Metrobay III

There are many artists who’ve worked on Dr. Robo and Finister Foul‘s Metrobay universe, and I am sure that all of them hold to the injunction never to forget Metropolis, but there was one who caught my eye in particular: Trishbot, and her Metropolis-inspired illustration Retro Brainwashing.

To my eye a most alluring image, presented here by kind permission of the artist. Click on the image for full size, and you can see the deservedly-laudatory viewer comments at DeviantArt at the work’s page here.

Metrobay II

A favorite thesis of mine is that we kinky people will always be able to find loads and loads of fetish fuel in popular culture, and that since as kids we began getting kinky but didn’t have access to porny stuff (well, usually) most of our early erotic memories are going to be tied to pop-cultural experiences of the “innocent” material we did have access to.

There are two reasons we can always expect this to be true, having to do with the twin facts that we’re all hypersexual primates and many of us are kinky in some way, so therefore

The people who create all this popular culture are going to work their kinks into it, intentionally or not and;
Whether any creator put anything there or not, we will find our kinks in their material anyway. There’s a reason why there’s a Rule 34, after all.

I wrote the first part of my Thaumatophile Manifesto so that my readers could have a sense of my formative pop-cultural experiences, and naturally when I started corresponding with Dr. Robo I just had to ask whether he could point to a similar class of material in the formation of his own thing for mind control and sexy robots.

Boy, could he ever. Here are some things he was able to point out to me.

He began with an episode of Gilligan’s Island, of all things, in which Ginger gets mind controlled by a mad scientist. I can’t embed the video, but you can see it here. (Well, if you were living on a tropical island with Ginger and Mary Ann, would you fix the damn boat?)

Another example, from the TV series of Wonder Woman, in which a toymaker played by Frank Gorshin builds a life-size duplicate of the heroine.

And another example, the 1982 sci-fi film Android, in which a somewhat mad scientist builds two androids, one of whom is a pretty blonde.

Dr. Robo pointed to some influences he has in common with me, such as Robotrix and The Bride of Frankenstein and also Weird Science, although actually had something in mind from the 1990’s television series rather than the 1985 movie which so influenced me. In the version pointed to by Dr. Robo, a mad scientist tries to drain created woman Lisa’s energy to power his own “bride.” Again, I can’t embed, but you can see the episode on Hulu here. And there’s also a scene in Superman III in which a henchwoman gets sucked into a machine and cyborgized.

But the best overlap we had was Metropolis. You know the scene. Everybody knows the scene.

Can’t see it too many times, and that thought will take us to tomorrow’s post…

Update: Some of the video embeds in this post were crushed by WordPress for the first few hours it was up. I hope it’s fixed now.

Metrobay I

I’ve always thought that one of the cardinal virtues of making your own erotica is that you have an extraordinary opportunity to make friends, and I’m pleased to have a bit of confirming evidence for that hypothesis just recently.

For many years there has been someone else making his own erotic mad science under the handle Dr. Robo. His core focus is a little different from mine, centered on the themes of erotic mind control and sexy robots (and human beings who’ve been made into them). Oh, and voluptuous superheroines: let’s not forget that! Together with his artist and creative partner Finister Foul, Dr. Robo has produced and published a hundreds-of-pages long series of 3D comics are set in a fictional setting called Metrobay. They got their start in publication from a gentleman working under the handle Jpeger, the proprietor of MCcomix.com (that is, “Mind Control Comix”) and HIPComix.com (that is heroines in peril comix, not hipster comix), and have since advanced to doing their own distribution. In addition to this principal art, both the series and the setting have benefited from the contributions of a talented group of additional artists attracted to the project over the years, including Trishbot, Uroboros, MCtek, Northern Chill, Akonkid, Dumbtime, and Sir Willoughby.

Yes a little different. There are no super-powered individuals in the Gnosis College fictional setting, and I’ve touched only a little bit on the theme of erotic mind control (remember Dr. Strangeways’s obscene hedonic machine from Invisible Girl, Heroine?). There are a lot of sex machines of various kinds, and there’s an A.S.F.R.-related theme often touched on. And of course, both Dr. Robo and I seem to enjoy working the visual tropes of mad science — of the subject stretched out upon the table, whether volunteer or victim, awaiting some extraordinary offense-unto-God transformation. Certainly all this was enough to answer Dr. Robo’s friendly hail.

It was time well spent, believe me, for it was a chance to discover still more in common, such as

(1) Origin stories. Dr. Robo reports that his thing for erotic mind control began when he was a kid. I experienced the first stirrings of my thing just as early, it seems. These sorts of things go deep for those of us who really have them.

(2) A common trope: the tube girl. I think I might use it more frequently, but Dr. Robo clearly understands its power. Here is an example, from his dieselpunk-era Metrobay story Original Sin.

(3) And another common trope: the scanner! For me it started with Looker, and I first wrote about Iris Brockman getting scanned to set up some fun personal identity porn. Dr. Robo also knows the trope and knows it well. Consider this scene from another of his comics, Adult Toys:

Yes, I can really relate.

(4) A lust for world-building. It seems that neither Dr. Robo nor I just want sexy images that reflect our thing, or even characters or stories that reflect our thing. We want whole worlds, places, fictional universes geared to the logic of what it is that we’re into. And so we set out to create them.

(5) And an understanding of popular culture as a never-ending source of fetish fuel… Well, that’s tomorrow’s post.

But if I’ve intrigued you enough about Dr. Robo’s project (or if you, like he, really like erotic mind control and robots), you can and should show him some appreciation even now. The Metrobay site at DeviantArt can be reached here, and there’s a whole site called the Metrobay Encyclopedia here. But probably best of all would be if you were to buy Dr. Robo’s work, which you can do at his Ebay store here. Happy browsing!

Amorous cyborgs

Fun shouldn’t be limited just to those who are made of meat.

Found in a directory at agora.eu.

Most agreeable robot

You know that your message about Erotic Mad Science is getting across when two of your readers independently draw your attention to the same photograph that appeared in Life magazine back in 1961.

This device was apparently created by Hughes Aircraft. That fact that it gets featured in a major American publication suggests that it was — or was perceived to have been — a perfectly innocent picture. Our useful mechanical servant is helping a nice lady zip up her dress — a common enough task for the clothing of that era which she would have difficulty doing herself.

Of course to a certain modern eye this is Fetish Fuel — that zipper is moving down. And those arms — so tentacular in appearance. Oh dear…

Which of course leads me to wonder — just how many people were in on the Fetish Fuel joke back in 1961? (I have a similar wonder about the 1930s shrink wrapped girl noted at Bondage Blog a while back which, curiously, also drew on Life magazine.) It can’t have been no one, surely…

A bizarre instrument?

Image delving for sexy girl robots for a slightly different purpose from this post, I came across a number or articles on the machine depicted to the left. It’s “Moaning Lisa,” a robot which you can manipulate to bring to a simulated orgasm.

Well, that might be mad science enough just on its own, but what really caught my eye was that one of the best articles on this innovative piece of technology was on Synthtopia, a site devoted to electronic music, under the headline “Moaning Lisa: The Most Bizarre Electronic Music Instrument Ever.”

Quoth her inventor, Matt Ganucheau

The process leading to a female orgasm is a uniquely delicate challenge for both sexes leaving it a mystery to most men and women. Moaning Lisa is an instillation that examines this complex process by simplifying it into an almost game-like state. With Lisa, as in life, there are no instructions on display. This leaves each participant to discover how Lisa’s true sexual potential is unlocked.

Wow. I would be remiss, of course, if I didn’t embed appropriate video.

Matt Bell reporting from 2007 Arse Electronica:

The presentation of Moaning Lisa:

One has to love an audience question like, “So when are you going to release Moan Moan Revolution?”

But what really motivated posting this (somewhat) old news is that I hadn’t seen it before, and it was yet another reminder of how other people are thinking what you’re thinking. Do you remember Tanya Yip’s rather unusual experience of being taught to sing better by being played like an instrument?

Tanya whips off her sweatshirt and casts it aside, then reaches back and undoes her bra-strap. Her bra hangs loose.

TANYA

Locrian! Please…

And, following that, her subsequent fantasy of becoming an instrument?

Sometimes I wonder if there are any unexplored erotic ideas.