The Transaction

I’m pleased to announce a new piece of bespoke art that has four pretty tube girls all in a row, with Dr. Strangeways and Frau Kupler engaged in…some sort of obscene business negotiation? It appears in the script for Invisible Girl, Heroine which I hope to have here in comics form in late 2012. It’s the work of the Argentine artist who publishes at DeviantArt under the name Felox08, and I’m sure you can agree he has an appealing style for tube girls.

(Click on the image for larger size.
The Transaction written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and executed by Felox08 is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)

Mad science circle

The Internet is so large, and so diverse, that you cannot help but encounter images that match up with your own visual inspirations, even when those inspirations were arrived at independently. Consider this…

…which I found here. It’s not just erotic mad science. It shares a visual theme with a specific scenario which I wrote down from Invisible Girl, Heroine.

INT. THE GOLDEN TURNTABLE ROOM – DAY

Strangeways and Colleen enter the adjacent room.

A circular area on the floor in the middle of the room is shiny and gold. A trapeze-like bar hangs from the high ceiling in the middle of the circular area. On the edge of the area is a podium

COLLEEN

It is so warm in here, doctor.

STRANGEWAYS

It should help you feel less shivery and relax, yes. Now could you please disrobe completely and step into the middle of the gold circle on the floor?

COLLEEN

Uh…

STRANGEWAYS

It is alright. I am a doctor, after all.

(gesturing toward a basket next to the wall)

You can leave your clothes right there.

Strangeways returns to making notes on his clipboard.

Colleen hesitates, then undresses, placing her clothes in the basket, then steps into the middle of the gold circle.

Strangeways looks up, smiles, and puts his clipboard aside.

STRANGEWAYS

Excellent. Now, do you think that you could reach up and grasp the bar above your head.

Colleen does so.

STRANGEWAYS

Good. Now just take a deep breath and let it out slowly…

Strangeways flips a few switches on his podium.

There is a HUM. The gold circle begins to rotate slowly.

A gold latex-like substance begins to cover Colleen’s hands and feet, then work its way up her legs and down her arms.

An alarmed expression appears on Colleen’s face.

COLLEEN

My hands and feet…they’re stuck!

Well, there’s at least some resemblance.

Another in the lion’s den

Back when I was writing about a certain lion-related scene in Invisible Girl, Heroine that a certain visual image didn’t seem to exist because, of course, there are certain rather pressing safety-related issues involved in creating one.

As my image-delving has brought home to me (which it does dozens of times a week), illustrators enjoy certain freedoms that photographers do not.

Via Janitor of Lunacy. Better late than never, I suppose!

Traveling by tube

Dr. Strangeways feels no small dismay when whatever rogue government operation he’s ultimately working for decides to dispose of his experimental material, but that’s an occupational hazard of being a mad scientist on Uncle Sam’s payroll. Dr. Faustus, on the other hand, delights in the image of naked girls, suspended in their tubes of nutritive and respirative fluid. That’s real mad science for you, and squee for the thaumatophile. (It’s also an opportunity to get the sinister Frau Kupler and her operation back into the plot, and set up more mischief, which will be coming in future scripts.)

Whence this peculiar image? There are many possible sources and precedents, which I’ll discuss in this and future posts, but the one that stands out most in my imagination is from a typically whacked-out Hong Kong movie, a live action version of a Japanese animated movie called Wicked City.

There are different races of humans and non-humans occupying parallel dimensions and villainous monsters and some kind of terrible super-drug and doomed inter-species love and…oh, I give up. I can’t really make that much sense of it, but there is a scene in which a non-human character named Gaye, played by the lovely Michelle Reis, gets captured by the human authorities and suspended in a tube full of fluid for some reason. I’m mean, I’m sure it was vital to, uh, National Security or something that she be naked and on display.

I’ve done my best with the images, which are blurry and poorly lit in the film. We do get one close-up.

Unlike the luckless State Home inhabitants, Gaye does get liberated in rather spectacular fashion, when her boyfriend shows up, punches out the technician on duty, and shatters the tube.

Depositing Gaye on the floor. If you ask nice, I might just post a picture of that as well.

It didn’t influence the writing of the scene, but I was tickled to find the tireless Drake over at Medusarrific (issue #33, p. 15) diverted momentarily from his more typical set of stories of beautiful women who unexpectedly turn into stone, plastic, or gold statues to explore the girls-in-tubes theme. He even hit the mad science theme right on the money.

I won’t provide an enlarged version here — I encourage you to visit Medusarrific for that.

That astonishing power

At least twice in my life I’ve had the experience of being overwhelmed by arousal at a fantasy that simply brewed up while on a long walk when my mind had a chance to wander. An early version of the Apsinthion Protocol was one of these; it happened to me as a graduate student walking back from the university library very late (they had kicked me out at closing time, 1 a.m. as I recall). Maybe it was just fatigue or weary confusion from too many hours spent among obscure tomes, but I found myself jogging along through the lonely dark wondering if I would make it home without…well, you know.

(The first time I attempted to write down something like the Apsinthion Protocol happened as a way of distracting myself during a really boring academic colloquium I attended sometime later. I was sitting at the back of the room. Given the extent to which so many academic colloquia resemble collective wanking sessions, perhaps my behavior was less inappropriate than it might otherwise seem.)

Something like Strangeways’s obscene technology, building on the conceit that female orgasm is such a powerful force that properly channeled it can rend the fabric of reality and result in spontaneous teleportation, was also something that inconveniently occurred to me on a long walk, this on a hot summer day, this in search of a video rental outlet that I had heard had a more interesting sci-fi collection than the ones in town. The fantasy that happened then was of subjects who voluntarily did this — there is something about that leap into the unknown that I find astonishingly compelling as fantasy. The conceit (one that Vinnie Tesla has also explored) lies at the base of both Strangeways’s technology and also the very strange ritual that Maureen will eventually learn about.

Promised you I was strange, didn’t I?

(And the trip to that video store? Paid off. I was able to rent a VHS copy of Galaxy of Terror, a cult-fave that’s pretty hard to find.)

Demonic male animals

And just in case you think that the reflections in the most recent post but this about the potential for carnal relations between human women and non-human animals were just the the work of an eccentric turn-of-the-century psychologist fixated on the site of women urinating, consider the following from a much more current scientist, Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham in his 1996 book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.

Nature is dangerous.

In the lion’s den

The strange encounter which Dr. Strangeways makes inmate Sandy submit to has its own long pedigree. And not just in art, or in mad science, but what is arguably real science as well.

The possibility of sexual excitement between women and animals involves a certain degree of sexual ecitability in animals from contact with women. Darwin stated that there could be no doubt that various qadrumanous animals could distinguish women from men–in the first place probably by smell and secondarily by sight–and be thus liable to sexual excitement. He quotes the opinions on this point of Youatt, Brehm, Sir Andrew Smith and Cuvier (Descent of Man, second edition, p. 8). Moll quotes the opinion of an experienced observer to the same effect (Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis, Bd. i, p. 429). Bloch (Op. cit., p. 280, et seq.)… discusses the same point; he does not consider that animals will of their own motion sexually cohabit with women, but that they may be easily trained to it.

—Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume V

So I guess now we can figure out what gave Strangeways the idea, yes?

Pertinent artistic representations exist, at least erotica involving women and big cats:

I have yet to find a <em>photographic</em> example of a model in tight with a lion, though perhaps that’s a bit too much to expect (the most elementary kinds of safety considerations make it clear that some things are only for fantasy). I regret not having handy an image of a woman in media coitus the way Sandy finds herself (even less likely as a photograph, certainly!) Though images suggesting leonine sexual menace certain can be found, such as on the paperback cover to the left.

And that’s hardly surprising. For not only is the lion a powerful and threatening animal, but it’s also a real-world example of astonishing sexual stamina (a subject I’ve touched on a little bit in the blogosphere before). If Wikipedia can be believed, a pair of mating lions will copulate 20-40 times per day. Strangeways’s first round of test subjects must have been very busy.

It’s good to be King. Or maybe Queen. Or maybe both!

Strangeways’s machine II — golden girls

That Strangeways’s elaborate, will-subverting sex machine involves the temporary growing of a golden “second skin” on its occupants is a fantasy that has a pretty obvious origin, one that I and probably millions of others encountered on television as an adolescent.

Yep, Goldfinger (1964). Probably no one could have gotten away with showing that much of Shirley Eaton in a mainstream movie (or in 1970s-80s television) had she not been wearing all that gold paint. But as it was, they could, and she because the stuff that erotic dreams would be made of, for decades.

And perhaps even today. There’s at least one guy out there who’s seems to have been far more influenced by this scene than I. (Possibly Drake at Medusariffic was also more swayed by it, although Drake’s A.S.F.R. thing involves the whole woman turning to gold, rather than just being coated with it.) This is a German artist who’s taken for himself the name of Goldfinger and made an entire fetish of the gold body paint thing, with spectacular results. Like this…

And this…

And (oh my) this…

I was directed to Goldfinger’s fetish work by this post by Michael Blowhard, which links to all sorts of other good stuff, including the only example known to me oferotic Russian-language hip hop that uses an accordian. [Update on May 6, 2018: The old link appears to be long-since broken, but you can find the video in the Internet Archive. You can find the Russian-language lyrics here and the English-language lyrics (with some mistakes that don’t account for the fact that some of Nastya’s exclamations are in Italian) here.] Really.

Strangeways’s machine I

Sometimes catching little snippets of a sci-fi story is highly evocative, perhaps even more so that the story itself. I had something of that experience a few months back when Bacchus at ErosBlog sent me a link to this posting of an oddity over at the online fanzineShowcase.

The point of the posting is to show us something form an old British magazine called Zeta, published in 1968.

This issue was devoted to a weird science fiction story. It was hard to make much sense of the story from the post (probably because the story didn’t make a huge amount of sense to begin with) but there were some intriguing text-image combinations, including one of a woman in a machine:

“What are you doing to me?” Now, I think that the story here is actually that this woman is being abducted as part of a weird all-woman Mars Needs Women-type scenario. But the curious thing is, I think I find the text-image combination here more erotic if I don’t have, or can put out of my mind the original “genuine” context, because it is at that point that one’s imagination can go to work and start filling in the story that I like.

And I hope that perhaps it can also be the basis for beginning to fill in the story you like.

A Prisão

I wouldn’t want the impression from my insane asylum post that the women-in-prison precedent was unimportant in creating the grim storyline of the State Home for Wayward Girls. In fact, it was. And unsurprisingly, too. The prison of the sexploitationeer’s imagination might not be the voluptuous setting that a harem might be, but it certainly has the potential as a modern setting for “women beyond the reach of normal rules.” It’s an ideal setting for shower scenes, sadism, and all the girl-on-girl action you can imagine. Consequently, it’s something of an irresistable subject, and has given rise to its own genre of movies.

One could point to any number of films as an antecedent. Possibly the best of them was Caged Heat (1974), which was written and directed by Jonathan Demme (a product of the illustrious film school known as “working for Roger Corman“) who would later go on to cinematic glory as the director of Silence of the Lambs (1991), thus circling from sexploitative prison movie to truly scary insane-asylum movie.

But much as I admire Caged Heat’s extraordinary energy and anti-authoritarian spirit, perhaps a more direct women-in-prison movie is the Brazilian A Prisão, which has been released in English as Bare Behind Bars, a movie I knew I would be destined to see when I read the first sentence of El Santo’s review: “…I picked up Bare Behind Bars because I was in the mood for something sleazy, but seriously— holy living fuck!“

It takes a truly heroic filmmaking effort to bring a reviewer like El Santo to the point of “holy living fuck,” believe me. And A Prisão does not disappoint.

Abuse of medical practice for sexual gratification? Check.

Helpless prisoners used in white slavery ring? Check.

Gratuitous shower scenes? Check.

Brutal and sexually humiliating punishments? Check.

And something that I would not normally check, but which ends up here anyway (perhaps predictably in this movie) are ventures right out of the normal boundaries of the genre into straight-up hardcore.

Wow.