Callidus

Well poop its been something like four months hasn’t it? How have YOU been dear reader? I’m keeping well, busy with vanilla life and trying to do a little traveling this summer (more on that later). But I have been neglecting things here, which I aim to begin rectifying…nowish.

So a quick update on things. Firstly, I am currently in-progress on a couple of projects that I’m eager to share with you all. One is a squick-a-licious manip series that’s been quite a few years in the making and secondly… Well, secondly is a new video manip. Of all the things I’ve done, Orientation has far and away gotten the biggest response over the years and I still get regular mail from people saying they enjoy it and asking when I’m going to do another video.

To which I can now answer: soonish. Quite soonish.

I won’t say more now, but I’ll have a more formal tease soon and drop a few more details 🙂

For now though, I’d like to share some more erotic-mind-control-in-comics hotness that I’ve been enjoying recently. Last time, I told you about the excellent series The Sixth Gun, today I thought we’d visit more familiar territory for comic and non-comic geek alike: Batman.

Now, after seeing The Dark Knight Rises (which was excellent btw), I got the urge to go back and re-read the original Knightfall comic storyline, from which the film is inspired. Unfortunately, most of my comic collection is currently packed away beneath a metric ton of stored items in my basement from the last time I moved. So, I decided to uh… ‘digitally match’ my comic library with some peer-sourced digital copies 🙂 But, this turns out to a great thing as reading comics on my iPad is a fantastic experience; I don’t risk damaging any of my originals and I can easily share the EMC bits with all you fine folks!

So let me set things up a bit before I get to the naughty bits. This storyline actually follows after the Knightfall series, in which Bane snaps Batman’s spine after a lengthy campaign of terror designed to physically and mentally exhaust The Dark Knight.

So, while a character named Jean-Paul Valley is filling in as Batman back in Gotham City, an almost entirely wheelchair-bound (though a pretty gadget-laden wheelchair) Bruce Wayne is trying to track down his current love interest, Dr Shondra Kinsolving, who has been kidnapped along with Jack Drake, father of Tim Drake aka Robin #3.

Shondra has the psychokinetic ability to heal others; a power that can be amplified when used in concert with her adoptive brother Benedict’s own mental abilities. Benedict, is behind the kidnapping hoping to use Drake (who was Shondra’s patient) as leverage to force his sister to use her powers again…this time to kill instead of heal.

After Bruce and Alfred are successfully able to rescue to Jack Drake, Benedict no longer has his leverage and that’s when he breaks out the mind-control drugs. There’s some great super-villian-monologue-ing detailing how the drug will melt her “resistance like an ice cube in fire.” Benedict uses the drug to regress Shondra to her childhood and rekindle the rage she felt then at her adoptive (and abusive) father. Using a control helmet to focus and direct their combined power, Benedict is able to manipulate Shondra’s weakened mind and coerce her into murdering a number of people through the pair’s enhanced telekinesis.

[Above images appear in Legends of The Dark Knight #59-61]

Of course, as with most comic book mind control plots, the aims are always more murderous and not nearly as sensuous as they could be. But since the pair in this case are (adoptive) siblings, maybe its just as well that Benedict doesn’t go there. Of course Bruce eventually rescues Shondra but she’s in a bad way, helplessly shifting back and forth between her adult and child personalities as a result of repeat mind control sessions under the influence of Benedict’s drug.

In the end, she sacrifices her own sanity to heal Bruce’s back; restoring the use of his legs while she remains in a regressed child-like state. Bruce sets her up in the best mental care facility money can buy and gets his heart broken yet again. He returns to Gotham, retrains his body, and reclaims the mantle of The Bat. Years later, Shondra does recover and actually appears breifly in another great Batman storyline: Hush, which featured its own EMC themes courtesy of Poison Ivy (hint: Catwoman…helplessly enthralled by Ivy).

When I originally read these comics, back when they first debuted, they were definitely tweaking my mind-control fetish but I have to say that I think I’m finding them even more compelling now. For whatever reason, the image of Shondra tied to that chair while her brother feeds his poisonous words into her mind…well it calls to mind images from Tabico’s Community and a host of other molten-hot EMC erotica doesn’t it?

Typically, I enjoy brainwashing apparatus, and visors, and headphones: visually-apparent tools of mind control. I think I’ve dismissed drugs alone as being too abstract a device for brainwashing. Here though, its really working for me. I think something about the anticipation of Shondra being told how the drugs will sap her resistance combined with the multiple conditioning sessions pulls it out of the realm of an EMC quick-fix (ala “I’ve injected you with this magic drug and now you’re my slave”) and instead turns into a brainwashing process.

The process of brainwashing, seeing the subject resist, weaken, resist, weaken, and then succumb is infinitely hotter than the presto-chango-slave routine. Despite, the lack of any erotic quality, beyond what my own imagination is supplying, I think that’s why I’m enjoying this particular angle of EMC where I haven’t in the past. And if I can find a pic of a pretty girl tied-wrists-and-ankles to a chair, I am sooooo ripping this idea off for a manip. 🙂

So that’s all for now, but I’ll probably have a new update tomorrow so I can share some very exciting news regarding my summer travel plans. “Why would I care about your summer travel plans?” I hear you asking yourself.

Well, you’ll just have to wait and see.