When I Grow Up I Will Marry an Illustration from Deities and Demigods
by levgrossman on Aug.21, 2009, under China Mieville, Lev Grossman
OK, I’m still here. I swore a mighty oath that I would post every day, and I betrayed that oath yesterday. I had lots of book-tour-y things to do and it got away from me. And as a result Smurfland is doomed and Christmas will never come again.
Or maybe I’ll just post multiple times today to make up for it. Yeah, I’ll do that.
I’ve been reading back through China Mieville’s posts, and as I physically resemble a smaller, less perfectly formed China Mieville, I’m going to take him as my model.
For example he has a deeply plangent post about his childhood crushes on characters from SF/F. As I read it I immediately knew who mine were.
First there was Dixie from What’s New with Phil & Dixie, the Phil Foglio comic strip that ran in Dragon magazine. I still love you, babe. And Phil: I’m watching you, man.
Second was an illustration from the Deities & Demigods sourcebook. I haven’t got mine handy — I’m in a hotel in San Francisco — and anyway I lost my original copy, the one with the Chthulhu and Melnibone mythoses that later got yanked for copyright reasons. But this book, aside from its undeniable value as a gameplay resource, and its hilariously disrespectful appropriation of many rich cultural and religious traditions, was the single greatest repository of hot fantasy art I had ever seen. Apparently it’s OK to show bare breasts if the lady in question is a goddess. Because, you know, it’s a spiritual thing. And some of those ladies didn’t even have lobster heads and such.
There was one page, I think it was in the American Indian mythos (they didn’t say native American back in the day), of this skinny blonde chick, who was sort of bathing in a stream … we spent a lot of time together, she and I. I got the impression she was preparing to lure some hapless warrior to his death — you could see one in the background, looking like he was making a really big mistake by checking her out. But I know she wouldn’t have lured me to my death.
Or maybe she would have. But it would have been worth it.
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August 21st, 2009 on 1:47 pm
Succubus FTW!
Although my true geek crush was the Andorian girl in the maroon uniform (she was confused by the ‘uniform colors’ page in the Joseph Tech Manual) that appeared in a short story at the back of Starlog in the seventies or eighties.
August 21st, 2009 on 2:14 pm
Ha! Fun topic. My geek crush was not an illustration but the screen-meltingly hot Caroline Munro, star of such early to mid-’70s fare as “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad,” “Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter,” and “StarCrash.” Good times.
If I had to pick a fantasy illustration, I’d have to choose between a dozen Larry Elmore D&D illustrations, probably one of Count Strahd’s conquests.
August 21st, 2009 on 2:22 pm
I remember that one well. That edition was the best one of the lot. I still have it somewhere. Great memory.
August 21st, 2009 on 3:14 pm
My God, I haven’t thought about Dixie in years! But I sure thought about her a lot back then
Remember in the last (?) strip, when they finally got to talk about ‘Sex and D&D’? It’s perhaps unsurprising that Foglio went on to do pornographic comics (among other things)…
I’ll echo Church here and go with the succubus from the old monster manual. Though if comics count, it was Kitty Pryde all the way — Arab Jewish tensions be damned!
Also, you realize you’ve opened yourself to commentary by degenarate Loth-fetishists?
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