Horror Ink Sketches
As part of our horror countdown we’re posting one new ink sketch every day until…well, until Miguel stops drawing more. Miguel was caught up in a creative frenzy and drew a ton of Horror illustrations. Who can blame him? Every time I arrived home, there were more black and white sketches all over the place. So, we’re posting all of his horror sketches!
★ To see all of the Horror Ink Sketches, click here.
Mad Scientist
“The Science Hero was once a staple of adventure fiction, overcoming the Evil Sorcerer and awing the superstitious natives with the power of Science! But somewhere between the invention of the Gatling gun and the atomic bomb, fiction-creators deconstructed him to create a new kind of villain: a villain who believes that the conventional scientific community are fools! Needlessly constrained by their petty ‘morals’ and their self-limiting ‘logic’!
The Mad Scientist fulfills many needs for a story’s creator, allowing him to fit into a wide range of stories. He’s mentally unsound, which allows the story’s creator to cover a weak motive or Bond Villain Stupidity with a Hand Wave. This also helps the creator of the story explain why he kept all his incriminating records and yet doesn’t have a duplicate monster or at least a blueprint lying around. Secondly, he’s a scientist, which in fiction means he can invent whatever strange device the plot requires. Thirdly, his insistence on weird experiments gives him artistic license to invent those devices. And lastly, a mad scientist is almost certain to violate the Scale of Scientific Sins: expect An Aesop (even if it’s a preposterous one.)…” [click here to read more]
The Enduring Scariness of the Mad Scientist
“As Mary Shelley described it, the inspiration for Frankenstein came to her all at once in a nighttime apparition: “I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” she wrote in the preface to the novel’s 1831 edition. “I saw the hideous phantom of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion….
Today, many of the things that would once have seemed like horror-story fodder are scientific reality: Animals have been cloned, for example, and human faces have been transplanted. Surgical robots are trusted with human lives. But still, as the boundaries of human knowledge are continually pushed, the trope of the mad scientist endures. What is it about the character that makes it so chilling? When so much of Halloween is based on the supernatural—the ghosts, the goblins, the vampires—why are scientists so often lumped in with the rest of the haunted-house cast?
“Science and reason are supposed to be the antidote to paranormal beliefs, and yet fictional scientists often appear as villains of paranormal horror films,” psychologist Stuart Vyse recently noted in Psychology Today, and mad-scientist-themed decorations abound in seasonal aisles as October 31 approaches. “Halloween is a kind of Rorschach test of our common fears,” he wrote.” [click here to read more]
Mad Scientist by Miguel Guerra
Related Links:
★ Horror Ink Sketch series by Miguel Guerra
★ 10 Mad Scientists Who Went Too Far