Bait now has a really permanent home

I am pleased to announce that my (very) graphic novella Bait has a permanent Internet Archive home:

Here is the link to the archive page, where you can download the whole graphic novel and all of its pendant art in either CBZ (a comic book archive format similar to ZIP) or as a single big PDF document. You can also read the comic in a nifty screen reader the archive provides (also embedded in small size above). The archive has also auto-converted my uploads into a variety of other formats. The completeness or reliability of these versions is a bit uncertain, but I would welcome reports from anyone who wants to look at them.

At 113 pages and with no fewer than five contributing artists, the assembly and uploading of this version of the comic was an unusual challenge, and it pleases me no end that this particular phase of the Bait project is now complete!

Faustus Crow illustration: The Daughters of Leos

The self-sacrifice of three noble young women saves Athens from plague and famine.

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This is Faustus Crow’s vision of the sacrifice of the daughters of Leos, a piece of Greek mythology they don’t normally teach you about in school, but one cited by the minister in Bait to illustrate the heroism of the three sacrificed women in that story: see the re-numbered Page 83 of Bait. Erosarts’s re-imagining of that scene is straightforward. Here Faustus Crow’s is figurative (consider, for example, the allegorical figures of plague and famine the background from which Athens is to be delivered by the daughters’ sacrifice). You can spend a lot of time hunting for other occult detail here, and I encourage you to do so.

If you’re interested in Faustus Crow’s work you can find a blog by him here (“Faustus Crow: Shaman Chaos Magick”) and a book website here (“Goetia Girls”). If you want a list of his books you can buy there is one at Goodreads or you can just search for his name at Amazon. You can also, as I do, support his extraordinary art on Patreon.

Lucy Fidelis illustration: ama Chiba Moe

Making an octopus friend!

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Please keep in mind that any moral rights the artist has remain intact under this license.

The fourth and to my mind most fetching of Lucy Fidelis’s pendant illustration to Bait. Chiba Moe, working as an ama, encounters and makes friends with an octopus. As with the others, this illustration is available in high-resolution.

Lucy Fidelis Bait illustration: Studious Daphne Bosselseg

Burning the midnight oil in the library

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Please keep in mind that any moral rights the artist has remain intact under this license.

The second of Lucy Fidelis’s pendant illustrations for Bait, this is Daphne Bosselseg hard at work on her doctoral dissertation in a very famous venue: the Salone di lettura in the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence. The image is available in full resolution.

Lucy Fidelis Bait illustration: sleeping Eliza Fanshaw

I don't know where she got that little smudge on her nose.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Please keep in mind that any moral rights the artist has remain intact under this license.

This illustration is by our longtime friend Lucy Fidelis. In it, Eliza Fanshaw from Bait sleeps on tangled sheets, the morning light falling across her body, as a kitty dozes beside her. You can download the high-resolution version of the illustration with a right-click and save.

Some announcements

Erosarts has been working at a heroic pace to make sure that we have almost a page a day of new material in the Tales of Gnosis College and associated comics, so we’re going to be doing other things for about a week here before resuming The Adventures of Ashley Madder. We shall begin with today’s announcement that Bait has been updated.

It was doubtless a strange service.

I have written an Erosarts has illustrated six new pages, represented in the long panel above. I you like to read them, they are the pages on the Bait archival page beginning at the newly-renumbered Page 79. In addition, we have fixed a number of infelicities in the dialog and narration that attended the first publication, one drawing error, and re-lettered all Japanese-language dialog in the story with a font which we you you will find more readable, or at least more aesthetically appealing.

To follow of the next few days: some fun new pieces of Bait bespoke art. Tales should then resume after that.

Occult ingestion

A tender morsel is ingested by the tentacle monster

We present another pendant illustration to Bait, this our second illustration by Faustus Crow. There’s a great depth of occult symbolism in this illustration, but rather than pedantically spell it out, I invite you to gaze on it for a while and interpret.

If you’re interested in Faustus Crow’s work you can find a blog by him here (“Faustus Crow: Shaman Chaos Magick”) and a book website here (“Goetia Girls”). If you want a list of his books you can buy there is one at Goodreads or you can just search for his name at Amazon. You can also, as I do, support his extraordinary art on Patreon.

Creative Commons License
The illustration above is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Please keep in mind that any moral rights the artist has remain intact under this license.

Navy nurse seduced

Lured by the tentacles.

Today we introduce a new artist at Erotic Mad Science, Suzarte, whom I have commissioned to do two illustrations imagining the fate of the Navy nurses from Bait who had fatal wartime encounters with the tentacle beast. This illustration is “Navy Nurse Seduction.”

Suzarte has an online presence at Portfoliobox and you can (as I do) also support him on Patreon.

Creative Commons License
The illustration above is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Please keep in mind that any moral rights the artist has remain intact under this license.