Tag Archives: Jill Keeney

Erotic Mad Science Invades Wholesome American Comic

Or it did back around 2000 anyway.  Chris’s Invincible Superblog has a post pointing out that the Archie spin-off comic book to Archie’s Weird Mysteries in which Archie Andrews dates a sexbot named Lisi.

Lisi was created by a local mad scientist to have the best features of both Betty and Veronica, I believe as some sort of very-necessary research into teenage sexuality.  She thus interestingly represents an attempt at sort of erotic chimera, like Jireen who was created out of Jill Keeney and Maureen Creel.  Although as far as I know, neither Betty nor Veronica had to be dissolved in the process of making Lisi.  (Darn!)

Squick or squee, I guess.  Though perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that something like this was going on somewhere in the Archie fictional universe.  I mean, Don DeCarlo did a lot of its art for a long time, and we know that DeCarlo definitely had a thing for sci-fi cheesecake and I’d wager he’d have ventured into erotic mad science given free rein…

Glad I’m alive now, rather than back then.

Aesthetics of the Fly III

In the end, Seth Brundle decides he just can’t hack being a human-fly hybrid (one which is becoming more fly than human as time goes on).  And there have been complications, in the form of his girlfriend Veronica getting pregnant (with what it’s not clear).

So Brundle comes up with  what is clearly very much a mad science idea, which is that he is going to use his transporter to fuse himself, Veronica, and baby into a single hybrid, one which he hopes will be more human than fly.

It’s quite an audacious idea, I must say, and perhaps it’s one source of my idea of fusing Maureen Creel and Jill Keeney into a single woman named Jireen.  Unfortunately for science, Veronica is no more keen on the idea of being fused with Brundle than Aloysius was with Jireen, when Jireen proposed exactly that.

It’s a close call for Veronica, though.  She almost gets fused.  And I must say she makes a fetching mad science almost-victim.

Not a movie that really ends well for any of its protagonists.  But it’s a true classic all the same.

Conjoinment

At the end of Gnosis Dreamscapes, Aloysius attempts a Hail Mary play with the Apsinthion Protocol to try to save the lives of Jill and Maureen, both gravely wounded in their encounter with Madder’s thugs.

As so often in mad science, what happens isn’t exactly according to plan, and what results is a conjoinment of Jill and Maureen.  More personal identity porn

Now with a little bit of effort you can find a fair amount of conjoinment material out there.  This example is found at Gammatelier, which has a lot of this sort of thing, very fetchingly done too.

But of course this art, though perhaps appealing, isn’t quite what’s going on in Gnosis Dreamscapes.  Jill and Maureen fuse completely to make a single individual, not just a sort of conjoined non-twin (or triplet, or what have you).  Artistic representations of that more complete process are harder to find, probably because a single fused being looks rather a lot like just another human being.

But there is at least one fine example of a complete fusion.  Back in the 1990s John Byrne , a prolific comic book artist who has worked on more superheroes than most people even know exist (website here) created a short-run series called Babe.  Babe was created when five separate women were fused together through some weird process involving alien technology and arcane forces (can you hear the thaumatophiles panting?), creating a being geometrically stronger and tougher (and arguably, more comic-book outlandish) than any of the five women put together.

Eventually the situation got defused and we get to see Babe’s five component women:

Though in a later series Babe was re-created.  The scene in which one of her component women vanishes to recreate Babe should have a familiar feel to readers of The Apsinthion Protocol.

I don’t think Carolyn actually melts away — panels in the previous number suggest she spontaneously dematerializes/is teleported away while showering, in a scene reminiscent of one that happens in Mars Needs Women. (If you remember that scene, or indeed anything else in Mars Needs Women, you have my sympathy.)

And as for Maureen and Jill?  As the last intertitle says…to be continued.

BS of A

“The Scouts taught me to to my duty.”

Okay, so I’m a Really Bad Person for having a villain invoke the Boy Scouts in the course of committing a sex murder.  I got my inspiration from Penn & Teller, who devoted a whole fourth season episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit to pwning the Scouts.

These splendid entertainers make the point that the Scouts discriminate against gays, bisexual, transgendered people, and atheists.  “[W]e won’t let in any faggots…”   Yeah, I’d give the Scouts the finger, too.

On the plus side, Penn & Teller propose an alternative organization with its own merit badges.  And very much in the spirit of things here, there is a merit badge for porn.

Hot damn! I wish these guys had been around when I was a lad. In the meantime,  I can hope their producer calls if they ever need a thaumatophilia expert. (If ve does, I can even promise to say the word “cunt” and not break down laughing, like that John McWhorter guy did back in season two.)

For a different vision of a better kind of Boy Scouts, see Tom Lehrer, who had it right decades ago.

A hanging

Alfred Hitchcock attributed to the playwright Victorien Sardou the maxim “torture the women” as good advice for constructing dramatic plots.  Even if Sardou never said such a thing (I haven’t been able to find an unambiguous French-language source for it), as the creator of the source-text for Tosca he would surely have had that maxim in his heart if not on his lips.    I  might more modestly note that if you’re going to construct a plot in a world like that of Gnosis which has its share of paranoid melodrama, you’re going to have to have villains.  And you can’t make a villain by just by putting a character in a t-shirt that says “I’m depraved.”  You need to show their depravity.

John Samson sure shows his depravity, and that of his boss.  In line with the rules of his universe, he makes the wrong woman his victim.  That’s bureaucracy for you.

Whether it is to my credit or demerit that the scene in which Jill-Prime is murdered has a clear precedent, rather than being a full-blown product of my imagination I leave to others to judge.  It’s from one of the most notorious exploitation movies ever made, Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS.  (A film which also leaves its imaginative marks on Invisible Girl, Heroine, in that it depicts helpless incarcerated innocents being destroyed in “experiments.”)

In this film, a group of Nazis visiting a concentration camp in which medical atrocities are taking place are entertained by a sadistic spectacle.  A young woman is placed at the end of a dinner table.

She is bound, and wired by a noose, not quite taut, to a rafter in the ceiling.

And she is made to stand on a block of ice.

It does not end well.

Two appetites together

I suspect that many young women might not be all that pleased to have a lover quote the Monster of Malmsbury at them, even in the pleasantest of afterglows.   But Jill (and therefore Jill-Prime) is a scholar as well as an athlete (sexual and otherwise), and so it goes pretty well.

Frontispiece to _Leviathan_ (1651). Click through to see an amazing collection of politico-religious visual references in the larger image

Now you, dear reader, might well at this point be scratching your head and wondering what a 17th century English political philosopher is doing in the middle of all this erotic mad science.  Well, for one thing, Hobbes is a natural go-to for the thaumatophile, because in his striking image of a political commonwealth as a sort of man-made man, he got close to the whole Frankenstein theme a century and a half early.  From the introduction to Leviathan:

Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governes the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seat of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall; The Wealth and Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength; Salus Populi (the Peoples Safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things needfull for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill War, Death. Lastly, the Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let Us Make Man, pronounced by God in the Creation.

And the erotic is not an element lacking in Hobbes.  The passage quoted by Rob is real.  It’s cited seriously by the contempoarary Cambridge philospher Simon Blackburn.  Blackburn’s a delight as a writer.  Not only did he administer a well-deserved intellectual spanking to theism-apologist John Polkinghorne in the pages of The New Republic a few years back, but he also gave the lecture on “Lust” as part of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins put on at the New York Public Library.  It’s there that Blackburn actually quotes Hobbes.  Have a look, if it’s your thing.

(Well, it’s at least my thing.)

“A total hate-fuck…”

Jill’s accidentally-on-purpose finishing off of the Generalissimo might seem over-the-top, but it too belongs to a long tradition of women who kill men through sex.

The human imagination…the male human imagination, surely? — has long created female monsters who kill men through sex, either draining them of their energy or otherwise.  It is this fear that doubtless underlies the myth of the succubus and perhaps a large part of that of the vampire as well.

Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944), "The Vampire" (1893-4)

And of course, it’s a theme that plays a lot in popular culture as well. I know of at least one rather obsessive internet compilation called “out with a bang” the lists appropriate scenes.  And a thaumatophile line?  Well, there are doubtless many, but we could begin with a personal touchstone, the plot of Invasion of the Bee Girls, which pushes the “kill men through sex” line so thoroughly that we even get a Bee Girl point-of-view at the fatal moment.

And there are doubtless many others — ponder for a moment, and by all means comment if you come up with any.

Training with machines

I recall that back when I was in college a lot of my fellow students were spending time I would have spent deep in the library instead working with various complex and expensive exercise machines with the aim of making their toned and fit selves even more toned and fit.  So it’s with no small pleasure that I can now pay tribute to their efforts by writing a scene in which Jill Keeney, already an athlete at Gnosis College,gets in training for her espionage mission with appropriate machines.

The sex machine is of course its own kind of thaumatophile vision, and it has inspired an entire site and at least one entire book, as well as coverage in Agnès Giard‘s Le sexe bizarre:

There’s even some fantastic video art on sex machines, such as “Noosphere,” by the sci-fi eroticist Yann Minh.

This topos too has a long and distinguished pedigree.  Dare we ever forget Duran Duran’s famous Excessive Machine, which was so singularly unable to overcome Barbarella?

Sort of the high point of Jane Fonda‘s career, if you ask me, so I am happy to be able to pay tribute to it.

Abuse of the confessional

My first post on Jill’s adventure abroad will be on the rather unusual use of a confessional for purposes of furthering a conspiracy.

Confession is a ritual surrounded in secrecy, and pretty much anything surrounded in secrecy will be the breeding grounds for inappropriate speculation and interesting narrative.  This is something that the artist (and children’s book illustrator!) Rojan understood rather well.

Rojan, "Colored Drawing," ca. 1930

So as usual, I continue in the well-worn paths of artistic tradition.