Ariana Page Russel suffers from a condition called dermotographia, which causes her body to exhibit extreme hypersensitivity via an immune response. Any time Ariana’s skin is lightly scratched or irritated hives and welts spring up in the irritated area, usually lasting around a half hour.
Where some might find this an annoyance to be dealt with or ignored, Ariana utilizes her condition as an artistic medium, scratching patterns and writing into her skin, then photographing the often beautiful result. Ariana Page Russel, by dint of her innovative creativity, is the very definition of a Deviant Artist.
Imagine for a moment that all your dreams have come true, and finally, you’re starting to turn into a metal monster. Now imagine that to your horror the transformation is less laser eyes and drill genitals and more a long, slow, painful metamorphosis into a rusted erector set. No, there will be no rampage of destruction and mayhem for you. After your diagnosis you’ll be transported to a terminal ward to live out your days being poked, prodded, and otherwise suffering the indignities normally associated with investigative medicine.
Interestingly, my highly refined medical acumen resultant from an exhaustive study in the hippocratic arts (four seasons of House and counting!) was perked at the names of the diseases and syndromes being bandied about. Impressively, the terminology is at least relatively sound. Although I can’t tell what I was more impressed with; that the film makers did their homework or that I’ve finally learned something from countless hours of television.
This video (and stupidly enjoyable track) must have cost at least a cool million, but the Backstreet Boys didn’t care. They were riding high on Lou Perlman’s buggery adoration, they had legions of teenage girls at their beck and call, and it was the nineties, so nobody bothered telling them (to their faces) how stupid they looked, acted, and sounded.
When you’re that rich, that vaunted, and that young, what can you do? Why, a Thriller rip-off that will live in infamy for a chosen few, of course. Namely, me and the rest of the malcontents who were impressionable youth during that cursed era.
And by impressionable, I mean we thought backflipping werewolves were pretty much the golden apex of comedy. We still think that.
Why am I posting this on Cthursday? Pay attention to the gangly gentleman in the deceptively intellectual glasses, with the briefcase and the obsession with staring away from the camera at exactly a ninety-degree angle. I assume he’s supposed to be some sort of Jekyll/Hyde manifestation, but his bifurcation is less monstrous than it is piscean. My hypothesis is that some concept artist snuck that one past the board, giggling into his dog-eared copy of the Compleat Works of Lovecraft the while.
But I don’t think backflipping werewolves had to be snuck past anyone.
In the dim history of my mumblings there are mentions of a property called, intriguingly, Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat. I first read this and wrote about it back at Table of Malcontents, mentioning it in a post on comic book MBQ. The post earned me to scorn of an entire generation of American manga fans (”white, fat, mousy-haired, wire-framed and lacking in personal hygiene”), and perhaps was not the best venue in which to introduce Rankle.
Allow me, instead, to quote from creator Rosearik Rikki Simons:
Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat is about a child Ghoul named Ranklechick. Ranklechick lives near Jupiter’s moon, Europa, within a sentient space station called the Europan Zoo. He lives with his three-legged cat, Pumpernick. Since birth, Ranklechick has been accused by his father of murdering his mother and now the sad little Ghoul thinks he can make everything right if he can just talk to his mother’s ghost. This is Ranklechick’s obsession, and every Ghoul on board the Zoo must have an obsession in order for the Zoo to survive. Being that he is of the inventor class of Ghoul, Ranklechick invents an absurd collection of devices in his quest to speak to his mother, like his Bliss Extractor, which he uses to try to get an autograph from the ghost of Charles Dickens, or his Sphere of Belligerence, a spacecraft propulsion system that literally insults physics. All Ghouls are social idiots trapped in a society that thrives off of absurdity, like a vast population of Asperger’s patients. Ranklechick spends his time living in the densely populated Europan Zoo, building necrotic communicators when he isn’t being interrupted by the the strange and unnatural — and he has many interruptions: running from handshaking lessons, avoiding being made into candy by the evil android Nathan Burblepinch, getting repeatedly decapitated, suffering the company of oniomaniac children, being possessed by the Spirit of Failure, suicidal disembodied brains, melancholic ham, a sardonic talking three-legged cat for a best friend, and all the while Ranklechick continues to believe he is becoming a comic book character. When all is quiet and he has time to think, he wonders if he’ll ever get to tell his dead mother that he loves her. This is a comedy.
I was so taken with Ranklechick’s cast and setting that I penned two pieces of fanart, something I never, ever do, one of which can be seen to the right. That is Sister Toovibohnes (I’m iffy on the spelling), a straight-laced space nun that lives aboard the Europan Zoo with the rest of the gang.
Ranklechick has been generously made available for free on Simons’ website, along with Super Information Hijinx: Reality Check! (which I have not read, but I believe it involves catgirls and also “the internet”).
MP3 provided for review purposes only, and will be available for just a few days. Buy DotHS music here.
I met her at the EOD
She sank her dewclaws into me
We stepped out to watch the tide come in
She said “A little swim would do some wonders for your skin”
Shed my old self slipped into the sea
Do you have an unsightly vagina, with slopping labia, birthmarked pudendum and a gooey external tube, reminiscent of the Xenomorph Queen’s egg-laying protuberance in Aliens? If yes, that will suffice nicely: no need to send pictures. *
Some musings on the elective genioplasty craze from Next Nature. All possessives as pluralization examples are bracket sic, natch.
I wonder if the modernistic painter Piet Mondriaan could have imagined designer vagina’s…
What used to be a somewhat mysterical territory of the female body is being formalized into the clear and accessible designer vagina. These post-sexual vagina’s, also referred to as playboy vagina’s because they are modeled after the photoshopped vagina’s featured in playboy magazine, are the ideal of many young girls. Although a slightly diminished sexual sensitivity is a known complication of the surgery, girls seem to prefer the visual power of a clear cut vagina above their own sexual arousal. It’s plastic fantastic and boyfriends love it! Various clinics for cosmetic surgery offer the so called vagina rejuvenation technique providing women with a hypernatural vagina.
One can’t help but wonder if the gay community is soon to find itself in the throes of a parallel elective analplasty phenomenon.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
Do you have an unsightly vagina, with slopping labia, birthmarked pudendum and a gooey external tube, reminiscent of the Xenomorph Queen’s egg-laying protuberance in Aliens? If yes, that will suffice nicely: no need to send pictures. *
