Those scientists. They have ways of monitoring everything.
(Click on the image for larger size. 
Gnosis Dreamscapes: Chapter One, Page Eight 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.)
Penile manipulations? Drugs? Uh oh…
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Gnosis Dreamscapes: Chapter One, Page Seven 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.)
Meanwhile, at Gnosis College, more mad science is about to get underway.
(Click on the image for larger size.
Gnosis Dreamscapes: Chapter One, Page Six 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.)
It’s a New Year, and time for a new volume of the Tales of Gnosis College. Ladies and Gentlemen and others, it is my pleasure to present the cover of Chapter One of Gnosis Dreamscapes.
(Click on the image for larger size.
Gnosis Dreamscapes: Chapter One, Cover 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.)
A central theme of the Tales of Gnosis College is that expanding mad-science enterprises require new recruits.
(Click on the image for larger size.
Progress in Research: Chapter Five, Page Twenty-Eight 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.)
Hypnosis in the service of erotic mad science is a fun theme that has been worked with great dedication by my friend Dr. Robo and his Metrobay Comix group of creators. They have an entire work, Mesmerella, which is right on point. A teaser therefrom:
(Image used here by kind permission of Dr. Robo.) Tempted? Then I urge you to check their work out further by visiting their Wiki and their DeviantArt site. You’ll be glad you did. Just don’t lose control of your mind — unless, of course, you want to lose control of your mind…
The final of our preview character studies for Progress in Research. Michiko Maeda (no, not the same as the actress of the same name, though the latter might be something of an inspiration). Michiko has only a little part in the upcoming volume, but she slated to become rather…interesting later on.
(Click on the image for larger size.
Michiko Maeda 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.)
I guess while the subject is fresh on the site I should point out that I also came across this pulp cover in the same Otago collection on which I posted yesterday.
I can’t comment about what lies beneath this cover, but I must say the art has a decidedly unpalatable “me love you long time” flavor. Which means, of course, that I now swear on the sacred stones of R’lyeh that I did not see or have this cover in mind before creating the character of Michiko Maeda.
Niceman, who’s work we’ve seen many times before, graciously agreed recently to participate in an experiment of my proposing (hey, it wouldn’t be mad science if we didn’t do experiments). The experiment was an open-ended commission in which, instead of my pulling something I liked out of the scripts and asking him to render it, I asked him to leaf through the scripts himself and pick his own commission.
I think he made an excellent choice.
Michiko in Gel by by Niceman, commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License (Click on the image for a larger version.)
Do we all recognize this, thaumatophiles? It’s Gnosis Dreamscapes, and Michiko is about to show off her awesome ability to invade a young man’s dreams.
INT. Monitoring ROOM – DAY
The room has low light, just like the previous room. The opposite side of the one-way mirror visible in the previous scene in the laboratory takes up part of one wall.
In the middle of the room there is an object resembling an illuminated glass bathtub with wires and cables snaking away from it and a few inches of a gel-like substance within it.
WILLIE and PROFESSOR REBECCA WAITE are concentrating on a screen as Michiko enters the room.
(Note: Willie and Waite are the same characters as appeared in Progress in Research)
As Michiko enters, Waite looks up and smiles.
WAITE
Excellent, brisk preparation of the subject, Michiko. Are you ready yourself?
MICHIKO
Thank you, Professor Waite. Give me just a minute here.
WILLIE
Professor Waite was just commenting on how good you are at the job.
Michiko steps out of her sneakers, then removes her lab coat. She is wearing nothing underneath except a push-up bra.
WAITE
Not just any woman could serve so well as a female neural template in the Dreamscape.
Michiko removes her bra and throws a seductive glance at Waite.
MICHIKO
Because I am so amazingly sensual?
WAITE
If you wish to put it that way, yes.
Michiko crosses her arms in front of her chest and frowns at Waite.
WAITE
You disagree, Michiko?
Michiko steps into the tub and eases herself slowly into the gel as she speaks.
MICHIKO
Oh I am ever so sensual.
(squeezes her breasts together before continuing)
It’s just that I never wanted to play to the stereotype of sensual Asian woman.
Waite grins.
WAITE
I am sure you’ll have the chance to shatter stereotypes with what is about to happen. Are you ready?
MICHIKO
Ever so.
WILLIE
Then let the dreams begin.
Pleasant dreams, Michiko!
When John Samson makes a crude (and racially loaded) pass at Michiko after his own dream experience, Michiko retorts with a reference to someone named “Abe Sada.” And who was Sada?
A real person, it turns out, whose activities were in fact significant enough for her to have a movie made about her, just as Michiko says. (The historical Sada is depicted in the picture to the left, after her arrest in 1936.) The movie is indeed called In the Realm of the Senses, made in 1976 by Nagisa Oshima. Sada is a former prostitute who starts a torrid affair with her boss, an inn-owner in 1930s Japan. In the movie she’s played by Eiko Matsuda.
Sada conducted a torrid affair with her employer, an inn owner named Kichizo Ishida (played in the movie by Tatsuya Fuji). Things apparently got pretty kinky and erotic asphixia got into the game.
…and eventually strangled him to death. (You have been warned that these practices are dangerous.)
Sada probably wouldn’t have enjoyed that much celebrity had it not been for what she did after asphixiating her lover.
She carried it with her for three days.
So implicitly, Michiko is responding to Samson’s crude overture with a suggestion that he be castrated. (Don’t mess with Michiko!) Sadly, Samson has been spending his life learning how to kill people and listening to talk radio, so he doesn’t get this rather subtle cultural reference.
I’m pleased, by the way, to be able to tell you that In the Realm of the Senses is now available in fine new editions from the Criterion Collection, so by all means give it a look in.
When I was just about ready to launch EroticMadScience.com I wrote to a friend describing my enterprise in these words:
I guess it’s time I raised the Jolly Roger and set sail.
And that’s very much in the general spirit of things at this site, since a core idea behind the Gnosis stories is that it is a blessing to be able to escape the realm of ordinary human life and its conventions, to find a morality-free zone where we might indulge our imaginations.
Dreams are of course the best and most blessed of all such zones, perhaps. Hence Gnosis Dreamscapes. But pirates do nicely as well.
And naturally, as pirates are outlaws beyond the reach of any state, one naturally imagines that they might get up to some rather interesting activities.
(For a larger version click through to Kinky Delight.)
I’m a little surprised that there isn’t more pirate-themed porn than I can readily find with simple image searching. “Rum, sodomy, and the lash” was how Winston Churchill supposedly characterized naval tradition. Churchill probably wasn’t right about the sodomy bit, given how little privacy there would have been on an a ship in the days of fighting sail. But seriously, wouldn’t a square-rigged ship be something like an ideal BDSM playground? What with all those ropes and spars and the great familiarity that sailormen are supposed to have with different kinds of knots? To say nothing of the fondness that navy men have long had for corporal punishment as a means of maintaining discipline… Perhaps the shortage of usable vessels explains why we don’t see sailing ships used for more bondage shoots. Perhaps the Village People’s use of the U.S.S. Reasoner lingers in institutional memory, making the Navy skittish of any possible proposal by fine folks at Kink.com to borrow the U.S.S. Constitution for an afternoon. But perhaps I speculate too much?
That said, there are certainly some people willing to make good use of the vast homoerotic potential of pirates.
But interestingly enough it was none of this that inspired Bill’s naval dream. Rather, it was Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht‘s song “Seeräuber Jenny” from Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) that really set my inner wheels in motion. A woman in an oppressive situation imagines pirates coming and wrecking destruction on all around her, and then carrying her off. Here is Lotte Lenya performing it in a 1931 film version. (German lyrics, and an alternative audio version, can be accessed here.)
So maybe this is really Michiko’s pirate dream?