Like this, for instance.  Mad scientist, pretty girl apparently dissolving in a vat.  Could this be an early example of the Apsinthion Protocol meme?

Chasing the provenance on this one was a little tricky.  It seems to have been the cover art for a pulp magazine called Fantastic Adventures, which according to Wikipedia was published between 1939 and 1953.

I was able to find a scan of the cover online, but it’s a thumbnail so unfortunately I can’s read the date.  However cross-checking the novel The Involuntary Immortals on Rog Phillips’s entry in the Internet Science Fiction Database would seem to place the publication date in 1949.  I would welcome additional provenance in the comments.

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Apsinthion Dissolve by by Niceman, commissioned by Dr. Faustus at EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.   (Click on image to see full-size.)

The scene should be familiar — Li Anwei and Professor Corwin providing Nanetta Rector with a very convincing demonstration of the viability of a functionalist theory of mind in action, via the apsinthion protocol.   If you’ve read the script, you might recall:

The rise of the fluid continues to the point where it has reached Anwei’s abdomen. She has disappeared up to her mid thigh.

NANETTA

What is going on here? What is happening to Anwei?

CORWIN

(mildly)

What is going on here is perfectly safe.

The fluid has reached up to Anwei’s breasts, and Anwei has vanished up to her crotch.

Sound of a loud CRY from Anwei, muffled by the tube.

NANETTA

She is in pain!

CORWIN

Cries like that might indicate…something rather the opposite of pain.

NANETTA

This is insane! Stop this! Stop this right now?

CORWIN

But My dear Miss Rector, didn’t you hear? To stop this now would risk death to Anwei.

Nanetta rushes up to the tube and pounds on its sides with her fists.

NANETTA

Anwei! Anwei!

What is left of Anwei pays no attention to Nanetta.

That was fun to write, but even so, the gratification was considerably heightened by being able to see it in an explicit visual realization.  Niceman may modestly describe himself as “just a farmboy nerd” over at Deviant Art, but he has a deft hand with rendering software and very much the right sort of vision for thaumatophile art, as the result above shows.  So if you like what you see, by all means pay him a visit over at Deviant Art or, if you’re a subscriber, at Renderotica.  You’ll be glad you did.

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Time I guess for another one of my melancholy Dr.-Fausuts-has-no-original-ideas posts.

A word first on how we might have gotten to the strange situation depicted in the panel above, and the provenance of the art.  It’s a panel from Weird Science #7, not a comix-format of the 1985 John Hughes movie, but an actual series put out in by famous EC Comics.  EC’s publisher William Gaines is an underacknowledged hero of American culture.  His comics lines broke new ground in many areas including horror and science fiction.  He acted defiant in front of a persecuting congressional committee.  He put an African-American character in a position of high competence and responsibility at a time when they were largely confined to menial or comic relief roles in mainstream fiction.  And when it became impossible to sustain his comics-making enterprise in the face of cultural backlash, he founded Mad magazine, which I’ll bet did more to train the satirical intelligence of generations of young Americans than any other publication — a latter-day American Mercury for the adolescent set.  A great story, which you can find entertainingly told in David Hajdu‘s The Ten-Cent Plague:  The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America (click on image to the left).

But before Mad and all that, EC had Weird Science, a pioneer of science-fiction comics.  The stories were largely written by Gaines and Al Feldstein, and drawn by a remarkable set of comics artists the included Harvey Kurtzman, Joe Orlando, and the great Wally Wood.   Though the story of this post, “Something Missing!” was written by Feldstein and drawn by Jack Kamen.

Submitted for your consideration:  Professor Roger Lawrence is miserably married to Hannah, a shrewish middle-aged woman who rides him hard to give up his experiments and teach more classes so that they can have more money.  It’s not his fault:  Professor Lawrence’s life is the way it is because he lives in the EC Comics fictional universe, where bitterly unhappy marriages are the norm.  They drive plots forward, you see.  Lawrence finds comfort in two things:  the laboratory in which he has just perfected an amazing machine he calls the “Physio-Chemical Decomposer and Re-aligner,” and his pretty blond undergraduate research assistant, Sally Chadwick.

Lawrence and Sally successfully test the machine on a mouse, which they decompose into slime, then recompose into — a piece of cheese.  Sally’s explanation:  “…that’s what it was thinking about when the machine dissolved it.”  They reverse the process, restoring the mouse.  Then, of course, they fall in love.

Well, Hannah is not pleased at all when she sniffs out this turn of events.  She marches to the laboratory and demands admission.  Sally is trapped:  there will be scandal, ruin, unless she can improvise a method of escape.  And, being a brilliant as well as a beautiful girl, she quickly improvises one — leaping into Lawrence’s amazing machine and melting herself into something else!  (Thus the panel above.  For the fetishist, the detail of Sally’s abandoned dress and shoes on the edge of the machine really makes the scene.)

However, this does not work out quite as well as one might have hoped once Hannah storms in.

Doubtless an “oh shit” moment for Professor Lawrence.  For Dr. Faustus, though, it was a moment of marvel, because not only has Feldstein anticipated the whole “liquid girl” scenario, but in having Sally turn herself into a statue, he’s also anticipated the whole A.S.F.R. thing.   I mean, damn!  (And don’t get me started on the whole professor-scientist/student experimentee thing.)  Probably the deepest thrill, though, comes from the willingness of the girl to jump into the machine.

All is not lost, though, because Lawrence still has his machine.  Or…

I’ve omitted the last panel, because your imaginations may be better than fiction.  But if you really must you can, with some effort, find a reprint of the story.

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MOIRA

It would be a one-way trip for whoever did it.

NANETTA

It would mean giving up everything in this world.

MOIRA

And possibly entering a far more wonderful one.

NANETTA

Or it might mean a few moments of ecstasy, and then annihilation.

MOIRA

And there is likely very little time to decide.

(In my bleak moments I often think that what Nanetta and Moira would eventually achieve — even if it was just blissful annihilation — would be superior to the alternative:  adulthood.)

One finds one’s erotic inspiration where one is.  Where I was for a lengthy stretch of young adulthood was Harvard’s Widener Library.  Had I had my druthers, the erotic inspiration would have taken the form of a studious-but-sultry meganekko but sadly there was a severe druthers shortage in Cambridge at the time and so I didn’t get mine.

There was, however, this mural executed by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925).

A doughboy embraces death and victory in the same moment.  (We know he’s victorious because there’s a defeated figure in a stahlhelm at his feet, presumably one of those nasty wicked Germans.)  At the time I would pass this mural daily (it’s on the library’s main entrance stairs) my conscious thoughts were that it was a singularly shameless bit of militaristic propaganda.

My subconscious thoughts, I conjecture, were on a different track entirely, thinking that maybe it’s cool — erotic even — to throw one’s life in like that.  It’s a natural interpretation — look at the soldier’s face, it’s expression and positioning under Victory’s bared breast.   It would explain a lot about the sort of things I’ve written.

Sargent didn’t do much in the more explicitly erotic line, although there is some, for example this study of a nude Egyptian girl.

Orientalist art — something I’ve found appealing before.

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If you had to come up with the genesis of the strange fantasy of Li Anwei and Nanetta Rector and eventually others orgasmically turning to liquid, a conceit on which The Apsinthion Protocol turns, you might do worse than that, a description of what orgasm felt like, given to 18 year-old me by a female companion.

But there’s doubtless some reason why this particular metaphor stuck so soundly in my mind.   Could it be, perhaps, that liquids, and water especially are such erotic elements?  Venus is intimately connected with the sea:  she was neither gestated in a womb nor constructed as a piece of technology like Pandora, but emerged from the sea foam, the product of sea-water and the blood from the castrated genitals of Ouranos.  Her emergence is commemorated in perhaps the greatest masterwork of the early Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

It is a subject painters will return to again and again.  Consider Odilon Redon’s twentieth-century sumbolist version of the same, which I find particularly striking.

But the association of women and water and eros is not limited to Venus.  Consider also, as just one example, Gustave Courbet’s Woman in the Waves.

Women, eros, liquid.  So powerful an association that there’s even a genre of erotica (printed in water resistant volumes, like that depicted at the left) devoted to it.  And if you survey photographic erotica, you’ll find that it’s a prominent theme — so much is shot in our around water — on beaches or in oceans or near waterfalls or ponds.  Or in baths or showers or hot tubs.    Surf over to a frequent poster of tasteful female nudes — GoodShit for example — on any day of the week and count the number of young lovelies who are in, or near, or covered with water.

And so I suppose it is hardly an accident also that some odd person like me might drive the metaphor into a more literal sort of fantasy…

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