Thanks, Grindbin Podcast

Since not too long after its inception I’ve been brightening up my Wednesdays with Mike Wood and Chris Mann’s Grindbin Podcast. Every week these two gentlemen pick out some obscure exploitation film from (usually) the 1970s or 1980s and give it a humorous working over, and it’s evident that even when they’re doing so at their most snarky they’re putting a lot of love into the enterprise too. (Seriously: these guys once put a whole month of effort into Linda Blair cinematic rarities.) As readers of this site know, I have a fair amount of love for exploitation cinema as well, so the podcast is a real pleasure for me.

In order to show my appreciation, last month I made a very modest donation to their enterprise, which they generously recognized in this week’s podcast (devoted to the appropriately bizarre 1982 mad science “comedy” Jekyll and Hyde…Together Again), even mentioning this site and the Tales of Gnosis College. Thanks right back at you, guys.

If you happen to have a fondness of exploitation, I urge you dial this podcast up: there is an episode archive here and you can follow the podcast on Twitter @Grindpod. They will be easy to find on your podcast app of choice. Give them a five-star review on Itunes and they’ll consider doing a movie on your request. Faustus sez…check it out.

Second Visiting Faculty Author: Vinnie Tesla

As our second guest author on the Tales of Gnosis College it a privilege and a pleasure to introduce a one-chapter story by Vinnie Tesla.  Vinnie and I go a ways back, at least to 2009 when I wrote a quick review of the audiobook version of his story “The Ontological Engine, or The Modern Leda” for ErosBlog, a steampunk mad-science erotic things-go-rather-awry romp that kept me very entertained back in that cold December.  (And also taught me the correct pronunciation of “geoduck.”)  So I was delighted when Vinnie agreed to accept my commission to create a story for Tales.

As part of its never-ending vigilance against...something or other, the National Security Agency generated this thermal image of Vinnie Tesla.

As part of its never-ending vigilance against…something or other, the National Security Agency generated this thermal image of Vinnie Tesla.

Vinnie is the author of numerous erotic books and stories, many published by Circlet Press.  Two of his most prominent are The Erotofluidic Agewhich includes the story I reviewed. and Ota Discovers Firethe winner of Circlet’s 2012 “Fantastic Erotica” award.

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Vinnie’s stories have also appeared in Fantastic Erotica:  The Best of Circlet Press 2008-2012,  Silent Shadows Come:  Erotic Tales of NinjasUp for Grabs:  Exploring the Worlds of Genderand Like a Long Road Home: Erotic Tales of Perilous Journeys.  He’s provided a fine script “There’s an App for That” for our next month’s enjoyment here at Erotic Mad Science, so please join me in welcoming him here.

Chris and Mike do Invasion of the Bee Girls

People who’ve followed my strange blogging career know that I have a real soft spot for the nutjob 1973 sci-fi flick Invasion of the Bee Girls. Its delirious mad-science transformation sequence was the subject of one of my early guest posts over at ErosBlog and I covered the subject again in my Thaumatophile Manifesto.

Recently I discovered that a pair of film buffs named Mike Wood and Chris Mann have started up a podcast devoted to cinematic exploitation fare, covering some pretty wild stuff, like the hard-to-forget 1973 softcore comedy The Cheerleaders and Russ Meyer’s over-the-top sexploitation opus Supervixens (which I also made the object of some serious ErosBlog love). So naturally, I had to issue to them a Twitter plea:

And that generated a promise:

Today, promise delivered on

Hot damn! The guys snark it up good (Invasion is, fundamentally, a bad movie…) but enjoyed every minute of it. Thanks, guys!

I enjoy this podcast immensely, and think many people who follow this blog will as well. Show these funny, hardworking podcasters some love, guys. Add the Grindbin Podcast to your podcast app of choice, or visit their website, or follow them on Twitter. It will be fun.

We Must Boost the Signal, pendant art by Dark Vanessa

Image

Hope Montclair encounters the tube brains

Description

Longtime Erotic Mad Science contributing artist Dark Vanessa has provided us with an image derived from We Must Boost the Signal, showing Dr. Hope Montclair encountering for the first time the disembodied brain of an abducted woman floating in a tube of sinister goo, complete with a spectral image of a person that was.

License

(Click on the image for larger size. Creative Commons License
Dr. Hope Montclair Encounters Brains in Vats , is based on a comic written by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com. The illustration was executed by Dark Vanessa is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)

Next chapter coming soon…

Due to a minor error in queuing I find myself filling a one-day gap between the end of Chapter 5 and the beginning of Chapter 6 of Gnosis Transformations. But don’t fear! We have a new and special chapter — both a writing and art experiment — coming with the new year, and the issue cover will drop the exact same moment the ball drops in Times Square.

In the meantime I suggest you surf over to one of our sister sites Hedonix, where we’ve been running a reblogging special on imagery, mostly from the Erotic Mad Science Tumblr. There should be something there for every taste. We have girls with rayguns

:

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Politically-incorrect pulp:

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Steampunk ‘n tentacles

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Old-fashioned mad science:

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And even a dose of communist propaganda:

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Faustus says check it out, and I’ll see you with the new issue tomorrow.

A Thanksgiving treat for you

This is the week of the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, and we have a special treat for you to go along with it.

As some of you are aware, my senior colleague-in-blogging Bacchus offers an image attribution service through which, for a very modest fee, he will track down the provenance behind images you find on the Internet. There’s a lot of imagery out there that has sadly lost its provenance — it’s beautiful to look at, but often the images as seen on the web (especially on Tumblr) have no text indicating who created these images or what they are representing. This lack of provenance is a wrong against the images, and Bacchus is a doughty righter of that wrong.

Recently I commissioned Bacchus to research a long string of images that had reblogged on my Erotic Mad Science tumblr without my knowing their respective provenances, and he came back with quite a few fine examples of research. This sequence of over sixty images (designated the gamma series to distinguish it from earlier research commissions I had placed with Bacchus) is being published now now at Hedonix, a sister site to Erotic Mad Science devoted primarily to images of all sorts of things, including all sorts of things mad science.

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The publication run began at noon New York time today, and I expect to have a new post up every two hours until Sunday morning. Head over and check it out — I think you’ll be well pleased by what you see (and also learn a lot about the imagery).

Transporter machine

Rope Guy over at BondageBlog came up with this particular erotic mad science manga gem in a recent post.

clone-tube

Rope Guy speculated — not unreasonably — that what was involved here was a cloning device of some kind:

I’m not sure what is going on here, precisely, but it does not look like she’s planning to let her clone-sister out of the vat any time soon[…]
My own read on this image was that it was inspired by a certain sci-fi horror movie of deservedly high repute. I commented at BondageBlog:

The setup here actually looks very similar to that for The Fly — notice the geometry of the pods, the fact that there’s another pod a few feet away, and the cables on the floor. Could this perhaps be a teletransportation experiment?

Don’t you wish you could read Japanese? I sure do. But even though I can’t, I can still commission knowledgeable human beings to do translations for very reasonable prices. Here are the results (keep in mind that in manga panels are generally read right-to-left):

Right panel:

物質転送の実験体になってもらうわ!

You will be used as a test subject for the transport(machine?)

Left panel:

ああ……僕って不幸…

Aaahh…I am miserable…

Well, that clears that up! (I hope our comely subject survives and does not turn into a fly…)

Drake does mad science island

Longtime readers of this site will be familiar with the work of Drake at Medusarrific, who has proved himself one of the most dedicated CG A.S.F.R. comics creators in field, having put out 89 issues and counting of his comic, as well as a variety of other material and, I am honored to say, a pendant story to the Tales of Gnosis College.

So it is with pleasure that I note that the most recent issue of Drake’s comic, “Audition” (Medusarrific #89) goes full-bore mad science. It begins with a classic trope of our two of his heroines — Lita and Connie — having washed up on a mysterious island somewhere.

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The exchange following “Was that a giant squid?” shows narrative artistry, hinting as it does at a whole prequel misadventure which Drake has left to the imaginations of his readers. (Perhaps an artist into tentacles will take up the implied challenge!)

In any event, seeking a path back to civilization, Lita and Connie come across a laboratory run by a solitary, but also quite friendly, scientist.

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Perhaps the classic response to “are you a mad scientist” in this situation is something along the lines of “Mad? Why no! I find my scientific work most enjoyable and fulfilling.” “When I’m a penguin” does show more originality.

Needless to say, our scientist has some very special plans involving some very special technology for her guests, but you won’t find out what they are from me. You’ll need to visit Medusarrific or at least download the issue (a .zip file containing the pages, its size a nice trim 9.8 MB). If you like mad science, or transformations, or A.S.F.R., it will be well worth your time.

I’ve also recently discovered that Drake now has a DeviantArt gallery up and running where you can see some of his single works, so if you’re part of that particular universe, by all means go over and give him some well-deserved positive attention.