Hell, yes. There's always somebody who did it better than I could ever do. But! From the OP:
To modify existing code, just change your printf's to cprintf's and add apostrophe's to the formats as needed. Less work than wrapping each argument with a subroutine call and changing each format to %s. It also helps keep things clear and readable.
So, my attempt was to provide a solution without shelling out printf. And done, without having to pull in another package and introducing object syntax.
perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'