Fun Comic: Pretty Vacant

One of the many pleasures of running Erotic Mad Science is that I can share fun examples of people who are following their own inspirations, even (no, especially) when they’re a bit odd. And today I have one to share.

Distilling many pop-cultural inspirations, of which perhaps the most central was an outrageous 1966 spy-thriller Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die (very hard to find, though there is a trailer on YouTube), writer John Villalino has been busy creating his own comics series, Pretty Vacant. And it’s a blast!

Gorgeous athletes are disappearing, only to show up in images as astonishingly lifelike mannequins produced by the shady Still Life Corporation. I don’t want to give away spoilers on the plot, except to note that something very A.S.F.R.-ish is going on…

Uh oh. Will an athlete heroine and a heroic accountant (yes, heroic accountant) be able to save their friends from a fate prettier than death? Well, you’ll have to read the comic to find out. You can get in touch with John Villalino via his contact page here.

As for Kiss the Girls… embedded for your convenience.

Tube girls without the mad science

And sometimes, of course, the serendipity of search turns up things you would never have thought of. This image also comes up under “tube girl” if you look hard enough, in a blog post with the somewhat awkward title “Beauty fever pipe tube exercise because of olympics.”

No mad science I can perceive here, but I must say that what these Chinese women are doing is certainly an impressive (and sexy) display of athleticism.

Origins of tube girl meme?

I’ve done a lot of posts here at Erotic Mad Science about what I call the “tube girl meme,” the visual depiction of a pretty woman, often nude or scantily clad, sealed in some sort of transparent tube (often suspended in fluid) for the purpose of preservation, experiment, or some perverted purpose — let your imagination run free there. It’s clearly a pretty prominent visual motif in the mad science genre and really takes off with pulp covers after the Second World War. But where did it come from?

I’ll offer a conjecture, and kindly keep in mind that it’s only a conjecture so if any of you who read this blog know of an earlier or better one by all means please comment. It goes back to a locus classicus of cinematic mad science, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

In this film, Dr. Septimus Pretorius, one of Frankenstein’s former teachers, demonstrates to Frankenstein a set of experiments in creating life, in this case Pretorius’s creation of a set of homunculi that live in cylindrical glass jars. It’s a pretty good effect, given that it’s 1935.

Among these are a dancer, (who, Pretorius laments, will only dance to Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song”)…

..and, perhaps more on visual point, a mermaid.

Origin of the concept? Maybe. I’m willing to bet that all those pulp artists and the public that patronized their work both watched Bride of Frankenstein a lot.

Bonus erotic trivia: The mermaid in the jar is played by Josephine McKim, a swimmer who won a gold medal in 1932 Olympics and who was the body double for Maureen O’Sullivan during her famous pre-code “nude swim” sequence in Tarzan and His Mate (1934).

Is there video? You betcha!

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Of course we have also visited the contributions of Olympic swimmers to erotica on this blog before.

Bound in the wheel

For the longest damn time I had a visual image of the sort of thing that poor Marie gets bound into and rolled away in, but had no damn idea what it was called. I had vague memories of seeing them in at least one Janet Jackson video and perhaps a martial arts movie or two, but was still clueless. But thanks to a searchable Internet, I know now. It’s called a rhönrad, and it’s a gymnastic device invented in Germany in the 1920s. It looks like a remarkably tricky gymnastic discipline.

(Image source this Dutch-language page.) Using these things is a real sport with a real international organization devoted to them.

Which is not to say that they aren’t sometimes used for cheesecake appeal. Note this vintage image.

Chorus girls in ‘Rhonrad’ wheels roll across Bondi beach,” Flickr image from here.

Now Marie’s wheel isn’t for cheesecake or for gymnastics. She’s bound in it to be humiliated and disoriented (more than she already is), and for this I must admit a rather different, but still real-world inspiration, which is this:

This is an illustration of something called “Field Punishment No. 1,” and it really was used as a form of military discipline on British soldiers in the First World War. (The illustration above is from the website of the Canadian War Museum.) It involved strapping a soldier motionless to something like a wheel or a fence for two hours. Very unpleasant if you have to itch, which given the ubiquity of things like lice in a trench environment meant often. The punishment was common enough for Paul Fussell to conjecture in The Great War and Modern Memory that it might have been a source for common Great War urban legend: “the myth of the Crucified Canadian.”

Funny given all that that an attempt to find something that answered to the description of “rhönrad bondage” came up empty. (Might just be too damn impractical, even for a rhönrad on flanged wheels to prevent tipping or escape like Marie’s.) But I did encounter this curious image at what appears to be a German-language bellydance site, which does seem to fit the overall theme.

Bet you wish you could have seen how all that was put together!

More locker-room snooping

Maureen takes advantage of her ability to be invisible to find an unusual scene, and an unusual gratification.

A story from Dr. Faustus’s life lies behind this scene (sadly, one less interesting than I’m sure many of you readers promptly thought of). Here is the background: I spent adolescence surrounded by nice, well brought-up Christian girls whose attitude toward erotic materials was “Porn! Icky poo! Baby Jesus cries!” And then I went off to college and found myself amongst outstanding, well-educated college women whose attitude toward erotica was “Porn! Icky poo! Degrades women!”

And then at about 21 or so I found myself in the company of a lady companion who told me — perhaps a little bashfully — about who incredibly horny she found herself watching a gay male porn movie.

It was a revelatory moment. And Maureen’s invisible girl voyeurism is a tribute to that revelation.

In retrospect it should not have been so surprising. The athlete is one form of extraordinary human perfection, and thereby loaded with erotic interest. The Greeks, in their Olympic games, understood this fact perfectly well.

And significantly, the modern Olympics have always been freighted with both heteroerotic and homoerotic interest. There is a goofy fun pre-code Hollywood movie about which I have blogged before called The Search for Beauty (1934), which pus beauty on display in (among many other ways) the form of Buster Crabbe in the shower.

Naturally, the whole fun them will find its way to Japan, where it will be exploited in anime.

(Note: what an awesome era we live in! You google image search on “gay hentai locker room” and you get “gay hentai locker room.” 187,000 results in 0.07 seconds, when I tried it.)

With the beautiful boys going at it in the locker room, there’s a thought that stands out for me, which I might attribute to my lady companion of all those years ago, or to Maureen for that matter.

Quite.