Maureen in Strangeways’s clutches
Those of you who have read Invisible Girl, Heroine know that at the end Maureen Creel plays a Xanatos Gambit against mad scientist Strangeways, which involves the intersection of (1) Maureen’s invisibility tech, (2) Strangeways’s “golden membrane” sex machine, (3) the fiendish device known as a micromachine quantum resonator and (4) a dangerously-powerful aphrodisiac. (I hope this summary will encourage those of you who haven’t yet read Invisible Girl, Heroine to at least consider doing so.) The gambit plays out with the following exchange:
MAUREEN
Well I am right on the edge of the biggest fecking orgasm I will ever have…uh…uh…and I can’t hold back much more…uh…so let’s find out just how much power I have..uh.uuh..whether its true that radius…increases monotonically with the force of the orgasm. …ah..ah…ah…
CLOSE-UP – STRANGEWAYS’S FACE
Stgrangeways’s face is grinning broadly, but suddenly shifts to a horrified expression.
STRANGEWAYS
No! Stop! Stop the ma…
Well now you don’t have to just imagine the scene, because 3D artist KristinF, whose work has been featured here recently, has rendered a version of it for you, right at the critical moment.
(Click on the image for full size. 
Maureen in the Machine by KristinF and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
And I must say I really like what’s been done here, not just with the mad-lab and the gilding, but with the facial expressions: Maureen on the point of ecstasy, and Strangeways at the point of realizing that something is about to go very, very wrong.
I hope to see more of this in the future, and hope you all do as well.
Maureen’s Re-engineering: Page Two
The key to technological success is persistence. Maureen knows this.
(Click on the image for full size.
Maureen’s Reverse Engineering: Page Two by Dark Vanessa and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
And from there, it’s off to wild adventures for Maureen…
Maureen’s Re-engineering: Page One
Time for another short comic of Gnosis material, in this case taken from the beginning of Invisible Girl, Heroine and illustrated by Argentine artist Dark Vanessa, who in addition to producing the sort of fetching manga we see below does some gorgeous pin-up work which you can see at DeviantArt.
The story — if you recall — begins in an earlier Gnosis College parascript Progress in Research, in which technologist girl Maureen Creel unearths the fact that a Gnosis physics professor has invented an invisibility technology, which he is abusing in an obvious way.
At the start of Invisible Girl, Heroine, Maureen takes it upon herself to re-create the prof’s technology for her own use. I chose it as a short subject to develop into a micro-comic for two reasons: (1) in itself it’s about as simple a story as can be told: protragonist encounters obstacles but overcomes them in the end and (2) it’s sort of humorous, though obviously YMMV.
The manga:
(Click on the image for full size.
Maureen’s Reverse Engineering: Page One by Dark Vanessa and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
Better luck next page, Maureen!
Erotic Mad Science Invades Wholesome American Comic
Or it did back around 2000 anyway. Chris’s Invincible Superblog has a post pointing out that the Archie spin-off comic book to Archie’s Weird Mysteries in which Archie Andrews dates a sexbot named Lisi.
Lisi was created by a local mad scientist to have the best features of both Betty and Veronica, I believe as some sort of very-necessary research into teenage sexuality. She thus interestingly represents an attempt at sort of erotic chimera, like Jireen who was created out of Jill Keeney and Maureen Creel. Although as far as I know, neither Betty nor Veronica had to be dissolved in the process of making Lisi. (Darn!)
Squick or squee, I guess. Though perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that something like this was going on somewhere in the Archie fictional universe. I mean, Don DeCarlo did a lot of its art for a long time, and we know that DeCarlo definitely had a thing for sci-fi cheesecake and I’d wager he’d have ventured into erotic mad science given free rein…
Glad I’m alive now, rather than back then.
Aesthetics of the Fly III
In the end, Seth Brundle decides he just can’t hack being a human-fly hybrid (one which is becoming more fly than human as time goes on). And there have been complications, in the form of his girlfriend Veronica getting pregnant (with what it’s not clear).
So Brundle comes up with what is clearly very much a mad science idea, which is that he is going to use his transporter to fuse himself, Veronica, and baby into a single hybrid, one which he hopes will be more human than fly.
It’s quite an audacious idea, I must say, and perhaps it’s one source of my idea of fusing Maureen Creel and Jill Keeney into a single woman named Jireen. Unfortunately for science, Veronica is no more keen on the idea of being fused with Brundle than Aloysius was with Jireen, when Jireen proposed exactly that.
It’s a close call for Veronica, though. She almost gets fused. And I must say she makes a fetching mad science almost-victim.
Not a movie that really ends well for any of its protagonists. But it’s a true classic all the same.
Conjoinment
At the end of Gnosis Dreamscapes, Aloysius attempts a Hail Mary play with the Apsinthion Protocol to try to save the lives of Jill and Maureen, both gravely wounded in their encounter with Madder’s thugs.
As so often in mad science, what happens isn’t exactly according to plan, and what results is a conjoinment of Jill and Maureen. More personal identity porn
Now with a little bit of effort you can find a fair amount of conjoinment material out there. This example is found at Gammatelier, which has a lot of this sort of thing, very fetchingly done too.
But of course this art, though perhaps appealing, isn’t quite what’s going on in Gnosis Dreamscapes. Jill and Maureen fuse completely to make a single individual, not just a sort of conjoined non-twin (or triplet, or what have you). Artistic representations of that more complete process are harder to find, probably because a single fused being looks rather a lot like just another human being.
But there is at least one fine example of a complete fusion. Back in the 1990s John Byrne , a prolific comic book artist who has worked on more superheroes than most people even know exist (website here) created a short-run series called Babe. Babe was created when five separate women were fused together through some weird process involving alien technology and arcane forces (can you hear the thaumatophiles panting?), creating a being geometrically stronger and tougher (and arguably, more comic-book outlandish) than any of the five women put together.
Eventually the situation got defused and we get to see Babe’s five component women:
Though in a later series Babe was re-created. The scene in which one of her component women vanishes to recreate Babe should have a familiar feel to readers of The Apsinthion Protocol.
I don’t think Carolyn actually melts away — panels in the previous number suggest she spontaneously dematerializes/is teleported away while showering, in a scene reminiscent of one that happens in Mars Needs Women. (If you remember that scene, or indeed anything else in Mars Needs Women, you have my sympathy.)
And as for Maureen and Jill? As the last intertitle says…to be continued.
Black Mass
What with all the generalized do-badding, and all the uses and abuses of religious settings going on around Gnosis, I guess it would only be a matter of time before someone decided on performing a Black Mass.
Félicien Rops (1833 - 1898), "Black Mass" (or "The Sacrifice") 1883
Just not that kind of Black Mass, fond as we all can be of Félicien Rops (intriguing gallery here).
This kind of Black Mass.
Alexander Scriabin‘s Sonata No. 9, performed here by naughty (but clearly virtuosic) young Arthur Kaufman, first seen in Invisible Girl, Heroine precipitating an orgy. A talented young man indeed!
The point at which Maureen walks in on him to settle his hash respecting the aphrodisiac she stole from him is approximately here in the score.
The dynamics marking in the score at the end of the crescendo shown in the third measure is only f, but I have yet to hear a recording of this work in which the performer interpreted that to mean anything other than “wicked loud.” I wouldn’t know how to characterize the technical demands of this piece other than “wicked difficult.” Small wonder Maureen had little trouble dropping in on Arthur.
And if you want to see it performed, you’re in luck, because YouTube has Yevgeny Sudbin doing just that.
Scarier than some old ritual with daggers and alters, or at least so it seems to me.
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 channelled 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.)
Dreaming of orgies
The rather exciting, aphrodisiaic-driven Sigma formal that Maureen gets such a close view of of course has its own long pedigree: another dream of a morality-free zone, a melting world of pleasures taken and given. The idea of the orgy appears over and over in the world’s erotic art, so it behooves me to give a few examples. Take, for instance, this exquisite carved-ivory reel from Japan.
(Click on image for a high-res version.)
In a very different cultural context, consider the temple sculptures at Khajuraho:
(Click on the image for a larger version.)
One thing you’re supposed to learn about in a modern college education, of course, is other cultures. The Sigmas and their dates are putting this precept into practice.
Of course, I wouldn’t be a a sex blogger worthy of the name if I at least once post one other very famous orgy scene, this one drawn by the great Wally Wood for Paul Krassner‘s The Realist.
(Click on image for larger version.)
Popular culture is a common area of study in contemporary higher education, too.
Girl, suspended
Invisible Maureen witnesses an initiation at Sigma Epsilon Chi that makes the Omega initiation in Apsinthion Protocol look like a merry little romp (if you discount the SWAT team raid at the end, anyway). What is going on here?
Well, if you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to have to go one of those corporate training thingies where you do “trust exercises” like falling backwards and trusting your colleagues to catch you (good luck!) then you might have something of the flavor of it. Want to prove your trust, Kyra? Well, here’s an exercise where you can really prove it.
Because what Kyra’s having done to her here, well… Let me put it this way: 
it can’t plausibly be described as anything other than dangerous. Unlike humanity’s evidently-endless number of paternalists and pokenoses I regard it as no part of my remit in this world to dictate to other grown-ups what they may and mayn’t do with themselves. But I am obliged to point out that responsible people more knowledgeable than I about practices like the one depicted just cannot be done very safely. Autoerotic asphixia is believed to have killed the pioneering cartoonist Vaughn Bodé and the actor David Carradine and might kill as many as 1000 people in the U.S. alone. So it’s not to be trifled with, by any stretch of the imagination.
But… considering at least just the fictional context here, the danger might be the point. If you really want to signal to someone just how amazingly comitted you are to some group or cause, wouldn’t the fact that your signal is not just costly, but really scary and dangerous for you, make it all the more effective?
