Jim was a sullen teenager. Luckily that was a phase because goodness gracious, he was insufferable.
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Perhaps the Finn family curse is some sort of signal of someone having a great destiny. Phineas the Red and Phineas the Green reportedly had Jim’s condition, and they both went on to do something of importance (we just don’t know what yet).
Also feeling the Jim feels here.
Phineas the Red was heavily involved in the Great War, and with the founding of the LA.
We don’t, yet, know what his daughter was remembered for.
https://www.skindeepcomic.com/archive/issue-five-page-23/
and the info on page 117 of the printed version of Exchanges, about the Statue of Phineas the Red, near the Gryphons Elder Hall in the LA
We still don’t know what he did EXACTLY though. Just vague implications from a half-coherent shade.
Whatever he did was certainly significant, which seems quite interesting when you consider that whatever he did of such a massive significance was done without revealing his actions to the outside world. So it cannot be THAT massive of a legacy, can it? Or if his deeds were actually so impressive, how did it stay a secret or become lost to human knowledge? So many questions…
But maybe that is part of the reason why it was such a massive legacy for them. For a hidden people, doing great things that the people that you are hiding from don’t notice would have more significance than if they did it and the humans had noticed it.
Well it’d be much harder, that’s for sure.
I do hope those are magic candles.. cause that is one hell of a mess you would have to constantly clean up every day.
Also wonder if Jim’s hair could get that poofy, like that last statue, if he got a perm.
I know, right? Eventually, I’m going to need to see a picture of Phineas the Red in all his poofy majesty (assuming that’s who those statues are of)
We get a glimpse of just how bulky Jim’s mane is when he’s in full form, in Orientations and in Nixie Spit.
That said, your comments do give me a silly idea for a sketch request to ask of Kory.
Jim’s hair probably lies flatter than most maned gryphon’s because of the length. Long hair weighs itself down.
“Nobody can really remember the last time anyone had it.”
Wait, didn’t Jim JUST name two ancestors who had it? Phineas the Red and Phineas the Green. They also had it, so even if no one else had it since, they had been the last ones to have it. Did I miss something?
I think that means Jim’s the first to have the curse in centuries. Perhaps the family line got a little blurry after Phineas I and Phineas II?
Or perhaps the only other people to have it were those two. Which means it’s not so much a family curse as a rare family phenotype.
I wonder? A recessive gene passed down for a while? A magical indicator that he is capable of the same greatness as only those two ancestors? Exposure to the family ghost dog?
I’m so looking forward to this story. :)
You haven’t missed anything.
Orientations, chapter 4, page 32.
https://www.skindeepcomic.com/archive/issue-four-page-32/
The curse doesn’t show up often, that’s all, and it’s been a while since it’s showed up again.
“the last time anyone had it” means the most recent time anyone had it. they know the Phineas’ had it they just don’t know if anyone had it since then.
My guess would be that no one has had it in living memory (i.e. nobody alive today knew the last person who had it)
Ha-heyy, it seems I had the gist of it! Not quite curse-y enough to be a proper, traditional curse, eh?
Also, Phineas the Red appears to have been adorably floofy. :3
I know, I wanna see him, in all of his poofy, floofy majesty!
“Jim was a sullen teenager.”
Now I wanna see a picture of Emo Jim. Dressed in dark clothes with the tips of his hair highlighted black, maybe?
We got a mono sketch of it on page 11 of the Patreon Sketchbook number 3, released back on January 10.
I think, if Jim had used hair dye, he would have gone for a solid color rather than streaks or tips. He was sullen because he hated dealing with “the weird looks”. His first though would probably be to hide the green as much as possible.
Come to think of it, I wonder if he tried and the dye just wouldn’t take. The same way the curse maintains the hair a certain length, it might not allow alterations in the color.
His hair was always green, so getting weird looks because of that in human form, or mid form, was unavoidable.
Suddenly growing to 7ft tall, and his hair growing to 3ft long, on his 16th birthday though, that would have immediately amped up the weird looks.
You can see how the curse works in the younger years with Colin. Blue eartips and tail tuft is the only indication of it.
So Jim would have had green eartips and tail tuft, and when Jim got his Medallion, he’d have had the green hair all the time. Just that it would have been normal length, and he’d have been normal size/height.
From the RQs we know that the green only applies to Jim’s hair colour in human form, and not to a beard/moustache if he wanted to grow either. And in full form or mid form, Jim’s eartips are green as is his tail tuft. So I think Jim would have to be in full form and dye his mane, eartips and tail tuft, for a dye job to possibly work on his hair.
I thought you had some cousins that have the curse. I believe it’s the red curse and the white curse. Well, since you are older than them, I guess you went through a long time as the only one in centuries with the curse.
From what I hear, this isn’t just a case of Punnet square stuff and genetics, but rather a deliberate act of choosing on the curses part. “Hm, who should I mess up next?” kind of deal. But why wait centuries? Maybe it slept? And is just now deciding on popping up, and rather quite numerously as well.
Maybe I’m reading far too much into it, but it’s fun to string these thoughts together.
I’m now wondering, based on what you say, if there’s only been two others since Phineas the Red and his daughter, that have had the curse.
First ones we know of chronologically were Phineas the Red and his daughter.
The next ones we know of are Jim and Colin, and we don’t yet know how the curse will play out for Colin.
I am wondering if there weren’t two others in a generation with the curse, sometime in the 1700s, which would be a midpoint between the 1400s of Phineas, and the present day in the strips.
According to a post of the Finn family tree she posted on dA a while back, she put two younger cousins with the curse. That’s what I’m referring to
Got a URL for that?
Unfortunately I do not. Kory put all her comic stuff into storage and such I can’t access them. Man, I really wish I could back up my claims
Yeah, I’ve been kicking myself for not saving that image on my hard drive ever since it was taken down.
There’s a reason why I took down those old pictures! A lot of them don’t have any bearing on the plot anymore. The only canon in Skin Deep is the comic itself and the reader questions. I drew that picture you’re talking about like ten years ago!
Oh hey, the comic is back!
Yaay.
Also that’s a preatty cool curse, you could say he is… Cursed with awesome?
I mean it’s not a really awesome curse, but as far as curses go that’s still on the plus side. Maybe one of his ancestors was trapped on a cliff with a wizard and he had an idea to make a rope out of hair (of course not his hair, don’t be silly).
The green colour is just a side effect cause magic.
It’s a good thing they have those magic self-lighting candles, or else that would be a lot less impressive.
Now that’s a hell of a sepulchre, and a great place for a kid! You could play “round and round the Phineas the Red” all day down there. And I think we all get the impression that everyone was mightily proud of the mighty floofiness of Phineas’s red mane. Might, indeed, this mane have been the last bulwark against human xenophobia and mytholo isolationism?
Rabid Priest: SEE!! SEE HOW THE BEAST IS FALLEN, AND HIS FLOOFY – I mean – HIS FOUL MANE WILL NOT TEMPT THE HANDS OF THE WEAK TO STROKE AND SCRITCH! *clasps hands together with excessive violence* NOW, BEGONE FROM THE SIGHT OF THE LORD, CREATURES WHO ARE OF HIM NOT, AND-
Phineas the Green: Yea, yea… we maun goen.
Maddye Snoddegrasse: Therefore putte a stockynge in it, thou stinkyrobes! *blows raspberry*
Athanasius Hyde: And so thou ne forgetteth us… *cartload of manure falls out of sky onto priest*
>:=)>
Wow, that is one fuzzy Griffin!
Much cooler than the cemeteries I played in as a kid.
Here comes the page,all dressed in… mythical creatures.
Um.
…it will soon enough, I guess.