winged and finned

“If one desires to be convinced of the fact that there are men—beasts—in this city, who are two (sic) low to be classed as men; who are merely walking human forms of filth in men’s clothing; who wear fine suits, a white vest, a silk hat, and carry a cane, yet whose very touch would contaminate one who came in contact with them; if one desires to be convinced of this fact, all he has to do is to pay a visit to the Randolph Street bridge, any time between the hours of 9 and 11 o’clock at night.”

Slumming literature — where the news writer or reporter would visit the “slums” in order to portray the dirtiest, darkest parts of the city — were very popular at the end of the nineteenth century.  They were titillating for middle-class readers, played on their fears that bad people walked among them unrecognized (see “filth in men’s clothing”)… and gave information about where to go (meet me at Randolph Street bridge tonight, honey).

See works by Chad Heap and Scott Herring for more! For concerns about deceit in appearance, see Karen Halttunen.

Source: Chicago Reader.  More excerpts at the source! Taken from the Daily Inter-Ocean, May 22, 1879.

From Marvel Boy #1, Astonishing #3.  Dates: December 1950/April 1951.  Titles: “Marvel Boy and the Lost World,” and “Runaway Planet.” 

Credits:  Stan Lee / Bill Everett - Writer
Russ Heath / Bill Everett - Penciler
Russ Heath / Bill Everett - Inker

An example, perhaps, of feminized perceptions of “Uranians” - Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ word for homosexuals - persisting into the 50s!

Source: Super Mega Monkey’s Marvel Comics Chronology.

“For their own more private and masturbatory purposes, the Uranians  collected artworks of a different sort: nudes of Italian boys by photographers such as Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1931), residing in Taormina, Sicily, and his distant relative Wilhelm (Guglielmo) von Plüschow (1852-1930), residing mostly in Rome 1 — photographs that have themselves become collectables dispersed by auction houses and chronicled in sales catalogues. However, for the Uranian scholar, catalogues have much to tell, and von Gloeden’s guest book was itself a catalogue of the paederastically-inclined, and included the signature of Oscar Wilde, one of his staunchest admirers.2  Like children with packets of baseball cards, the Uranians exchanged these salacious photographs as a form of pictorial insinuation and friendship.”Michael Matthew Kaylor, Secreted Desires. The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde, Brno, Czech Republic: Masaryk University, 2006, p. 86-87.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs came up with a term for men with a woman’s soul (those with contrary sexual instinct, often posed as part of the history of homosexuality), “Uranians,” from the Symposium by Plato.

Source: Reves Siciliens.

rrosehobart:

Designer unknown - Cirque Daniellis - La femme araignée

: catalogue.swanngalleries.com

(via mudwerks)

“The first I shall present is a most frightful monster indeed, representing an hairy child. It was covered over with hair like a beast. That which rendered it yet more frightful was, that its navel was in the place where its nose should stand, and his eyes placed where his mouth should have been, and its month was in the chin. It of the male kind, and born in France in the year 1597.”

From Aristotle’s Masterpiece, Chapter 9, Section 2, “Of Monsters, and monstrous births.”

From Aristotle’s Masterpiece, Chapter 9, Section 2.

“By this figure, you will see that although the arms are missing yet they are supplied by other members.

Nature to us sometimes does Monsters show,
That we by them may our own mercies know;
And thereby sin’s deformity may see
Than which there’s nothing can more monstrous be.”

Booker sacked out next to me.

Sticky Comics.