Tag Archives: Aloysius Kim

Aloysius Kim Character Study

We’re beginning a new set of characters to be introduced into the Gnosis College mix in the forthcoming volume of the Tales, scheduled to begin in March. Here the first, the romantically-challenged gadgeteer genius Aloysius Kim.

(Click on the image for larger size. Creative Commons License
Aloysius Kim Character Study written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and drawn by Lon Ryden is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)

Willie and Rayna Dungeon Sequence I

Today we begin a new four-illustration bespoke art sequence, done in 3D by artist KristinF. Kristin has illustrated the first of Willie’s many sexual misadventures from Progress in Research.

Lord Byron, in Don Juan, describes part of the education provided for young Juan by his widowed mother thus:

Sagest of women, even of widows, she
Resolved that Juan should be quite a paragon,
And worthy of the noblest pedigree
(His sire was of Castile, his dam from Aragon):
Then for accomplishments of chivalry,
In case our lord the king should go to war again,
He learn’d the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery,
And how to scale a fortress—or a nunnery.

Education and the world having may moved on from the romantic by-gone days of chivalry, but young men are just as pecker-directed as ever.  Willie (with a little help from his gadgeteer genius friend Aloysius, manages to make a late-night break-in to adjacent claustrated Catholic girls college Mary Magdalene  not by scaling its walls by by breaking into its steam tunnel system.

Aloysius (perhaps sensibly) declines to accompany Willie on his tour of the girls shower room and pool.  Too bad perhaps, as Willie discovers adventurous young Rayna out for what had up to then been a solo late-night skinny dip.

Frolics ensue — and trouble lurks!

(Click on the image for full size. Creative Commons License
Willie & Rayna Dungeon Sequence I by KristinF and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)

Depths of the sea

Well, I suppose no set of post about the process through which Aloysius Kim begins his ascent into a new form through a descent into the depths would really be complete withott a visual reference to pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones‘s “The Depths of the Sea”  (1887), shown here to the left.

The visual relevance is perhaps too necessary to merit much further comment. Various vesions of the image float around the web:  this one was posted some time ago at Janitor of Lunacy, while the original can be found in the Fogg Museum at Harvard.

Bram Dijkstra reproduces this picture (among many, many others) his Idols of Perversity (p. 269) and has this to say about it:

In Burne-Jones’s “The Depths of the Sea”…a woman with hypnotic eyes and a vampire’s mouth has already completed her seduction and is carrying her prey — as if it were a huge, flowery bouquet of lost male morality — into the oblivion of her sensuality, where, we can be quite certain, he is to suffer the brain death which unfailing accompanied the state of perpetual tumescence promised by the hollows of the siren’s lair.

Gee, Professor, thanks for the fetish fuel!

 

Created women

The process through which Aloysius and his ad hoc band of resisters swiftly wreck Colonel Madder’s mental equilibrium is the sort of Hail Mary play that makes basically no sense outside of a mad science-driven fictional world…

…and perfect sense within it.  The fictional concept of resurrecting the dead to create an artificial woman has a long history.  One of its most distinguished moments would be the appearance of ravishing Elsa Lanchester as The Bride of Frankenstein.

(Image source cinemastrikesback.com.)  Though for my money, I think I like better the 1967 Hammer Horror production Frankenstein Created Woman, which among many other strengths has some very arresting imagery.

(Image source Frankensteinia, an entire blog devoted to things Frankenstein.)  And of course Peter Cushing.  Cushing might be best known to American audiences as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars, but before that he had a whole series of brilliant British horror-movie roles.  Naturally he gets a site of his own, from which this French-language poster is taken:

That’s an EroticMadScience two-fer at least, because not only does it make us of the whole “created/resurrected woman” theme, but it also makes good use of the tube-girl meme.

Unsurprisingly, “woman created to make trouble” is itself a very old idea:  certainly as old as Pandora, represented here in an 1872 painting by Jules Joseph Lefebvre.

And Pandora is also an Erotic Mad Science two-fer.  Not only is she herself a woman created on purpose by a god associated with technology, but she is part of a plot by Zeus to punish mankind for the transgressions of Prometheus who, if mad science ever had a divine patron, would surely be it.

Aloysius’s reading

The reading material with which the somewhat burnt-out Aloysius is trying to relax near the end of Progress in Research is for real, and has a real antecedent in my own developing erotic consciousness.

Background: way back in my early graduate student days I read a comic drawn by Phil Foglio called XXXenophile that made me very happy.

XXXenophile was merry erotic romp through the conceits of fantasy and science fiction: magic, cloning, time travel, sex with aliens, and so forth. It wasn’t heavy material, and nowhere near as dark as many “adult” comics. It was happy and funny and sexy and fun, and doubtless influenced the brighter side of my own writing about Gnosis.

So as I was writing the Gnosis College scripts, perhaps just after finishing the first draft of Study Abroad, it occurred to me to wonder what good ol’ Phil Foglio had been creating as of late, seeing as he had been such a good influence on me in my impressionable youth.  So I googled around and found out:  a web comic called Girl Genius, which are the adventures of one Agatha Heterodyne in a mad-science, steampunk world.

It was with a peculiar mix of delight and dismay that I discovered that Agatha is a student at an institution of higher learning called Transylvania Polygnostic University.

I didn’t steal the idea, Phil!  Honest!  It’s just that γνῶσις, a Greek noun meaning knowledge, especially knowledge in a higher or esoteric sense, is one of those things in memetic space that many people are just bound to stumble across.

It’s probably a little late for me to make the change now, and I do like the word Gnosis for any number of private reasons.  But I can at least offer the shout out to Phil Foglio.  So here it is.  You can subscribe to XXXenophile online now at Slipshine, and keep up with the adventures of Agatha Heterodyne’s adventures at the Girl Genius site.

Dr. Faustus sez, check it out.

Born again

Both Kitty and Tricia found themselves in very sticky respective situations, but luckily Aloysius was able to improvise a solution that got them more-or-less back to normal.  Among other things, Aloysius proved that having the rudiments of a classical education can come in handy, and not just for the purposes of adding a little seasoning to one’s kinky blog.

The scene is an homage to pregnancy and lactation fetishes, which aren’t really my thing all that directly, but throw in a little spin involving strange machines and syringes and the Apsinthion Protocol, and you have a fun bit of thaumatophilia going on, from my perspective.

I knew of the existence of the fetishes before writing the scene, but I had little idea before doing a little reading up on the subject just how damn much there was on the Internet about it.  And I must confess, that some of it is undeniably appealing.

Hat tip on this one to Due Joy, which struck me as one of the nicer blogs on the subject.