ogden Wernstrom
      September 18, 2020, 10:04 pm | # | Reply

      Sounds right to me. The rationalists are fascinated by truly alien intelligences like the paperclip optimizer and evolution, though of course many others (Solaris, anyone?) tried for unusually alien aliens. Progressives and allegorists usually go in the opposite direction, with the aliens being something like stand-ins for human cultures.

      I don’t even think it’s wrong to treat smart animals how Shaenon and Jeff do. Until like 30 years ago, The Experts kept warning against anthropomorphizing, which sounds fine in the abstract but mainly it involved a lot of authoritatively claiming, “Animals don’t do ” and turning out to be wrong. They should have done more anthropomorphizing. Even dumb vertebrates don’t seem that alien.

      • Ogden Wernstrom
        September 18, 2020, 10:12 pm | # | Reply

        All right, I realize I’m overgeneralizing here. Other experts anthropomorphized like crazy.

      • Daphne Eftychia Arthur
        September 19, 2020, 11:02 am | # | Reply

        (Let’s see if this posts in the right spot…)

        1: Solaris — oof. I asked a Polish Lem fan whether Solaris made any more sense in the original language and she said no, that one is just confusing. (I like most of Lem’s other work).

        2: Anthropomophization — non-human vertebrates might not think like humans or have human motives, but yeah, there are definitely recognizable moods, desires, thought processes. For domesticated species with a big incentive to communicate with us, even more so. My mother used to say, of her dog, “i think Pepper is trying to talk to us — can you believe it?” and my reaction was, “Of course she’s trying to talk to us; dogs and cats _do_ that, and some are better at it than others.

        2.5: Tagentially but because the memory was triggered — Many years ago, a bunch of friends had pins made that said, “Anthropomorphizers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but Mr. Dignity!”

        3: It has been said that the most alien intelligence on Earth (from a human standpoint) is probably the octopus. And even there, there are behaviours we can recognize.

        4: If mentioning a friend’s book isn’t crossing a line (no hard feelings if it’s deemed to do so and this comment gets deleted), Karen Osborne’s _Architects_of_Memory_ has alien aliens, not so alien as to make their thinking unintelligible to humans, but different enough to lead to fatal mis-assumptions, for a complete human misunderstanding of what the Vai actually _are_, and for communication to only be possible under certain unusual circumstances. Less alien than C.J. Cherryh’s t’ca or knnn, but more alien than 99% of SF aliens. (And note that even Cherryh’s methane-breathers manage to cooperate somehow with oxygen-breathers like the Hani for trade and joint operation of space stations, so maybe “more alien/less alien” isn’t a linear comparison because that suggests that in some ways they must be less alien than the Vai in _Architects_.

        • Manifesta
          September 19, 2020, 6:58 pm | # | Reply

          Re 3. Octopodes exhibit very human behavior in their many successful attempts to get the hell out of Dodge.

          • Daphne Eftychia Arthur
            September 20, 2020, 5:40 am | #

            Aye! And also in their holding grudges, recognizing individual humans, and squirting water at scientists they don’t like. Either some things are really universal, or “on Earth” puts a huge constraint on “most alien”. ๐Ÿ™‚ Assuming the statement that octopodes are the most alien intelligences is correct, anyhow.

            (The story of finding evidence an octopus had been practicing its aim at night to learn how to compensate for the optical shift at the water/air boundary, before squirting its most-hated human scientist when he arrived in the morning, was the one that drove home to me how much forethought and planning octopodes are capable of. And that’s oh so recognizable behaviour, to us humans.)

  17. Knuckles
    February 15, 2022, 1:40 pm | # | Reply

    Oh no Cinnamon, you’re huge!

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