This image created by British artist James Bingham (1925 -2009) invites us to ask the question “ordinary medical procedure” or “mad science in action?”
You can guess which has my vote. Found here.
Dec 092010
Found another example of the elusive tube guy, so much more rarely seen than his distaff counterpart. Maybe also an example of the slightly less elusive shrinking guy. In any event, the art sure looks mad sciencey.
Found at Golden Age Comic Book Stories, a very cool blog that is Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
I guess while the subject is fresh on the site I should point out that I also came across this pulp cover in the same Otago collection on which I posted yesterday.
I can’t comment about what lies beneath this cover, but I must say the art has a decidedly unpalatable “me love you long time” flavor. Which means, of course, that I now swear on the sacred stones of R’lyeh that I did not see or have this cover in mind before creating the character of Michiko Maeda.
Dec 072010
A sharp-eyed commenter recently brought my attention to another tube girl.
Standing alone, this illustration would have merit in a exhibition of tube girls, because demonstrates with unusual clarity a classic property of the tube girl illustration. Namely, the way that it was used to get as much nudity as possible on the cover of something without actually showing something that would attract the attention of the constabulary. We are given to understand that the woman in the tube is naked, but the tube has opaque structural elements which just so happen to be in the line of sight between the viewer and the woman’s naughtier bits. The viewer’s imagination is allowed to gratifyingly fill in the rest.
But what’s more interesting about this image is that it’s actually from a rather interesting collection of Australian pulp fiction covers at the University of Otago in New Zealand, one which I believe a post of Bacchus’s at ErosBlog quoted recently as well. It’s a small world after all.
Indeed, smaller than one might think. Is it a coincidence that Otago’s philosophy department is home to a metaethics guy whom I have reason to like? (Well, yeah, it probably is but I can’t help but notice stuff like that.)
Nov 022010
An astute reader brought this paperback cover (and, of course, the novel underneath it) to my attention:
I haven’t been able to find the time to read the whole thing, but the first paragraph seems very promising indeed.
AT THE ORGASM RESEARCH FOUNDATION Dr. Roger Prong, who was known by some foundation employees as “a bloody Peeping Tom”and a “horny old voyeur” was in fact very scientific, or so he always insisted as he watched the girls having orgasms.
Was there ever an opening paragraph that was more erotic mad science than that?
And I’m pretty sure that it is that same Robert Anton Wilson who achieved such great and deserved fame as the co-author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. I mean, how many of them can there be, really?
Oct 222010
Here’s another Elvifrance cover, from it’s Série Blanche, No. 36, which is intriguing for the thaumatophile, because one has to ask, what on earth is going on here?
Are we looking at
- A conjoinment fantasy? That would seem to be one obvious reading of une fusion organique.
- A liquid girl story? Wiktionnaire gives the first definition fusion as “liquéfaction d’un corps par l’action de la chaleur” and there certainly does seem to be a bit of melting going on at the base of the illustration.
- Something A.S.F.R.-related even? Women are not normally silver or gold like that.
As for the grotesque figure looming over them, I haven’t a clue.
It gets stranger from there, because there is some evidence that whatever was beneath the cover you see above was considered too naughty even to be published in France. The index page for the cover art in the series tells us “Les n°35 et 36 sont des microtirages destinés à la commission de censure, donc jamais commercialisés.”
Which fact, of course, only makes this thaumatophile want it more.
A cover from a bande dessinée adulte series called Luciféra, about which I know very little, except that it appears to have run from 1972 to 1980 and was published by a company called Elvifrance to which French-language Wikipedia attributes “une réputation sulfureuse.” I wonder why.
I run the illustration here not so much because it’s Erotic Mad Science per se, but because it’s a rather fine example that the initiation ritual that Cleo Mount went through in Study Abroad drew on something that’s captured many other imaginations.
Oct 142010
Something Erotic Mad Science seems to be going on in this old Bantam paperback cover, although I confess I’m hard-pressed to say exactly what.
Found in this cover gallery.
Aug 182010
The title at least would seem to have been a custom job for Erotic Mad Science.
I couldn’t find much about this other than the image, which came from this post at the aptly-named (and very fun) blog “Judge a Book by its Cover.” The book itself appears to be from 1966.
Another manifestation of the tube girl meme!
Cover of the Summer 1948 issue of Planet Stories. I don’t know the artist, unfortunately. I found this version of it here, and there is a gallery of all covers here.
It is comforting to know that even 1,000,000 years ago, 1940s -style hairdos were in fashion, at least for Nuala of the NekkidNekalad.
