Image Of The Beast

[dem bones]

Justin sent me a bunch of truly inspired underground comix scans yesterday that he thought we could use. I hope he'll be along later to fill us in about these because I sure can't. All I know about Farmer's Image Of The Beast series is that the cover of book two, Blown reads: Warning: This modern classic of horror fantasy contains scenes that may shock the nervous, and that the friend who gave it to me reckoned "You'll like this. It's right perverted".

[justin]

An authorised adaptation from well-known underground comix publishers Last Gasp of the Farmer sci-fi porn printed by the infamous Essex House. I don't know too much about the background as to how this adaptation came about, but it's an interesting attempt...

Written and drawn by Tim Boxell (as Grisly) it manages to cram all of Farmer's novel into its 32 pages. All of the castrations, inter-dimensional couplings, shape-shifting and general weird sh*t are intact. There was a second edition with a new front and back cover- I didn't scan the latter as there's no way Dem could post it without the site being immediately shut down. It has an individual having the life squeezed out of him by a snake-lady. His own snake pokes out from between her coils and is evidently of the spitting variety...

There weren't any follow-up adaptations of 'Blown' or any of Farmer's other Essex House work.

An interview with Boxell appeared in Pete Normanton's 'From the Tomb', which unfortunately didn't ask about this work, primarily concentrating on 'Commies From Mars' (Boxell's best known comix work- a title satirising US overseas policies) and his later film design work.

[dem bones]

Thanks Justin, I'll scan up some more tomorrow. You know, I tried to read Blown but just ... gave up on it. Even from the bits and bobs Michel Parry has distributed throughout his anthologies I've never found Farmer an easy author to get into. The 'Grisly'/ Boxell illustrations certainly have something, though!

[Calenture]

I've heard of Image of the Beast, but not found it locally yet. I've only read Farmer's Tiers trilogy and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. Justin's coverage of Farmer's Tarzan novels were a revelation to me! I think one other SF author who notably dabbled in weird porn was Samuel Delany. Frank Herbert's Whipping Star was also pretty strange, about an alien creature who's subjected to unwanted flogging by a woman from another planet, who materialises, delivers several blows of a whip, then vanishes again!

Oh, and I've just remembered a short story by Piers Anthony in one of the Dangerous Visions anthologies, then in Anthony's collection Anthonology. It's a long time since I read it, but it involves a man finding his way into a peculiar farm where men and women - whose intelligence is similar to that of farmyard animals - are kept in pens. The man is penned with a woman, but his attempts at sex are received with comple indifference as the woman is accustomed to much better endowed 'beasts'.

I fouind just a little information on Image of the Beast. It's part of this series:
Image of the Beast, 1968 (#1)
Blown, 1969 (#2)
Traitor to the Living, 1973

I found this cover text on this Farmer bibliography

Herald Childe has just seen a home movie in which his partner was brutally murdered, his life-fluids drained by a lady with razor-sharp dentures.
Childe is a private dick. He's accustomed to sticking his nose into other people's business, and it's usually dirty. But he's not prepared for the gut-churning horrors which await him as he wades through the L.A. smog following up a lead in the most disgusting case of his career.
He is plunged into a waking nightmare of sexual brutality and supernatural bestiality; he becomes entangled with a snake-woman; he is seduced by a filthy human sow; and he lays a ghost, only to realize that he's the one getting laid - by a woman working off the frustrations of over a century in ectoplasmic exile.
But what can he do? He can hardly tell the police that he's discovered a crowd of sex-mad vampires and werewolves from another universe...
(Quartet editions.)

I also found these scans for Part 2 of Image of the Beast...

And The Meat Socket, an excert from it available on CD Rom.

[dem bones]

Here's the snake fellow and blurb for the 1985 Granada edition of Blown which will give you some idea of what the comic is like (?)

cover: Chris Moore

THE HORRORSHOW CONTINUES

In Philip Jose Farmer's incredible sequel to The Image of the Beast, Herald Childe continues what started out as a murder case - a very gruesome one, admittedly - but which has now become a struggle against the strange and deadly beings who have taken his wife, who threaten his manhood and who threaten mankind itself.

His seems a hopeless quest. He is fighting not people but inhuman, unhuman monsters from another universe. They take grotesque physical forms, they recklessly indulge cruel whims - and they are utterly sex-crazed.

There's Vivienne - amazingly beautiful - who used to be Joan of Arc. But she has false teeth and she comes, literally, to pieces. Her lover is a snake-like horror whose needle teeth drip aphrodisiac venom. There's Count Igescu, a real live vampire. And these three are surrounded by a crowd of ghastly aliens, grisly characters in a science fiction nightmare.

But for Childe there is to be no waking up. It is no bad dream. Though no one else will believe him, he knows this is for real ...

[dem bones]

justin said:

There was a second edition with a new front and back cover- I didn't scan the latter as there's no way Dem could post it without the site being immediately shut down. It has an individual having the life squeezed out of him by a snake-lady. His own snake pokes out from between her coils and is evidently of the spitting variety...

Just as well you didn't! Grisly's presumably far milder illustration from the 1st edition just got us our very first "This image or video violated our terms of service" from photobucket!