Word has reached me from my good friend Dr. Faustus at Erotic Mad Science that yesterday’s post marked the beginning of a series of perhaps 20 posts featuring pulp art reconstructions. The series, which is tagged PAR1 for your viewing convenience, is an example of Dr. Faustus’s views on hedonic philanthropy being put into action: he engaged a variety of erotic artists to recreate classic pulp images, bringing us new versions of old art, versions that make explicit what was previously left to the imagination. As he explains:

The basic idea is that we’re delving into the past of old pulp and comics covers and looking for relevant art for modern artists to… sex up a bit. Or rather, a bit more, given that these covers were pretty racy to begin with.

I’m really looking forward to seeing all the images Faustus has commissioned. To give you an idea how it’s going, here are some side-by-side thumbs of the art in yesterday’s first post from the series. On the left is the vintage art from the cover of an Italian pulp magazine; on the right is the 2015 reconstruction by Netherlands artist Frans Mensink:

pulp-reconstruction

If you’re still curious about the purpose behind all of this (and you’ve already followed the hedonic philanthropy link), Dr. Faustus has a page here explaining his project in greater detail:

As part of my project of commissioning and publishing art for Erotic Mad Science, I am setting up a series of commissions in recreating various old pulp covers. I love these things: they were lurid and shameless, an attempt to titillate the mid-twentieth century viewer into buying the magazine for the genre-fiction contents within. Of course, they couldn’t be too lurid – the nudity had to (usually) be implied to keep news dealers from getting in trouble with the local prosecutor – but they went pretty far.

One of the delights of living in the twenty-first century is that we have a medium in which we can really let our respective freak flags fly, and this is one of mine. The objective here is create psuedo-pulp covers that make explicit what might only have been hidden before.

Budding erotic artists, are you paying attention? Dr. Faustus is not just explaining himself at this link, he’s actively recruiting additional artists to work on his project. This is paying work, and by my count, Faustus has more than forty pulp covers that he has not yet assigned to anyone, in addition to the approximately twenty that he’ll be publishing during the remainder of June. Get after it!

Similar Sex Blogging: