What follows is not a post I particularly want to write, but one that I think is necessary.

Publication here at Erotic Mad Science is going to slow down considerably over the next several months. In order to explain why, perhaps a little bit of background in the economics of the site is in order. I am on my own here. Every comics page that you see on this site was work from an artist I commissioned and paid out of my own pocket. What’s in my pocket is money I earned from my regular career, I have never relied either on advertising or sales of merchandise or on any of the voluntary finance arrangements (e.g. Patreon) that others have relied on. I do not in the slightest disdain anyone who does any of those things — we all have to make a living somehow, but I have made the choice to use my own resources and I happy with that. I have had the resources, and I have used them. I think that frees up more resources for other creators who have not been as lucky in life as I have been and I’m fine with that.

I am now, however, engaged in a project to produce a full-length graphic novel — probably around 400 pp — and the commission fees for its production bring me up against the limits of my resources. The novel matters a lot to me and I have to make a choice, and so that’s where the resources have been going.

I would also note that there is an element of time here that is important. Every bit of work on this site that is done is done by me. Writing scripts — even of the most lightest variety — is an immense sink of time, as anyone with writing experience can tell you. Keeping the site here running also requires considerable maintenance time as well. Time isn’t all that cheap in my life: I work a full-time professional job and have a lot of family obligations as well.

I also have a podcast I would like to resume if I can. We shall see.

On top of all that I’ve had some health issues which began getting worse in early 2022, and I should really spend some effort attending to those.

I don’t want anyone to feel abandoned; this site will continue to be here and there will be at least some new material appearing. I have some art not yet published here and there might be an additional “Agents” series if the artist who draws it can fit it into his budget. I am achingly close to the psychologically-significant total of 10,000 posts and would like to cross it. Perhaps I shall. And I also hope to devote some time in the near future to a significant site overhaul make all the material here more readily accessible to both new and old readers.

It has been an enjoyable run here. I am grateful to all of you who have devoted your own time to reading and commenting here. And who knows? Perhaps in the future fortune will smile and I will be able to resume…something wicked.

The Movie

I was feeling unusually patriotic last night for some reason, and so I decided to watch something a little different from the usual collection of body horror, film noir, and dark comedy that make up most of my evening cinematic diversions.

So Proudly We Hail came out 1943, about eighteen months after the events it supposedly depicts. Its female leads Claudette Colbert (1903-1996), Paulette Goddard (1910-1990), and Veronica Lake (1922-1973) were among the Hollywood’s brightest stars in 1943. The movie was produced by Paramount Pictures, one of the bigs and it shows in high production values with large sets and a huge cast. And just like the box says, the movie did get four Academy Award nominations: Best Supporting Actress (for Goddard), Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, and Best Original Screenplay.

So this movie was big deal in 1943. And it deserves to be: it was exceptional American war propaganda, quite skillfully representing its American protagonists as humane, decent, and courageous while representing their Japanese antagonists (never really seen except in shadows or as taunting radio voices) as thoroughly vile, the sort of people that would bomb and strafe a clearly-marked hospital (which they actually do in the course of the movie). It’s a tear-jerker but with bit of Hollywood uplift in the ending.

As such, it might be a bit surprising that the movie isn’t better known than it is, but I think I might know why. You see, there’s this scene right at the halfway point of the movie.

The scene

It is 1942. The American Army and its Filipino allies are getting their collective asses kicked by the Japanese down the Bataan peninsula. A group of nurses under the command of Lt. Janet ‘Davy’ Davidson are under orders to evacuate with the rest of their field hospital, together with a group of sick and wounded Filipino children under their care. Unluckily for them their group is one of the last out. A squad of Japanese soldiers infiltrates the hospital grounds and kills the two soldiers assigned to drive their truck out. The nurses and children huddle in a shack in the dark, clearly terrified. One recalls (rather loudly) what Japanese soldiers did to women in Nanjing in 1937. Colbert throws one of the dead soldiers’ grenades away from the shack as a distraction and makes for the truck, only to discover that she doesn’t have the ignition keys.

At this point Lt. Olivia D’Arcy (Lake) takes a grenade of her own. There is a brief conversation in which Lake tells Colbert “It’s one of us or all of us.”

And in spite of Colbert’s horrified protests that Lake shouldn’t do what it is obvious that she is going to do, Lake walks out, pulls the pin out of the grenade and tucks it into her brassiere.

Lake walks out with her hands raised in apparent surrender.

She is promptly surrounded by Japanese infantrymen and…

KABOOM!

The consequence of the scene

I don’t know how the scene was received in September 1943 when So Proudly We Hail was released, but it’s pretty clear that we are meant to see Lake as a heroine here. By about a year later, though, this coding would have to be forgotten when the Japanese began kamikaze attacks on Allied warships. Paul Fussell (1924-2012), one America’s most perceptive writers on war, noted something similar happening to an earlier war myth:

Widely believed in the dark days of 1942, when America required relief after all the narratives about surrenders and sinkings and retreats, was the story of Air Corps Captain Colin P. Kelly. He is said to have immolated himself in the early days of the war by dropping a bomb, with the customary early-in-the-war precision, down the main stack of the Japanese battleship Haruna, and then, after ordering his crew to bail out, crashing his bomber into the foundering warship. (By the time of the kamikazes, this myth was forgotten, lest the kamikaze pilots be considered heroes rather than madmen.) Actually what Kelly damaged was not a battleship but a barely armed troop transport which did not sink, and he was killed not then but later, when a Japanese fighter jumped his plane. There is evidence he tried to bail out before anyone else but was carried down with the plane when his parachute caught on the escape door. (note omitted)¹

And the need to stigmatize the vile enemy may help explain why this movie seems to have largely sunk out of sight,², which I think is too bad, as not only does it deprive people of a chance to see how even history’s “good guys” use propaganda, but also a precedent for my own interest in self-sacrificing heroines. For those of you who don’t like the narrative arc that something like Auto-Icon is tending, what’s wrong with you? Self-sacrifice is a tradition with the imprimatur of patriotism! Are you anti-American, or something?

Notes

¹Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Kindle electronic edition, Loc. 480. Back to main text.

²Not entirely, of course. The late Florence King makes a reference to this very scene in her memoir and in particular in her discussion of being a most unsociable elementary school student. (In this context a “watery mole” is another elementary school student and a “huggybear” is a schoolteacher or other adult authority figure who insists on King’s being more sociable than her temperament can tolerate.

See Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). p 73. Back to main text

I take the usual pleasure in announcing that we now have a translation of “Bubbles” in Punjabi (ਪੰਜਾਬੀ):

And also in Turkish (Türkçe):

We’re getting within sprinting distance of having this be a complete translation project, and that makes me happy.

Perhaps I should start making foreign-language editions of Bait next. Take that ol’ perversion global!

I sometimes forget to post these things, but within the last month we’ve managed to put together translations of Bubbles into Vietnamese:

And also Farsi, which is to say the principal language of Iran and Tajikistan, and also western Afghanistan:

Who some would see as enemies, I would rather make friends. That’s the power of porn, amigos!

Oh, and by the way also Bengali:

“And that is how I spent my summer vacation.”

It is a privilege and a pleasure that I am able to announce that a version of “Bubbles” is now available in Bahasa Indonesia.

Click on the image or this link for the comic as well as download links for CBZ and PDF versions.

If the figures in Wikipedia are right, I’ve just added to my potential audience 200 million native and L2 speakers. Onward, mad science!