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1814
Legendary Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai—best known for his portrayal of a tsunami as a threatening wall of little gropy fingers—paints a picture in his novel The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife depicting an octopus performing consensual cunnilingus on an abalone diver named Tamatori.
1868
Dark times for tentacle porn. In a political rearrangement called the Meiji Restoration, imperial rule is reintroduced to Japan under Emperor Meiji, bringing with it increased censorship.
1945
After declaring victory by dropping two nuclear bombs nicknamed "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," the United States bans censorship in Japan while still censoring anti-American rhetoric. Shrewdly, the Americans also ban all mention of censorship. The Japanese to this day have broadly interpreted the limits of free speech to involve the blurring of sex parts during sex.
1970
America, not Japan, films cinema's first known lurid tentacle rape, an aggressive sexual assault by a face-tentacled monster in impresario Roger Corman's Lovecraftian grotesquerie The Dunwich Horror. America repeats the gesture in 1981 with Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead, in which a woman is penetrated by a tree.
1986
The first tentacle penetration in Japanese anime appears in Yoshiki Takaya's mecha-horror cartoon Guyver: Out of Control.
1986
Toshio Maeda, who would come to be known to manga fans as the "tentacle master," creates his first, seminal work: Urotsukodoji. It features no tentacle sex. However, the notorious cartoon series created in 1987 by Hideki Takayama adds so much violent, terrifying tentacular sex that Maeda's book becomes almost synonymous with assault-by-tentacle. Maeda called Takayama's series "repugnant, cruel and sadistic, yet brilliant."
1989
Maeda makes what's considered the first great modern piece of tentacle-rape-fantasy erotica: Demon Beast Invasion. Maeda says he used tentacles or robot limbs so he could show full penetration without running afoul of Japanese censors. Apparently violent rape by tentacles is considered less dirty than consensual sex that features a penis.
1990s
Tentacle porn's heyday, centering mostly on horrid, violent, aggressive and oddly creative sexual assault. Maeda is the acknowledged master, with at least three series devoted to awful, awful things.
2001
Maeda receives a lifetime achievement award in New York City, where he is hailed as "the most influential erotic manga artist in Japan" and "the foundation for the entire 'erotic-grotesque' genre of Japanese anime." He asks to have "Tentacle Master" inscribed on his tombstone. He then injures his hand in a motorcycle accident, ending his drawing career.
2005
Painter, photographer and porn actor Zak Smith releases his project 100 Girls and 100 Octopuses, parts of which now hang in London's Saatchi Gallery.
2007
Janis Martin brings tentacle porn to a much wider Portland audience than would ever conceivably seek it out, showing assault-laden, penetrative cartoons at her Northwest Portland izakaya, Tanuki. This practice continues, meaning you can eat octopus while watching a giant octopus exact its terrifying revenge onscreen.
2010
Maeda starts a website with the option to join the "tentacle club" to view his full menagerie of angry, bulbous, pulsating sexual violation—with the option to sign up and stay at his house.
2016
Maeda's original 1986 comic Urotsukodoji is translated and published in full in English for the first time.
Toshio Maeda will appear in conversation with Tim Goodyear of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund on Thursday, Dec. 8, at Floating World Comics, 400 NW Couch St., floatingworldcomics.com. 6 pm. Free.