…in which things get really sticky for Stacey.
(Click on the image for full size. 
Shrinking Stacey Comic Page Three by Lucy Fidelis and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
And what happens next? Well, perhaps it’s time to write your own story…
In which Stacey displays questionable judgment…
(Click on the image for full size.
Shrinking Stacey Comic Page Two by Lucy Fidelis and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
If Gnosis College has a Human Subjects Research Committee, they must be really tearing their hair out on a regular basis. The conclusion tomorrow!
Over a year ago I essayed my very first short comix script over at ErosBlog, and repeated the attempt here at Erotic Mad Science. It was a little “shrinking woman” mad science story. And now it’s finally no longer just words on a screen. Thanks to the diligent work of Lucy Fidelis, a versatile Brazilian artist with a knack for visual storytelling, the script is now an actual short comic, and I couldn’t be happier. A very short comic, but you have to crawl before you can walk.
Here is the first page of three.
(Click on the image for full size.
Shrinking Stacey Comic Page One by Lucy Fidelis and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
If you’re interested in Lucy’s fetching illustration, I encourage you to visit her DeviantArt profile here and see her portfolio here, and I do believe she is actively taking commissions.
A compact, motile, and highly autonomous one at that. (Hans Moravec, please call your office.) Naughty, naughty little machine:
That’s from ongoing comic series called The Perils of Penelope Pornstarr, the fetching creation of comics and pin-up artist Lon Ryden. The narrative contains not just mad science and a mad scientist, but pretty girls in peril, a vast fortune of uncertain disposition, a corrupt lawyer, and ecclesiastical skulduggery. So there’s really something for everyone here, and I encourage you to check it out. You can follow Penelope’s adventures online here, and see more of Lon’s art either at DeviantArt or at his site here.
C’mon, it’s well worth a click. You know it is.
Al Feldstein and Jack Kamen back at Weird Science sure seemed to like the liquid girl trope. I’ve found another example, this one from Weird Science #15 (September/October 1952).
What on earth is going on here? Well, it’s yet another story of loneliness and sexual failure. Melvin Sputterly is a bachelor who lives alone in rented rooms. One day he receives a mysterious package bearing a postmark from the year 2952 and, internally, a label reading “De Luxe Personal Harem Kit: Not for sale to minors or married men!” A package from the far future! And it contains — dehydrated harem girls. Just follow the directions that involve adding certain quantities of water and table salt.
How interesting that there’s still a Post Office that uses physical postmarks in 2952, also that at least some norms of sexual propriety from 1952 continue to flourish almost a thousand years into the future. (Focus on the Family must be so pleased.) But one thing that hasn’t endured that long are units of measure familiar to Melvin, or us. So he has to experiment. The first experiment produces a girl rather to plump for Melvin’s tastes, so he administers a solvent (included in the package) that causes her to dissolve away, thus the panel above.
Melvin tries the other girls, but manages to mess up their rehydrations as well, making girls to skinny, small, large, etc. He rejects them all, dissolving them as he did the first.
Perhaps Melvin Sputterly deserves to be a lonely bachelor living in rented rooms.
The thought of people turning into flies means that now I just have to post this disturbing comix advertisement, to which my attention was directed by Bacchus and which appears on the tumblr blog Comically Vintage.
“She’ll turn into a fly, heh heh.” Well, that’s at least thematically apropos this week. My initial reaction to the ad was a lighthearted “it’s Poser for the pre-computer era!” But there are naturally some darker strains here.
There’s a wealth of weird in this ad, beginning with the strange cast of characters: Vampirella, Frankenstein’s Monster (misidentified as “Frankenstein” in the ad) and an obscure mad scientist called “Dr. Deadly.” (Guess his experiments don’t work so well.) I wonder how disturbed we should be that there’s a specific action figure designated as “Girl Victim,” or that these are apparently action figures meant as children’s toys.
The line “Don’t Worry, this is New York, no one will help her” marks a special (and, to my mind, ugly) cultural moment, perhaps an indication of the long shadow cast by the 1964 Kitty Genovese incident, which of course has its own deep comics resonance — awful real life intersecting with popular culture.
In a children’s toy, a reflection of the “New York = hell” meme that would be so common in the popular culture of the 1970s. (One manifestation of which would be the 1974 movie Death Wish, which would mark — you guessed it — the first screen appearance of Jeff Goldblum, so it all comes full circle, yes?)
On a side note: isn’t Vampirella supposed to be a heroine? If not entirely benign, then at least certainly not the sort who would help kidnap innocent young women into horrible mad-science experiments. Am I misssing something here? Perhaps someone more familiar with the history of the character can set me straight in the comments.
After all the Sturm and Drang with which Gnosis Dreamscapes ends up, I thought it might be nice to come up with a little something bright and cheerful for all of you to start your workweeks.
A few years ago, James Lileks as part of a series called “Funny Books: Dubious Moments in Comics History,” featured the following cover from a short-lived early 1950s series…
…together with some appropriate (and funny) snark. Naturally, when I first saw it, I wanted to see more of this curvaceous redhead in her natural habitat. The illustration alone would have been appealing enough, and the artist Dan DeCarlo — probably best known for his work on Archie — was one of talent.
But what to do? This was a very minor comic book written over half a century ago (and a pain to Google, too, since a certain car made by Volkswagen will swamp your attempt to do so).
But we live in a happy age, we do. Back in the 1970s a critic named Roger Price formulated something he called Price’s First Law, a dismal reflection on consumption in a mass-production age: “If everybody doesn’t want it, then nobody gets it.” But now in the era of the long tail, a new principle has taken hold (let’s not call it Faustus’s Law, please): “If anybody every loved it, then everyone can get it.”
And so with Jetta. We are blessed to have among us one Craig Yoe, comix historian extraordinary. You might be familiar with him as the compiler of Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings or perhaps Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster. (And if you’re not, you owe it to yourself to have a look-in at the steamy, seamy demimonde of comix art — it’s fun!)
As it turns out, Yoe has a recent project of some interest:
Ta da! Every issue of Jetta ever to be published, right in an appealing hardbound edition. The long tail wins again!
Now perhaps one might think that Jetta is a marginal topic for EroticMadScience. Eroticism is rationed strictly in the form of winking, nudging cheesecake (this was a book thought fit for sale to minors in the 1950s). And the science isn’t too mad. It’s more like a goofy imagined future, full of jet packs and flying cars and clunky robot servants in a brightly colored populuxe built environment. But personally, I think that’s appealing. YMMV, dear readers.
Maybe there’s a little hint of conjoinment in one episode, and thus a tenuous link between Jetta’s innocent future past and my rather kinky present.
But even if DeCarlo’s teen-comedy romp isn’t your particular cup of mad-science mystery formula, there’s another virtue of Yoe’s collection: 39 pinup artists who’ve re-imagined Jetta for our age. I’ll provide some examples of — thumbnails only, as these are working artists who deserve patronage. You can click through to the websites if you’re interested.
Jetta (right) as envisioned as a pure pin-up girl by artist Ben Tan.
A humorous take (left) done by comix artist Colleen Coover.
And additional, rather sexy take (below), done by Bill Presing. Looks like the robot won out after all!
Plus 36 more if you pony up for the book itself, and original DeCarlo pinup art to boot. See Veronica Lodge just a smidge hotter than you probably ever have, with perhaps one exception…
Well, if the last pair of posts on pirates weren’t sufficiently strange for you, maybe this will be.
Because it turns out at the illustrators at SheAniMale.com have kinked into the whole pirate theme:
This narrative is going…exactly where you think it’s going.
Good use of the nautical setting, guys. Though I imagine that Patrick O’Brian must be spinning in his grave.
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.
One of the twin crises that have Aloysius running back and forth late in Progress in Research is an attempt at breast augmentation that runs way out of control.
Well, maybe I’m just being immature to notice such things, but even this odd little theme has a history. One example (which I only vaguely remembered from video-store box art until I finally got hold of and watched a copy, just for your benefit, dear readers) is the 1982 comedy Jekyll and Hyde…Together Again. I’ll never have those 87 minutes of my life back, but I can report that there is a scene in which a plastic surgeon named Dr. Knute Lanyon gets distracted in the course of a procedure that “injects collagen behind the soft tissue of the breast” or one Mrs. Simpson. This inflation goes on and on. Mrs. Simpson actually seems rather pleased with the unplanned result.
As she admonishes Dr. Lanyon “don’t you dare touch a thing…Bernie’s going to love these.”
A better example of this sort of thing can be found in Vittorio Giardino‘s Little Ego (1985). This is an erotic tribute (Wikipedia suggests “parody,” but I think tribute might be better) to Windsor McCay‘s extraordinary Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905 to 1914). Nightly, Little Ego has dreams in which all sorts of absurd and wrong and yet highly erotic things happen. (There is an extended “abduction into a harem” sequence which doubtless influenced the “Odalisque” segment of Study Abroad.) It is an exquisite piece of work that belongs in the library of any serious collector of comic-book erotica.
In one of Ego’s dreams, she stands before a mirror, wishing she had bigger breasts. By the merest chance she finds before her a jar of cream the label of which proclaims “increases and firms breasts in minutes.” “Why not?” asks Ego, trying it out. And before you know it…
The dream ends with Ego in a rather unusual modeling career. For a Vittorio Giradino site look here.