Skin Horse

"Steel assembly line define the others' fate

Blind the believers, a blend of church and state

Who calls upon you, claim they shall be saved

We will all love you, conform, submit, behave"

 

I.Scintilla - Machine Vision

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I've kept telling myself I'd do a full archive binge of Skin Horse before writing up a reaction, but realistically, nothing I've randomly sampled of its last few years is encouraging me to do that, and I doubt its upcoming finale will either. It's yet another case study in our past decade's pop culture insanity. For anyone looking for mad science experiments' comedic superpowered hijinks, it actually started out great and only gradually devolved to shallow running gags, plotless self-reference and pandering to the snowflake market - so you can at least count on some initial entertainment. Here's the beef, if you don't mind some

 

----------------------------SPOILERS--------------------------------

 

At some point during the past year, Garrity, the visual artist, threatened to quit... because of negative comments. Never mind what little I skimmed of the comment section seemed full of shameless simpleminded adulation and even on her worst day she still receives thousandfold more support and appreciation than my admittedly failed creative attempts ever will. I myself noted her previous work, Narbonic, benefited from a better breed of audience than any webcomic short of XKCD can reasonably expect. I don't know much... okay, anything, about her co-author Jesus Christ Wells, but given Skin Horse spun off Narbonic's comedy mad science precept and even borrowed at least one recurring character, it's not too far a stretch to compare them at least partly.

Start with stagnation. Skin Horse started in 2007 to a host of (deserved) accolades. By 2013-ish it had revealed its over-arching plot in the Colodi chapter and others around that time. Note it is now 2022. It's spent almost a decade reiterating the same foregone conclusion (the fuddy-duddies cannot win) then breaking off to introduce new stories which are never resolved before it has to remind fans of the overarching plot with its foregone con- well, you get the point. Much of this time has been spent restating each character's central gimmick without any of them actually going anywhere. When the water cooler gets more character development than anyone else, you've got a problem. Just as Garfield hates Mondays and eats lasagna... and will always hate Mondays and eat lasagna, unto infinity, Skin Horse's characters began dropping in, sequentially, to restate their quirk then exit, stage nobody cares. The Russian security guard talked about his muscles, Unity punched/ate something inedible, Moustachio spoke in old-timey gallantry, Tip romanced someone to decreasing effect, Artie was attracted to a man, the dudebro unicorn said something to which the woke could take offense, etc.

Which brings us to the pandering, because nowhere have the authors spun their wheels so much as in constantly reaffirming their SJW credentials. Artie, the gerbil who can transform into a human, was permanently recast as a black gay human male, Tip went from a stylish babe-magnet transvestite to still being defined by his romances, but now unsuccessful ones because karma or something. Also homosexual. Once the female zombie and the bitchy bitch hooked up, it was pretty much the last word on either of their stories. The foulmouthed male gamer acquires a female clone of himself whose main purpose seems to be talking down to him, and is redeemed by winning the acceptance of a female. The most benign man in the comic turns out to be the villain while the token villainess heralds salvation as prophetess of Lovetron. Not to mention random new characters like the lesbian zombie couple. The less said about strong woman Hitty, and the unwarranted number of panels she takes up with her single running gag, the better.

 

So I'm not particularly surprised at the authors choosing to wrap up their two thirds filler by volume comic with a grand finale in which all non-human sapients are offered a free ride to planet Lovetron, which is by word of goddess "a harmonious, functioning society" in direct contrast to Earth. No mundanes allowed, and at this point we need to bring up Narbonic again. Superficially, Lovetron recalls Helen and Dave exiling themselves (at least temporarily) on a private tropical-island-cum-mad-scientist-lair. But their reward had been narratively hard-won by virtue of their intellectual (and therefore existential) superiority, by their mad genius. Skin Horse's nonhumans in contrast are simply handed their reward for being <SPECIAL> by the degenerate definition of young adult confidence-building pablum. Most of these beings have in fact been amply demonstrated since 2007 to barely crest the nadir of sapience. Conversely, plenty of humans would place much farther from the human norm by their actual thought, their individual persons, than the mindless masses of Joe Sixpack zombies who merely happen to be missing a pulse.

 

Therein you have the narcissistic insanity of current twenty-somethings to whom Wells and Garrity are presumably marketing. You don't have to prove yourself deserving of a free place on idyllic Lovetron. You don't have to make anything great, to create or design or analyze or advance ideas or write or speak or at the barest think well. No. Rewards are for those declared part of an arbitrary in-group of specialness.

 

Lovetron is only for <our people> of the correct skin color horseness, and damn those other heathens no matter their objective qualities.

Maybe they'll twist the ending. I'd very much like to believe they intend to subvert this expectation, redeem the past decade's stagnation by a more conscious finish, and am posting my thoughts before the comic's official end precisely to give Wells and Garrity a chance to prove me wrong. But I doubt it. At most, I expect Tip might get himself bitten by a vampire/zombie to qualify as nonhuman (or turn into a wolf again) or some other flavor of condescension by rainbow fiat.