Waiting for transformation

S.J. Perelman (1904-1979), who as a humorist might be the one American who reasonably bears comparison to P.G. Wodehouse, was doing Erotic Mad Science way back when. Or more specifically, in a story “Captain Future, Block that Kick!,” published in the New Yorker in 1940, he begins thus.

I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.

Waving something like that in front of Dr. Faustus is like waving a red flag in front of a bull or money in front of a United States Senator — vigorous action will result. In my case, the vigorous action is more Bespoke Art, in the form of a three-illustration sequence from Russkere, whose work has appeared here before (if not recently enough) in the form of a mad science chase-and-capture sequence some of you might recall.

Here is is his sequence. A girl in a diaphanous veil, a mad scientist, and a laboratory.

A girl in a diaphanous veil about to be experimented upon by a mad scientist

Zapped with mad science energies!

Girl in diaphanous veil zapped with mad science energy

Resulting in a beautiful chimpanzee.

Beautiful girl to beautiful chimpanzee.  Long live mad science!

Creative Commons License
Waiting for Transformation Sequence commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and executed by Russkere is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)

Long live mad science!

Transforming Aloysius

The strange transformation that Aloysius manages to work upon himself with his wire machine might have any number of precedents.

The fact that he’s pierced by a lot of wires from his machine is evocative, perhaps, of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a subject that found great favor with religious artists and is certainly not without homoerotic interest.

Andrea Mantegna (1431 - 1506), _St. Sebastian_ c. 1506

And in another way Aloysius’s self-induced experience might also be thought a version of the BDSM-related practice of needle play.

Closer to home, perhaps, what Aloysius does to himself is live out a pretty common geek fantasy — go from science nerd to Greek god through a miraculous technological (or just miraculous) intervention.

Searching my own memory for antecedents to this scene the one that leaps to mind most readily  is the “Den” sequence from Heavy Metal (1981), in which a nerdy teenager is transformed through the Loc-Nar (a glowing green sphere that represents super-evil, or something) with lightening, (in the best Frankenstein tradition), and then transported to a swords-and-sorcery fantasy world far away.

(Heavy Metal definitely deserves to be on any thaumatophile‘s preferred viewing list, since not only does it have this transformation sequence going on, but it also has — at least impliedly — woman on funny little robot sex.)

But perhaps most centrally of all to this scene is that Aloysius has decided to jump in with both feet and adopt, with his “death or glory, here I come” remark the operative philosophy that drove both Moira in Apsinthion Protocol and Iris in Study Abroad.

Must be something in the Pleasant Prairie water supply, I guess.