Post-Chapter One Liquid Girl III

So how far back does the whole liquid girl/Apsinthion Protocol thing go? One of the odd but surpassingly charming aspects of being a pervert infovore is that you can keep finding astonishing antecedents for your own thing. And wouldn’t you know it but one popped up for me just as I was putting together this little post sequence.

It came from reading Deborah Lutz‘s new Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism, in a passage about John Everett Millais‘s (1829-1896) painting Ophelia (1852)

Ophelia’s body dissolves into the glittering water that surrounds her. Woman becomes nature in an epiphanic transformation…With her hands and wrists held above the water in a kind of passive supplication, her parted lips and tilted head show a willingness to be ravished. Death appears as the ultimate ecstasy, its climax reaching a similar intensity as the sexual orgasm.

You’re not kidding, Professor Lutz — take a look at the painting.

You can click on the image for larger or, if you want lots of detail and have lots of bandwidth, you can find a giant (7087×4280 pixels) version of it here, courtesy of the Google Art Project.

Not only is there dissolution and orgasm going on here, but there’s an awful lot of green…which seems appropriate, somehow.

Something that strikes me as curious, by the by. The pre-Raphaelites (an artistic brotherhood of whom Millais was one of the founders) would seem to be unlikely candidates for generating mad-science art, given their thematic focus on an imagined pre-industrial (and therefore low-tech) past. But they seem to show up again and again and again here at EroticMadScience.com. Must be all that eroticism. Even before I had the benefit of Professor Lutz’s guidance, I already knew those Victorians were all pervy.

The model in the painting, by the way, was Elizabeth Siddal, who would eventually meet a fate worthy of a second-tier character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But I’ll just suggest you get a copy of Pleasure Bound to find that one out…

Post-Chapter One Liquid Girl II

Some more variants on a popular theme, probably an example of someone making ver own. I wish I had exact provenance; although I can’t find it, I suspect that it’s the creator behind this site.

I am beguiled at her bemusement. And then there’s this:

I’ts so sweet that she doesn’t seem to feel she’s in a predicament at all, and flirts with the viewer instead.

Post-Chapter One Liquid Girl I

Even if a lot of posts over the next several months will be taken up with posting out the first volume of Tales of Gnosis College, I have by no means given up on my fetish fuel mining mission, as three little posts prior to the beginning of Chapter Two shall now show.

Astute and alert reader Hug in a recent comment brought my attention to an episode of the 1987 anime Ladius, with an indication that liquid girl-making was to be found therein. Ve told true.

A plot summary, in so far as my not-so-great-at-anime mind is able. Young hero guy Riot, accompanied by two very hot but not-really-human girl sidekicks is in pursuit of some sort of mystical energy source, opposed by a Big Bad and his army of unattractive and none-too-capable minions. Riot wants the energy source to revive his not-quite-alive sister, while the Big Bad wants it to rule the world. Conflict! Along the way Riot picks up an even hotter human girl who tags along providing swimsuited fanservice. Since human girl also happens to be the last descendant of a priestly line somehow related to the energy source the possessor of some important artifact also pertaining thereto, she is natural kidnap fodder for the Big Bad. (Showing that whatever the creators of this anime otherwise did or did not know, they at least understood how to steal plot elements from the very best.) More conflict! Angry posturing! Collapsing ruins! Narrow escapes! At this point you or I, dear reader, might have just submitted the whole matter to arbitration and hoped for the best, but principle characters in anime series do not think like you or I so instead what we get is a hero-versus-villain showdown involving humongous mecha.

Things don’t go so great for Riot humongous mecha-wise, but just when it looks like he’s in for a by-proxy giant metal asskicking he calls on the powers of the two hot but not-really-human girls in a scene which made your host Dr. Faustus at first sit up and take notice, then reach for his trusty demuxer to extract screenshots to remember the experience by.

The two girls enter Riot’s humongous mecha via some curious liquid entry ports:

They are suspended in liquid — and what’s happening?

There is a cloud of bubbles:

Into which each girl disappears

Leading to easily pipeable liquid girl!

Well that is impressive. The purpose of the exercise is to allow the not-human twins now in liquid form to improve control of Riot’s humongous mecha. Result: victory for the good guys! Not that I was really thinking too much about who won at this point.

I can’t guarantee that the video will always be there, but with a little persistence and patience you can download it here. The key scene occurs at about the 42-minute mark.

Metrobay III

There are many artists who’ve worked on Dr. Robo and Finister Foul‘s Metrobay universe, and I am sure that all of them hold to the injunction never to forget Metropolis, but there was one who caught my eye in particular: Trishbot, and her Metropolis-inspired illustration Retro Brainwashing.

To my eye a most alluring image, presented here by kind permission of the artist. Click on the image for full size, and you can see the deservedly-laudatory viewer comments at DeviantArt at the work’s page here.

Metrobay II

A favorite thesis of mine is that we kinky people will always be able to find loads and loads of fetish fuel in popular culture, and that since as kids we began getting kinky but didn’t have access to porny stuff (well, usually) most of our early erotic memories are going to be tied to pop-cultural experiences of the “innocent” material we did have access to.

There are two reasons we can always expect this to be true, having to do with the twin facts that we’re all hypersexual primates and many of us are kinky in some way, so therefore

The people who create all this popular culture are going to work their kinks into it, intentionally or not and;
Whether any creator put anything there or not, we will find our kinks in their material anyway. There’s a reason why there’s a Rule 34, after all.

I wrote the first part of my Thaumatophile Manifesto so that my readers could have a sense of my formative pop-cultural experiences, and naturally when I started corresponding with Dr. Robo I just had to ask whether he could point to a similar class of material in the formation of his own thing for mind control and sexy robots.

Boy, could he ever. Here are some things he was able to point out to me.

He began with an episode of Gilligan’s Island, of all things, in which Ginger gets mind controlled by a mad scientist. I can’t embed the video, but you can see it here. (Well, if you were living on a tropical island with Ginger and Mary Ann, would you fix the damn boat?)

Another example, from the TV series of Wonder Woman, in which a toymaker played by Frank Gorshin builds a life-size duplicate of the heroine.

And another example, the 1982 sci-fi film Android, in which a somewhat mad scientist builds two androids, one of whom is a pretty blonde.

Dr. Robo pointed to some influences he has in common with me, such as Robotrix and The Bride of Frankenstein and also Weird Science, although actually had something in mind from the 1990’s television series rather than the 1985 movie which so influenced me. In the version pointed to by Dr. Robo, a mad scientist tries to drain created woman Lisa’s energy to power his own “bride.” Again, I can’t embed, but you can see the episode on Hulu here. And there’s also a scene in Superman III in which a henchwoman gets sucked into a machine and cyborgized.

But the best overlap we had was Metropolis. You know the scene. Everybody knows the scene.

Can’t see it too many times, and that thought will take us to tomorrow’s post…

Update: Some of the video embeds in this post were crushed by WordPress for the first few hours it was up. I hope it’s fixed now.

Metrobay I

I’ve always thought that one of the cardinal virtues of making your own erotica is that you have an extraordinary opportunity to make friends, and I’m pleased to have a bit of confirming evidence for that hypothesis just recently.

For many years there has been someone else making his own erotic mad science under the handle Dr. Robo. His core focus is a little different from mine, centered on the themes of erotic mind control and sexy robots (and human beings who’ve been made into them). Oh, and voluptuous superheroines: let’s not forget that! Together with his artist and creative partner Finister Foul, Dr. Robo has produced and published a hundreds-of-pages long series of 3D comics are set in a fictional setting called Metrobay. They got their start in publication from a gentleman working under the handle Jpeger, the proprietor of MCcomix.com (that is, “Mind Control Comix”) and HIPComix.com (that is heroines in peril comix, not hipster comix), and have since advanced to doing their own distribution. In addition to this principal art, both the series and the setting have benefited from the contributions of a talented group of additional artists attracted to the project over the years, including Trishbot, Uroboros, MCtek, Northern Chill, Akonkid, Dumbtime, and Sir Willoughby.

Yes a little different. There are no super-powered individuals in the Gnosis College fictional setting, and I’ve touched only a little bit on the theme of erotic mind control (remember Dr. Strangeways’s obscene hedonic machine from Invisible Girl, Heroine?). There are a lot of sex machines of various kinds, and there’s an A.S.F.R.-related theme often touched on. And of course, both Dr. Robo and I seem to enjoy working the visual tropes of mad science — of the subject stretched out upon the table, whether volunteer or victim, awaiting some extraordinary offense-unto-God transformation. Certainly all this was enough to answer Dr. Robo’s friendly hail.

It was time well spent, believe me, for it was a chance to discover still more in common, such as

(1) Origin stories. Dr. Robo reports that his thing for erotic mind control began when he was a kid. I experienced the first stirrings of my thing just as early, it seems. These sorts of things go deep for those of us who really have them.

(2) A common trope: the tube girl. I think I might use it more frequently, but Dr. Robo clearly understands its power. Here is an example, from his dieselpunk-era Metrobay story Original Sin.

(3) And another common trope: the scanner! For me it started with Looker, and I first wrote about Iris Brockman getting scanned to set up some fun personal identity porn. Dr. Robo also knows the trope and knows it well. Consider this scene from another of his comics, Adult Toys:

Yes, I can really relate.

(4) A lust for world-building. It seems that neither Dr. Robo nor I just want sexy images that reflect our thing, or even characters or stories that reflect our thing. We want whole worlds, places, fictional universes geared to the logic of what it is that we’re into. And so we set out to create them.

(5) And an understanding of popular culture as a never-ending source of fetish fuel… Well, that’s tomorrow’s post.

But if I’ve intrigued you enough about Dr. Robo’s project (or if you, like he, really like erotic mind control and robots), you can and should show him some appreciation even now. The Metrobay site at DeviantArt can be reached here, and there’s a whole site called the Metrobay Encyclopedia here. But probably best of all would be if you were to buy Dr. Robo’s work, which you can do at his Ebay store here. Happy browsing!

Edith Sterling’s Transformation Begins

KristinF has worked up a doozy of a bespoke art set-piece from a bit of comics script I was once working on, coming up with a gritty, scary, sexy, dieselpunk environment in which something very mad science is taking place.

(Click on the image for full size.
Edith Sterling’s Transformation Begins by KristinF and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)

The script is Teuthology and the basic story is that Edith Sterling an assistant professor of inveterate biology at Gnosis College, summoned by the government to help clean up after a mad-science experiment disrupted by the authorities, has agreed to undergo a version of the experiment in hopes of being able to reverse its effects on the mad scientist’s previous victims. She’s naked because she needs to soak up a lot of special radiation that will effect her transformation from woman to octopus (note the receiving tank of fluid beneath her). And she’s crucified because…well, that’s the way the mad scientist did his other victims, and you don’t want to tamper with mad science procedures more than you have to!

Edith is being watched here by a naval officer and his chief scientist, neither of whom appears to have had the courage to show up naked for the proceedings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Edith in the script takes a pretty dim view of being on display here.

PANEL ONE

View up Edith, ¾ behind, upper half. We can see her head slumped down.

Caption (1): Great Cthulhu, this hurts.

Caption (2): Small wonder crucifixion is associated with matrydom.

PANEL TWO

View of Edith’s bare midsection. Two “ray-gun” like objects are in the frame, pointing at her. (SFX: WHRRR)

Caption (3): It wasn’t even obvious that this part of the ordeal was necessary. It might just have been sadism on Dr. Sin’s part. But I don’t want to deviate unnecessarily from…

PANEL THREE

View of Shackleford and Chen. They are both wearing radiation suits and dark goggles.

Caption (4): Aw, crap.

Shackleford (5): Everything all right, Professor Sterling?

PANEL FOUR

Close-up on Edith’s face. She is showing an expression of grim determination.

Caption (6): He isn’t here out of scientific interest. Or out of compassion for me.

Caption (7): He likes seeing me like this.

Caption (8): Asshole.

We can but sympathize. (It should be noted, though, that Edith is actually looking forward to becoming an octopus, even if no one else in the story knows this.) Though perhaps if Edith had read this rather remarkable blog entry and picked up the right fetish, she might have had a different hedonic take on the mad-science proceedings…

Steampunk Chimera Genesis

Back when I first commissioned the Chimera Genesis image for this site’s first anniversary post, 3D artist Niceman thoughtfully suggested that he could do a steampunk variant on the same theme. I put that in the mental folder of “interesting idea, must think more about it.” Chimera Genesis proceeded to storm to triumph, being featured not just here but also in a post by überblogger Violet Blue. Around that time, Niceman’s proposal swiftly departed the limboland of “interesting idea” for the blessed region of “I’d be a fool not to do this.” I told Niceman, in effect “I won’t even ask exactly what you’ve got in mind, I’ll commission the steampunk version.”

And I would have been a fool not to have, to, seeing the stunning image Niceman came up with.

(The in-post version really can’t do it justice, so click on the image for full-size version.)
Steampunk Chimera Genesis by by Niceman, commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The story here is the same, but the historical setting is different. Mad science is being used to turn two women into one with the memories and skills of both. There’s a lot to love about this image: the fact that a lady mad scientist seems to running the show here, and the shocked “I didn’t sign up for this” look on the faces of one of the experiment’s subjects. Even the nineteenth-century underwear has a nice fetishy appeal, somehow.

You know, given how much fun steampunk and dieselpunk and all that are, I really ought to do more with the history of Gnosis College. I mean, as you can see from the college seal (recently worked up for me by Lon Ryden, thanks Lon!) the college was supposedly founded in 1844 (the year that Nietzsche was born and Marx wrote his Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts), and those Victorians could get pretty darn kinky when you looked closely at them.

Must write more…ever more…

The Apsinthion Protocol: Chapter One, Nanetta Pinup

Lon had the good idea of doing a Nanetta Rector pinup, and I added some copy. I think it makes a nice “virtual back cover” for Chapter One.

(Click on the image for larger size.
Apsinthion Protocol Chapter One, Cover written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and drawn by Lon Ryden is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)

And that marks the virtual back page of the Tales of Gnosis College, Volume I, Number 1. We have reached a milestone in this history of this site. The entire chapter is now available on a page of its own, where it reads in a somewhat more logical direction than it would in a series of blog posts.

You can also get Chapter One as a torrent, either as a CBZ (comic book archive) or PDF file. The CBZ is here:

And the PDF is here:

Look for Chapter Two to be coming in April, where Moira Weir starts checking out the strange Professor Corwin. The mad science will be kicking into high gear, and believe me, Lon has already drawn some amazing stuff to represent this. So stay tuned!

Update 20110402 at 1300 GMT: Since Issue #2 is now posting out here at EroticMadScience, Issue #1 is now on its own sub-page here.

The Apsinthion Protocol: Chapter One, Page Twenty-One

Nanetta might feel blissful upon finally getting home, but her roommate Moira now seems worried about what might be going on.

(Click on the image for larger size.
Apsinthion Protocol Chapter One, Page Twenty-One written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and drawn by Lon Ryden is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)

And thus ends Chapter One!