Monthly Archives: October 2015

Tumblr favorite #1801: I’ll zap them with my ray!

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Original post here. This image was researched by Bacchus at ErosBlog as part of the “Γ commission.” The research was originally published at Hedonix as “Γ 031 – The Battle For Earth. Here is what Bacchus found.

The “Don Lawrence” signature on this image refers to the British comic book artist perhaps most famous for his Storm series of comic books (22 volumes over 25 years). According to the artist’s official website (where a fairly detailed biography is also available), this image is from the fifth volume of Storm, entitled The Battle For Earth, written by Dick Matena and appearing in the Dutch serial weekly Eppo ##23-43 in 1979.

There is an authorized 2D-to-3D conversion of this image available on Flickr. A gallery of large-format artworks from Storm (including this one) may be found here.

Tumblr favorite #1800: Autofuck!

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Original post here. This image was researched by Bacchus at ErosBlog as part of the “Γ commission.” The research was originally published at Hedonix as “Γ 030 – Autofuck!. Here is what Bacchus found.

This image was posted to the 0/0 Tumblr in April 2014, and all subsequent Tumblr appearances source back to it. There are no tags or attribution. (This is surprising because virtually all other 0/0 posts are attributed.) The only discoverable earlier internet appearance is from 2013, on this Russian-language image-sharing site (Imgur-clone) where Mila from Krasnodar tagged it Эротика 70х, which is Russian for “1970s Erotica”.

Looking at the image, I find myself in broad agreement with Mila in Krasnodar, although I think the date is likelier to be the early 1980s. The use of the Mylar space blanket as a background to indicate “science fiction scene” in particular strikes me as very early 1980s in style, and the overall campy appearance leads me to suspect a European publisher, although it’s also visually reminiscent of Penthouse Publications in the era of Omni magazine. The fact that the image itself is perfectly G-Rated (despite the Autofuck! captioning) makes me question my first notion that this might have been a porn magazine cover; it seems more likely to be the first image in a porn photoset, or perhaps an illustration from a non-porn magazine with stricter standards for its visual imagery than for its text. It could even be a modern composition, although I doubt it; the cheap and garish costuming virtually screams of its dating to an era before Photoshop.

Keyword searches for “Autofuck!” were not illuminating. The phrase has been used in a variety of contexts and especially by a number of musical groups, but nothing associated with imagery of this sort was discovered.

Tumblr favorite #1799: Can you solve the mystery of the sexy hex dump?

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Original post here. This image was researched by Bacchus at ErosBlog as part of the “Γ commission.” The research was originally published at Hedonix as “Γ 029 – Sexy Hex Dump.” I’m sure Bacchus did his best.

This simple animated .gif shows just a few frames from a movie or video in which we can see an oldfashioned hexadecimal dump scrolling by on the left side of a monochrome monitor as a simple graphic of a naked woman builds from top to bottom on the right side of the screen. The monitor is in a dark room on a metal rack while a large fan spins nearby.

All appearances of the .gif on the internet that I was able to locate were on Tumblr, and they all source to this post on the 2Cool 4Internet Tumblr. Sadly there are no tags or other attributions offered, and I was unable to search out the source by any other means. I imagine it to be a few frames from a movie — it has that “gee whiz looks good on the screen but why would anybody actually build an interface that actually did that” appearance so common when Hollywood shows computing on-screen — but that’s really just a wild guess.

Tumblr favorite #1798: Laser fucked

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Original post here. This image was researched by Bacchus at ErosBlog as part of the “Γ commission.” The research was originally published at Hedonix as “Γ 028 – Laser Fucked.” Here is what Bacchus found, somewhat to his (mock?) disappointment.

This image originates at the LiarTownUSA Tumblr, where it is tagged “#magazine #vintage #porn #xxx”. I’ll confess I was taken in by it; the groovy 1970s imagery depicted is not completely uncommon in porn magazines of that era. However, a few increasingly-persistent searches failed to turn up any evidence that such a porn magazine ever existed. This is odd, because the fonts used on the apparent magazine cover are typical of those used by a large publisher of porn magazines, and their magazines virtually all survive today in online scans at various levels of detail and completeness. So a lack of search results seemed implausible.

A bit of sleuthing at LiarTownUSA (a name which perhaps should have been taken more literally than I first did) turns up a considerable volume of artwork using a formula that combines vintage iconography with modern photoshopped absurdist humor. Thus we have the impossible titles What? How? Wonder Book of 3/4″x1/8″ Threaded Hex Bushings, Harry Potter and the ’66 Chevrolet Owners Guide, and another psuedo-porn title, Badly Cropped Teens #4.

Thus I am reluctantly forced to conclude that “Laser Fuck” never existed as a porn magazine. Nailing shut the coffin of hope, we have Boing Boing explaining the joke:

If you like surreal Photoshop jokes, LiarTownUSA is the tumblog for you. Every single thing on Sean Tejaratchi’s blog is magnificent ‘shoop genius.

Le sigh…

Tumblr favorite #1797: Shane Glines’s cute spacegirl

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Original post here. This image was researched by Bacchus at ErosBlog as part of the “Γ commission.” The research was originally published at Hedonix as “Γ 027 Cute Space-Girl.” Here is what Bacchus found.

Appearances of this image on Tumblr all trace back to this post on Cartoon Retro. Although that Tumblr offers little in the way of self-explanation, it turns out to be the Tumblr of cartoonist and designer Shane Glines, who also uses cartoonretro as his DeviantArt ID where he claims the Cartoon Retro Tumblr as his own in the bio there. A perusal of his DeviantArt gallery (where this image does not appear) does offer exemplars (such as this one) of his artistic signature, which is a sort of stylized S followed by an indistinct dot or glyph and which can be seen in the subject artwork. Thus, even though Glines appears to post a variety of images to his Tumblr from various sources, it seems confirmed that the subject cartoon is one of his.

Tumblr favorite #1796: Flaming tauntresses

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Original post here. This image was researched by Bacchus at ErosBlog as part of the “Γ commission.” The research was originally published at Hedonix as “Γ 026 – Demon Ladies Of Derision.” Here is what Bacchus found.

The “EMSH-” signature on this work is the signature of legendary science fiction cover artist Ed Emshwiller. This artwork by Emshwiller appeared on the cover of the Summer 1954 Startling Stories. The Encyclopedia of Science fiction has a detailed biography with a lot more information about this artist.

Tumblr favorite #1795: Junior-grade mad science

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Original post here. This image was researched by Bacchus at ErosBlog as part of the “Γ commission.” The research was originally published at Hedonix as “Γ 025 – The Frog Elixir.” Here is what Bacchus found.

This artwork appears on the cover of the book Confessions of a Teenage Frog (Samantha Slade, Book 2) (1987). Google Books identifies the cover artist as Jodi A. Lee, and provides this summary of the book:

Samantha is running for class president against the prettiest girl in school when she makes the mistake of drinking a “greatness potion” cooked up for her by Drake, one of the two “monsters” she babysits. But instead of turning her great, the potion turns her into a talking frog!

Although this artwork does not appear there, the artist Jodi A. Lee has a web page, on one page of which she does disclose that frogs are among her “passions other than art.”