“Well, That’s Terrorism For You”

Over the holiday weekend my indefatigable friend and patron Dr. Faustus launched his new Fabulae Atroces Fausti series with a dark little comic book called She’s The Ransom. Fair warning, Faustus is at some pains to have us all know in advance of reading that this is not a happy-fun piece of art:

“She’s the Ransom” isn’t Erotic Mad Science. It’s something more like erotic horror. Or an attempt at a contemporary realization of the old-fashioned shudder pulps. Or it’s a dark vision of things that are soon to come. The blurb I wrote for the copy deposited at the Internet Archive reads as follows:

In a near-future dystopia, a gang of rebels abduct a rich, politically-influential man and his wife and use them as actors in a macabre piece of political theater. This work is a short comic book. It contains violence and explicit sexual content and is not suitable for minors.

If that weren’t enough warning, the new comic has already attracted reader complaints, not the least of which is that it has “an incomplete and just fucked up narrative”. I’d argue with “incomplete” myself — I think it’s actually a chillingly-intricate little comic — but “fucked up” I would cheerfully grant, even if I think the noose and the knife on the front cover should have been sufficient warning for anyone.

Like many of Dr. Faustus’s comic book projects, Faustus wrote the script and the illustration is by Erosarts.

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Better Fantasy-To-Image Conversion Tools

Much like Bacchus I have no shortage of images in my head which I’d like to have out in the world, and also like him I have neither any real skill, nor any talent that I can discern, for doing my own drawing. So needless to say I’ve been following Bacchus’s recent posts on 3D SexVilla with considerable interest. Now, there have been software engines for creating high-quality graphics around for quite a while, but my own sense is that you have to be pretty damn good to get results like this:

(“The Seventh Time I Died,” by Scandinavian artist Johan Flood, gallery of his work here.)

And naturally, as a committed Linux user, I hold out high hopes for the development of MakeHuman, which can also produce impressive Poser-like results:

Still, I suspect that this engine won’t be all that simple to use.

But simpler things are surely coming, and that will mean significant changes. The point of this post will be to speculate about them a bit. There’s reason for optimism here.

The hope is that whatever interfaces we have will be easier and cheaper to use. That seems almost sure to happen, and when it does, it will mean that the sort of publicly available kink out there will be stranger, and better, and kinkier than before, because you’ll have not just thousands but millions of weird imaginations at work. That means a lot of fetishes and a lot more strange little communities of sexual interest. It was Voltaire, I think, who once remarked that if you have two religions in land they will cut each other’s throats, but if you have thirty there will be peace. As in religion, so in sex, maybe. It will be hard to have oppression of sexual minorities when pretty much everyone is part of some sexual minority or another.

A possible further social implication might be an escalation of interest in transhumanism. Once people can see vividly all the strange and wonderful things that might happen, the more they might be interested in enhancing themselves in ways such that these things could happen.

And there may be deeper technological implications as well. I’ve mulled over a suggestion made by Bacchus that perhaps in a decade or so we will have artificial intelligence (AI) engines capable of turning natural language scripts or instructions into illustrations.

That’s a tricky thought to get my brain around. Although it’s not really my thing, I sat down and composed a little bit of script in honor of the latest little weird community of interest to catch my eye out there on the internet: the so-called “shrinking woman” (SW) enthusiasts. (There really is something for everyone out there.)

(The HTML tables above reproduce a script layout by Celtx, which is a very cool (and free) tool for writing screenplays, comic book scripts, etc.)

Now the above script probably isn’t your thing either, but bear with me. There would be a lot of detail to fill in here. Is Professor Strange a Mephistophelean figure or a Jerry Lewis-like nutty professor? Is his laboratory a Bond-villain lair? An antiseptic academic space? A steampunk setting? Is Stacey an anatomically-implausible comic book cover babe? Or perhaps short and zaftig? Blond, red-headed, brunette, raven-haired? European? Asian? African? I imagine you were filling in all the details as you read the script, probably in the way that you found the most gratifying.

Now in my experience (admittedly limited) in working with professional artists, I’ve prepared written descriptions to which they’ve responded with multiple pencil sketches and a query: which among these best captures what you’re looking for? It’s a process that often reveals pleasant surprises, bits of self-knowledge that I didn’t have before. (Though, to be sure, it’s also expensive, at least when I’m paying the commission.)

Now a really good AI engine would probably not just stop at turning out drafts based on your scripts. A really good AI engine will learn about you, improving its searches over time to read what you give it and turn out things that are better and better, more and more like what your mind is searching for, things you find more and more appealing. A really good AI engine — and this might be a few decades further down the road from what Bacchus first suggested to me — would be a partner, something (perhaps we might even call “it” a someone) that serves as a partner, something that builds up within itself an image of your own erotic consciousness and imagination.

(I realize now there must be artists out there beginning to gnash their teeth. Sorry guys. Feel free to imagine a future in which AI engines manage to replace the annoying writer. Maybe I deserve it.)

And that’s significant, because it’s a step forward for both you and the machines. Nietzsche wrote an aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil: Grad und Art der Geschlechtlichkeit eines Menschen reicht bis in den letzten Gipfel seines Geistes hinauf. Someone’s sexuality reaches to the very top of his or her spirit. Most likely he was right. You create a record of yourself, not just in pictures, but in intelligent software. If there’s ever to be any hope of overcoming death through indirect mind uploading, as Paul Almond has proposed, this could be an unparalleled record of yourself, the recording that reaches right to the top of your spirit.

Now that would make possible one amazing future.

Keep Your Nipples Up, Phoebe!

It was G.W.F. Hegel, if I remember right, who wrote that the Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. He meant this as a commentary on the Self-Understanding of the World Spirit in History or some such Deep Important Germanic Thing, but here I’ll just apply it to dirty comic books instead, and how you don’t really know the significance of something when you first encounter it.

It was in a dingy used bookstore, in a decaying New England industrial town, that I encountered in my late teens a truly bizarre-looking comic book called The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist. I opened it up and found…a pretty young woman being forced to strip at gunpoint by a Nazi (hmm, Erosblog familiar theme there, then tied to a helicopter. Well, I thought, that’s certainly different.

But I could deal. I mean, I was eighteen and in college and all sophisticated about sex, right?

Well, wrong. I think I was somewhat disturbed by the fact that in Episode III our heroine Phoebe is killed, and in Episode IV her corpse is stolen by a cult of necrophiliacs…but somehow later on she is resurrected by an Eskimo shaman and then she proceeds to have a endure a series of perils and humiliations that take her all over the globe. She is converted into a makeshift torpedo by some gay white-slaving submarine pirates:

She is captured by shoe fetishists:

She is enslaved and abused by Asian communists:

And so on. There is a mad tattoo artist and a guild of lesbian assassins, among other things. Feeling somewhat disturbed, I didn’t buy the book, a decision I regretted for years thereafter, because copies of The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist would prove very hard to find in subsequent years.

But what I didn’t realize then is that Phoebe is satire, and absolutely brilliant satire at that. (ErosBlog’s astute readers will have picked this up from individual panels already, of course.) She was written in the mid-1960s by Michael O’Donoghue who would later go on to comedic glory as a writer for National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. She was drawn by Frank Springer, who would go on to a future as a distinguished artist at Marvel comics. And her adventures were first published in Evergreen Review, one of the most daring serious publications of its day (so much so that it was once denounced by Gerald Ford on the floor of Congress). Everything that O’Donoghue can think of is a target here, from old Perils-of-Pauline like movie serials to James Bond movies. Needless to say, the optimistic consumerist culture of the postwar United States is well skewered.

Indeed, by the end, O’Donoghue is even satirizing himself and his own bizarre sense of humor.

If you can ever get a copy of Phoebe, treasure it, because there’s really nothing like it. I read it now and wonder how I could have missed all the obvious jokes.

I suppose the answer is just too obvious. Because I was eighteen years old and this a comic book whose heroine spends about eighty of its ninety pages naked, that’s why.

Afterthought: If you are an eccentric billionaire looking for a project with which to make your mark on the world, please consider financing Phoebe as a movie. Thanks, and now back to your regular ErosBlog programming.

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Comic Book Penis

National Penis Month is not forgotten. This is from a panel in a French-language comic book found on alt. binaries. pictures. erotica. cartoons: