This image is reblogged from a 5 January 2014 post at Infernal Wonders, whence it was in turn reblogged from the aptly-named Bondage Blog. The intrepid proprietor over there, Rope Guy, added this commentary.

This is from an (I think) Italian horror comic called Terror Blue. In later panels these girls are walking around as partial skeletons, so I do not think this procedure in the tanks is intended to be a healthy one.

Uh oh.

This is a tube girl in this Japanese-language gallery while I was researching another post. What made the illustration stand out for me was its internalization of a classic tube-girl trope. You see, back in the days-that-would-have-been-bad-but-at-least-we-had-pulp-magazines, we often encountered illustrations like this one, which I posted on 14 August 2017: or this one, which I posted on 3 April 2017: or finally this one, which I posted on 14 October 2016:

Notice the common theme? The artists working at that time couldn’t depict nudity (at least, not without running into legal and commercial problems), so putting girls in tubes gave them a way of implying nudity, but putting having the naughty bits concealed by metal rings that were presumably part of the tube’s construction, or occasionally steam or bubbles that were part of the “experiment” she was undergoing.

I doubt that the artist who made the primary illustration in this post faced any such constraints, but the glowing rings around our girl seem like a neat tribute to the older tradition. Provenance is very uncertain, but there is at least a version of the illustration that has captions, if any of you read Japanese.

Bacchus at ErosBlog found me this gem:

Here she is in context, a page from Japanese fetish magazine Kitan Club, from 1960.

One of my many deficiencies as an adult blogger is that I have no command whatsoever of Japanese, and there is just so much material with associated Japanese text that one really wants to be able to read. Online computer tools aren’t much help: extracting text from an image with OCR tools is hit-or-miss, and even when you have the text, something like Google Translate is just fucking awful with Japanese-English translations.

But one of the joys of life in this age is that it is very easy to arrange for a skillful human to do translations, at least if you’re willing to pay up. And this time I was. The text rendered into English:

My Model

The Inquiry Committee workers looked at each other, relief showing on their faces as if they had just set down heavy loads from their shoulders with the feeling of a job well done. I hurried out of the room, stopping by the hall window to catch my breath as the clouds overhead for the fourth day in a row were dyed red. When I closed my eyes, I could still see the figure of “Miki Koyama,” her four tight limbs slowly gyrating.

“That’s the one!”

“I’m going to make her mine!”

I can do it! I had zero doubts and trusted my hunch completely. I lit my cigarette, and waited for today’s results.

I timed it carefully and went to the room, when Mr. N raised his hand and called out to me out of the tobacco smoke.

“Oh hey, you’re still here…?”

“Yeah, actually I just…”

“Ah, I see. I gotcha, I gotcha,” he said with an expression like a kid who aced his test as he withdrew.

“Who was it? Which girl tickled your fancy?”

The name “Miki Koyama” finally came up.

“Ah, from that last group… Yeah. But you know these new models are lacking in growth. That said, that model was kind of an innocent melancholy girl. To be honest, I was thinking of hiring her at my place if she graduated from here…”

Mr. N and I met about three years ago and I was very into making dolls. He made me a real designer and was my teacher for a while. That’s why my desire for a “Specialized Model” was heeded. However, if my former teacher, Mr. N, took the lead, I wouldn’t think twice. However…

Finishing the story is left as an exercise for the reader’s imagination.