I’m not a weeb, I’m a Hentai artist. I was an artist. Now I’m…writing this. Now I can’t pick up a stylus because of what I know it can do. I’ve drawn something permanent, something living and now I’m scared of what’s coming.
I think I’ve always been ‘artistic.’ I doodled as a kid, I drew DBZ and Street Fighter characters as a teen, and by the time I dropped out of art school, I was drawing pussy on a WACOM tablet. For all I know, that’s a perfectly natural progression. But for me, I think my turn to porn began with the works of J. Scott Campbell and Joe Madureira on the Uncanny X-Men comics.
If you’re familiar with their work, you’ll know that they have very different styles. There’s a simplicity to Campbell’s stuff that oozes with soft, buxom sensuality. Madureira by comparison pours a kind of lush, organic madness into his pieces. I learned from both. Like any artist, I imitated. I remixed and found a style that borrowed and built something novel from the pieces. And then in my final year of school, I took a summer course in Rome that would undress my art.
I, like plenty of art students, had a habit of going to museums and sketching. It’s a good way to study the technique of those artists worthy of preservation and as a bonus, it can be a decent way to meet women. I did both at the Borghese Gallery, sitting in front of a baroque masterpiece, a Bernini sculpture I had seen online many times before but was utterly captivated by in person—The Rape of Proserpina.
It has a jarring name, but there’s nothing graphically sexual about the sculpture. It depicts a scene of Hades, the Greek god, carrying off Persephone to the Underworld. There’s a struggle there, fear, desperation, but it was Hades’ hands that had always drawn my attention. His fingers press into Persephone’s flesh, sink into it in a way that makes the hardness of the marble melt into something supple and alive.
Maria saw it too, peering over my shoulder as I studied and sketched.
“Those hands are sex.”
It was a hell of an introduction, and it was more than enough to pull my focus away from the page. She sat down beside me. Stared at the sculpture.
“She becomes a queen, you know? Proserpina.”
I nodded, she smirked and it began, the confluence of art and sex, graphite and sweat and a half dozen nude figure drawings that began and ended in the bedroom of a shabby Roman rental. After a two week fling, I gave Maria one of my studies of the hands and wrote my number on the back. It was a just in case you’re ever in Chicago kinda thing. Then we parted ways and when I returned home to the States, I started drawing sex.
I posted a few online. The first was passionate in a way, but taboo; set against the backdrop of the altar and grandiosity of a Catholic cathedral. The gilded man in the drawing and the empty crucifix behind him probably raised some eyebrows. But people seemed to like it and people liked it more as the series became more…demonic over time. It was my induction into the world of Hentai. Christ fucking open the gates of Hell and filling it with comments and likes.
My art eventually found a home on various sites. And I was happy making it, not because I love drawing fuck scenes, cock veins and tentacle cum, but because of what it did for people. I drew arousal into people’s minds and—I don’t know—there was something magical about that.
So, for years, I posted under the username ProserpinasMoan and I made Hentai.
Back when I had an account on Hentai-Foundry I took commissions pretty regularly, and found that a certain sort of customer wanted subject matter that I didn’t want to get into. I ended up setting three basic rules:
No Scat. No Loli. No Guro.
For those of you not in the know, Scat is just porn that fetishizes shit, Loli is hentai where the proportions of the subjects are…cute…sometimes unsettlingly youthful, and guro is the snuff film equivalent of the hentai world—torture porn, but torture as porn. (All risky image searches on a browser, so, be warned if you’re not already down that rabbit hole.)
Everything else was fair game though and I got requests for just about everything else. And I wasn’t cheap. But I was good. My attention to detail and anatomy and emotional expression got me noticed. The bold, complexity of my scenes got me Patrons when Patreon started talking hold. I was in my 20s, making money from art, and pornography or not, I considered that an accomplishment. I knew it wouldn’t pay all my bills, but…
Well, I thought I knew that, and then I got a message from a Hentai-Foundry user named SadeFace.
As it happened, I got a phone call the same day. It was a local number, unknown, but I answered it and heard a voice I was sure I’d never hear again.
Maria.
She told me that she had a 24 hour layover at O’Hare and was going to get a hotel. I did the gentlemanly thing and offered a freer accommodation. We could get drinks or something. It could be fun.
My phone buzzed during the call and I checked it.
SadeFace: Really dig your stuff, Pros. You interested in a batch commission?
His first message was three hours old. I hadn’t checked it previously.
SadeFace: Well, if you are, I’m looking for fourteen panels, full colour, multiple characters with backgrounds. $10k now; $10k upon completion.
I almost dropped the phone. Twenty-thousand was an insane amount for fourteen pictures. It wasn’t much less than I made in a year at my night job tending bar. And it was more than my posted rates by quite a bit.
“Hello?”
I heard Maria’s voice but hung in the shock of the number for a moment more.
“Yeah. Sorry. Get an Uber. I’ll text you the address. I…think I’ve got something to celebrate.”
I messaged SadeFace back.
ProserpinasMoan: Yeah, sounds dope! Send me the details of what you want. Also, $20k? Not a typo?
He messaged back quickly and confirmed the amount. He told me that he wanted the first seven pieces to be interpretations of the seven virtues: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience and humility. But he wanted hentai. Pornographic chastity was a bit of a head scratcher, but I said I’d do it. He asked me for my Venmo and just like that, I had five grand and a promise of another five in a week. The money was fucking real.
In a moment of impulsivity, I quit my job at the bar and decided to pour myself into the drawings. Maria was ‘enjoying Chicago’ and canceled her connecting flight. She said she’d delay her trip to San Francisco for a week. I said she could stay with me and somewhat sheepishly told her about what I did for my now full time job. I showed her.
She giggled. “Plenty of acclaimed artists would make pornography if they thought they could get away with it. Many have in their way; Picasso, Schiele, Freud…O’Keefe. You’re work is brilliant, raw. Don’t apologize for being provocative.”
She was right. Hentai had arguably found its origins in centuries old Japanese erotic paintings. Paintings that found their way to museums despite their graphic depictions of sex. She bolstered my confidence, my sense of entitlement to the money. She inspired me. Her body inspired more, and I found myself learning Italian at night and drawing away my days as she wandered the city or languorously adorned the comfortable spots of my apartment.
Three weeks later, I had finished and Maria had stayed. I felt happy. And then I sent the pictures to Sade.
SadeFace: Stunning. Truly.
SadeFace: The next seven, as you might have surmised, are the sins.
ProserpinasMoan: Naturally. Any direction or same blue sky as before?
SadeFace: You will make them bleed.
I had three rules. Simple.
ProserpinasMoan: If you’re asking for guro, man, my commission rules are pretty clear.
He let my message hang in the ether. It was a silent manipulation, massaging my anxiety with the yawning curve of more zeros than I had ever seen at once. But the next day he responded.
SadeFace: Your fees are pretty clear. But I am paying for the beauty of sin. 20k. Make them bleed.
This time he sent me references. Pictures of war, surgeries, screaming faces and tears, specific imagery like chewed gum being pulled from the sole of a shoe—‘Like this, but with the skin.’ He gave direction as well. The flesh-peeled face of pride and her masturbation with the shard of a broken mirror; the cannibalistic hunger of gluttony posed as mutual felatio. And every panel was meant to be voyeuristic, set against the backdrop of dozens of faces, some watching the gore and others watching the viewer.
But I buckled. I made justifications for the work. There was the money, but there was also the history of Renaissance patrons, paying for the artistic glorification of god while they persecuted and killed real people. History didn’t judge the artists, and my pictures would shed no actual blood.
But it all made me curious about my patron. He was anonymous, in fact, I wasn’t certain that he even was a he. Four panels in, I decided to ask him about himself. Maria assumed that he was in tech or finance, nouveau riche and spending with abandon. She wasn’t far off.
SadeFace: I do stuff with Blockchain and Non Fungible Tokens.
ProserpinasMoan: So, is that what the pieces are for? NFTs?
SadeFace: Does it matter?
I supposed not. But something about the whole thing didn’t sit right with me. I had gotten one or two commission requests for simple Hentai NFTs before, something about immorality lending itself to exclusivity I guessed, but they wouldn’t have required the ritualized violence of Sade’s direction. Then I started looking into his reference material. Some were clearly marked with licensed image tags, but the faces—the photos of screaming bloody agony—many returned no results on reverse image searches. They still had original metadata, camera data.
As I started my penultimate picture, Lust, I began to lose sleep and I began to see the distaste for my work growing in Maria’s face. The pictures were vile, almost surreal in their excruciating detail. The more I checked back on the ones I’d finished, the more I saw little details that I couldn’t remember drawing.
And the images lived in my dreams, playing out with sickening frenzied energy. Sex and suffering and the itch for an ever evasive climax—death. And all writhing beneath a growing blanket of red.
Maria tried to soothe away my anxiety at night. She was the softnesses of marble flesh that had inspired me. She fucked me, but just as often, she made love, and I needed that—a carnal virtue to balance the bloody sins my stylus brought to life. When I had finished Lust, Sade gave me my final direction.
SadeFace: Only Wrath remains. This one I want to be different. Background: empty walls and an open doorway into darkness. One Subject: female, nude, covered in blood with as much rage in her face as you can create. The face is very important.
ProserpinasMoan: Okay. Any reference?
SadeFace: Yes.
He sent me an image file.
MARIA_116.jpeg
My Maria. Nude. Livid. Screaming.
ProserpinasMoan: Where did you get this
SadeFace: You have an Instagram. She has an Instagram. I have an investment in a company that does deepfakes. Now finish the series. The face is important.
I had never particularly liked Sade apart from the transaction in our transactional relationship, but this was a prod and a smirk that I didn’t fully understand. What bothered me more though was the body of the deepfake. I knew Maria’s body. I had studied it with much more care than any typical husband might study the body of their wife during years of marriage. I had drawn it dozens of times, taken photographs and scrutinized the details. I knew it well enough that I could likely draw from memory the flexing softness of her bare back, her navel, the curve of her shoulder as it swept into her neck, the way her lips hugged a vibrator as she slid it in and out. I knew her body, and the body of the ‘deepfake’ was hers.
But $10,000 more was mine if I just finished. I tried to bury what I knew about the picture of Maria in expedient work. I would get the money and grapple with the how of it all afterwards. I wanted haste, but the drawing dragged and the strain of hiding it from Maria began to wear on me. She was curious. She had seen all of the thirteen pictures that had come before and tried to appraise them with the liberal eye of a connoisseuse. She tried to see the artistry in the gore, but she was failing to do so little by little. I was too. My sleep consumed more and more of my nights but I awoke shattered by fatigue and filled with lingering unease.
I had begun my work on the face when on one particularly hot night, Maria told me that she loved me. She sighed the words and they joined the quieting hum of the bedroom ceiling fan. It wasn’t a swooning sigh, but one of resignation, the words an admission after the slow torture of unwitting emotional attachment. I thought I felt the same, sudden though it was, but I was too tired to say it back.
The days started to bleed together, I started drinking more, spending my hard won money on amnesia and numbness. Maria and I grew distant, our conversations overtaken by anxious silences and the drone of the television. But I couldn’t stop.
The fourteenth panel became a compulsion; no longer art, but a solemn meditation in imagined pain. I drew and redrew her face in fine detail and the more I saw it on the screen, the less I saw of it in life. It was just never good enough.
Looking back, I think that my first attempt probably captured rage just fine in the subdued complexity of western hentai. It might have been perfect, but I scrapped it, buried it in a hundred different hidden Layers of the Photoshop file. Each further iteration looked less like anger and more like fear, pain, desperation. She had become my Persephone, screaming in terror as I dragged her down.
“You don’t love me. Do you?”
The question came out of silence one night as I lay in bed not really sleeping or awake.
“What? I—of course I do.”
“You’ve never said it. I do, and I wait for you to speak, but you don’t.”
“Well, I do. I love you—see? I love you, but I’m—“
“Obsessed? Three weeks to finish seven pictures. Three. But this one, the one that you won’t let me see…how long?”
My skin felt suddenly tight, brittle. I didn’t know.
“Too long. It’s almost done. Almost.”
She sighed. “My tourist visa runs out soon and I never made it to see my cousin in California. I should try to—“
“Marry me, then.” What was I saying?
“Jesus, you’re tired and I’m tired and you’re drunk.”
“I need you.”
“You need sleep. I’ll be here tomorrow. Don’t worry. But finish the fucking picture and take the money. Do something that doesn’t make you miserable.”
“Do I seem miserable?”
She stared at my face for a long while. “You don’t seem happy. You used to.”
She fell asleep quickly afterward—or pretended to—and I stole from my bed and made the short creaking walk to my computer. I turned it on, opened my Photoshop file and stared at a familiar body drenched in blood. She stared back at me in brutal terror and I felt an echo of that fear. I felt responsible for it. The art was getting to me. Had been getting to me.
Fuck it.
I uploaded it to Dropbox. The file was enormous. Much larger than any of the other thirteen. But I sent it and tried to put it out of my mind.
ProserpinasMoan: Done. Pay me.
I shut down the computer and went back to bed. I seeped into the mattress and for the first time in weeks, I fell asleep quickly. But I awoke the next morning sweating and heaving rapid breaths.
A nightmare had clung to my unconscious mind for what felt like days. I remembered it in vague strokes. It was chaotic, endlessly recursive, bloody and agonizing. I remembered the screams and the uncertainty, lost meandering bodies, tightly packed or fleeing alone. And I remembered deaths, some swift and gruesome, some slow and anticipated, but all of them utterly meaningless.
Hell.
The dread lingered as I checked my phone and dragged myself from bed. It was afternoon. I had slept for nearly twelve hours.
“Maria?” I called.
Sade had left me a message. I checked it as I went to the kitchen.
SadeFace: Perfection. You have earned every penny.
Maria wasn’t in the kitchen but the coffee pot was nearly full.
I didn’t see a Venmo notification, but I did have one from my bank. I checked that next. An ACH Transfer.
+$60,000.00
Sixty? I stopped short of the door to my office and stared in disbelief. Sade said 20k. He had paid seventy in total; it made no sense. I opened the door to my office. Maria was at my desk, sitting in front of my computer. Looking at an image.
“Maria, this guy SadeFace paid me sixty-fucking-thousand dollars. What the fuck! Right?”
I stepped toward her. The money had erased the nightmare in a haze of giddy elation. And I felt alive. I wanted to go somewhere far, to lie naked on a beach with her and guzzle rummy drinks in the surf. Two more steps.
“Maria, that’s amazing righ—“
I stopped and my elation sublimated into something unreachable. Maria looked like she was screaming, silent, pale and unmoving. I shook her and her head lolled backwards as she slid down in the chair.
I didn’t want to look at her face, at her gaping, lifeless mouth. I didn’t understand. How?
My eyes searched for something safe and settled on the screen. The image had looked like nothing from a distance, red noise, but as I looked at it closely, my nightmare came flooding back. The red noise was a sea of naked faceless bodies amidst a landscape of gore. It was so detailed, each body trapped in a moment of anguish. But it was tinged with a disturbing sexuality that turned my stomach.
The frenetic complexity, the anatomical detail, the bodily expression of pain, the style…mine. I recognized my art but remembered none of its creation. I scanned, searching for recollection and at the center of the throng of featureless heads, I found one that was different. A woman. A face. Maria. Screaming in brutal terror. A reflection of the face beside me; a perfected version of the picture that had become my obsession.
——
It’s been a month since Maria died in a way that a half dozen Chicago police officers, two EMTs and a Medical Examiner still cannot explain. But her face remains in the image. Her expression changes each time a new face joins her in the throng. A few new faces are added to the picture each day, giving identity to the faceless bodies. And all of them are screaming.
But the image is a jpeg. It shouldn’t change, but it does. It was sent to Maria in a link to a Hentai website. An innocuous thing.
SadeFace’s account on Hentai-Foundry is gone as is the Venmo account he used to pay me. Fifty Grand for a living picture of Hell. It explains the long nights of sleep without rest—I was drawing—but it doesn’t explain how.
I can only guess at why. He said he did “stuff with Blockchain.” I looked into it. Blockchain is a ledger of transactions. It exists on thousands of computers, updated and added to each time a new transaction occurs.
A transaction. A view.
I used to draw sex to make people cum. Now they suffer. And I don’t know why. But I think a part of me wanted to keep people away. I gave the file a jarring name, my Rape of Proserpina:
NSFL.psd became NSFL.jpeg.
I can’t change the file name. I don’t have the photoshop file now. And I’ve been slowly losing pieces of ProserpinasMoan online, accounts, posts. It’s all slipping away. I wish I knew more, I wish I could convince people to stay away, but for now all I have is a warning:
Be careful what you click