Tag Archives: pulp art

Tube girl from down under

A sharp-eyed commenter recently brought my attention to another tube girl.

Standing alone, this illustration would have merit in a exhibition of tube girls, because demonstrates with unusual clarity a classic property of the tube girl illustration.  Namely, the way that it was used to get as much nudity as possible on the cover of something without actually showing something that would attract the attention of the constabulary.   We are given to understand that the woman in the tube is naked, but the tube has opaque structural elements which just so happen to be in the line of sight between the viewer and the woman’s naughtier bits.  The viewer’s imagination is allowed to gratifyingly fill in the rest.

But what’s more interesting about this image is that it’s actually from a rather interesting collection of Australian pulp fiction covers at the University of Otago in New Zealand, one which I believe a post of Bacchus’s at ErosBlog quoted recently as well.  It’s a small world after all.

Indeed, smaller than one might think.  Is it a coincidence that Otago’s philosophy department is home to a metaethics guy whom I have reason to like?  (Well, yeah, it probably is but I can’t help but notice stuff like that.)

The Sex Magicians

An astute reader brought this paperback cover (and, of course, the novel underneath it) to my attention:

I haven’t been able to find the time to read the whole thing, but the first paragraph seems very promising indeed.

AT THE ORGASM RESEARCH FOUNDATION Dr. Roger Prong, who was known by some foundation employees as “a bloody Peeping Tom”and a “horny old voyeur” was in fact very scientific, or so he always insisted as he watched the girls having orgasms.

Was there ever an opening paragraph that was more erotic mad science than that?

And I’m pretty sure that it is that same Robert Anton Wilson who achieved such great and deserved fame as the co-author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. I mean, how many of them can there be, really?

Fusion organique

Here’s another Elvifrance cover, from it’s Série Blanche, No. 36, which is intriguing for the thaumatophile, because one has to ask, what on earth is going on here?

Are we looking at

  1. A conjoinment fantasy?  That would seem to be one obvious reading of une fusion organique.
  2. A liquid girl story?  Wiktionnaire gives the first definition fusion as “liquéfaction d’un corps par l’action de la chaleur” and there certainly does seem to be a bit of melting going on at the base of the illustration.
  3. Something A.S.F.R.-related even?  Women are not normally silver or gold like that.

As for the grotesque figure looming over them, I haven’t a clue.

It gets stranger from there, because there is some evidence that whatever was beneath the cover you see above was considered too naughty even to be published in France.  The index page for the cover art in the series tells us “Les n°35 et 36 sont des microtirages destinés à la commission de censure, donc jamais commercialisés.”

Which fact, of course, only makes this thaumatophile want it more.

Another spider horror

A cover from a bande dessinée adulte series called Luciféra, about which I know very little, except that it appears to have run from 1972 to 1980 and was published by a company called Elvifrance to which French-language Wikipedia attributes “une réputation sulfureuse.” I wonder why.

I run the illustration here not so much because it’s Erotic Mad Science per se, but because it’s a rather fine example that the initiation ritual that Cleo Mount went through in Study Abroad drew on something that’s captured many other imaginations.

Mad Science pulp art — Virgil Finlay

The cover of Weird Tales, February 1938, done by prolific pulp artist Virgil Finlay (1914 – 1971), and depicted at left.   A win for the thaumatophile:  Weird Tales was were much of H.P. Lovecraft‘s work first appeared.   The story it illustrates is part of Seabury Quinn‘s “Jules de Grandin” series of occult detective stories.

It’s exquisite (I think) by pulp cover standards.  I love the way the central figure appears to glow; and her attitude recalls that of Ashley Madder at the end.  An anticipation of cryonics?  I can’t say — the nearest libraries that are likely to contain the story are a good hour’s travel away from my personal mad lab.  But someday perhaps I’ll find out.

Found in a gallery at this French-language site.

Amazing stories

Yesterday’s post containing an Amazing Stories cover encouraged me to go deeper into the archives for this image to which my attention was directed by Bacchus at ErosBlog.

(Image originally found on Flickr here.)

Also Erotic Mad Science, but what kind?  A guy with headphones and various early-era-of-radio apparatus.  And a tiny woman, who I suppose lives in the glass dollhouse behind her and who also appears to be wired up somehow.   Unlike yesterday’s 1952 cover, I’m not even sure what story this is supposed to be illustrating.  Cross referencing clues on the cover with an available on-line index from Science-fiction: the Gernsback Years suggests that this is the May 1927 edition.  (A view confirmed by a check of a more-or-less complete cover archive for Amazing Stories here.) The story by A. Merrit was called “The Moon Pool” and they also printed part of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.  But is the story Bent Prout’s “The Singing Weapon”?  Or perhaps more poetically Will H. Gray’s “The Star of Dead Love”?

Perhaps it’s best not to know.  And I don’t say that because I think that any of the stories that were published way back then were bad.  Aside from The Time Machine I haven’t a clue.  Rather, I say so becaue I think that it may just be more fun to look at whatever bizzare scenario is contemplated in this cover art and invent one’s own story around it.  At least that seems to fit into the way I like to write.   The Apsinthion Protocol, for example, started out only as three characters one of whom (who would become Li Anwei) was tunred to liquid and then reconstituted by another (who would become Professor Corwin) watched with at once fascination and horror by a third (Nanetta Rector, in the end).  But it started with no backstory and not even any character names.  The rest of the script was, in a sense, written to have give the scenario something to fit into.

It would be intriguing to give the scenario above something to fit into.   Perhaps someday I shall try.  But I sure don’t want to discourage anyone else from trying in the meantime….