I see that the new graphic novel of H.P. Lovecraft’s life is available now for the Kindle, titled He Who Wrote in the Darkness. The book is by Alex Nikolavitch and Gervasio-Aon-Lee, and is due in hardback 2nd October 2018 from Pegasus Books. $26 / £19 for 112 pages.
However, Amazon UK has a Kindle edition which is available right now. Nice to see a book get its Kindle edition first, although sadly the price is hardly lower than the hardback. I’ve asked the publisher if it’s possible to send my Kindle HD 10″ a digital review-copy.
“He Who Wrote in the Darkness” opens with a partial but factual recounting of Lovecraft’s New York City period. The reader also sees scenes from his earlier life and the stories, deftly woven into the pages at the points in time when Lovecraft dreams them up or remembers them. The art is simple but clear, and the faces are expressive in the samples. The toony style reminds me a little of the Dreamlands / Kadath comics adaptations which were nicely done in the 1990s by Jason Thompson and published in full in 2012. It looks very promising.
Incidentally, what is the short name for a comic book bio-pic? For movies it’s obviously bio-pic, for graphic novels… not sure. ‘Biography’ seems too grand for many rather slight and under-researched graphic novels, though some (such as the recent chunky Alan Turing one, The Imitation Game) do deserve the term. ‘Bio-comic’ is too clunky and also dismissive sounding. ‘Graphic novel biography’ is both clunky and too ponderous. ‘Life story’ is not going to cover all biographies, which may only cover part of the life. Comixology hasn’t cracked it, putting The Imitation Game under ‘biography’ and ‘historical’. Combining biography and comic as ‘biomic’ sounds like the name of a Saturday Morning Animation’s kid-robot. So I guess we’re stuck with ‘biography’.