HPLinks #75.
* From Italy in English, the “Fragments from Elsewhere: the Weird as a Transmedia Genre” (2025). Possibly a Masters dissertation? Freely available online.
* Pierre Deleage’s blog posts about his new book Transmigrations: Lovecraft, Barlow and Burroughs, noting… “It is a revised, corrected and quite expanded version of my article ‘La transmigration de Robert H. Barlow'”.
* The new open-access book Crossing borders between countries, scholars, and genres: Commemorating the late Kathleen E. Dubs (2025) has two relevant chapters. “Crossing Genres, Crossing Media: The Cthulhu Mythos Through the Ages”, and “Liminal Aspects of the Hero’s Journey in the Major Works of Neil Gaiman” has the comparative sub-section titled ‘From Lovecraft to Gaiman’.
* The Italian Tolkien journal now has a book collection of the best articles, in English translation, as Arda Notebooks: the Best of I Quaderni di Arda. In the new book one can find the acclaimed German scholar Thomas Honegger in English on “Re-enchanting a Dis-enchanted World: Tolkien (1892-1973) and Lovecraft (1890-1937)”. The publisher Walking Tree has free abstracts for the book’s contents.
* Also from Italy, a film adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” as “Il vecchio terribile”. It premiered a few days ago in Rome, and is now reportedly destined for the film festivals circuit… “The short film The Terrible Old Man, a film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s famous horror novel, premiered last night [24th February 2026] at the Cinema Caravaggio in Rome”.
* New on Archive.org, a good scan of The Collected Poems and Letters of Hart Crane (1952)…
I have been greeted so far mostly by his [Lovecraft’s close friend Samuel Loveman] coat tails, so occupied has Sambo been with numerous friends of his here ever since arriving; Miss Sonia Green and her pipingvoiced husband, Howard Lovecraft (the man who visited Sam in Cleveland one summer when Galpin was also there), kept Sam traipsing around the slums and wharf streets until four this morning looking for Colonial specimens of architecture, and until Sam tells me he groaned with fatigue and begged for the subway! Well, Sam may have been improved before he left Cleveland, but skating around here has made him as hectic again as I ever remember him, and I think he is making the usual mistake of people visiting NY, of attempting too much, getting prematurely exhausted, and then railing against the place and wanting to get back home.
* Popping out shortly before Christmas 2025, which means I missed noting it here, the podcast The Atlantean Archive: Retro Books & Shows had A Chat with “The Lovecraft Geek”, Dr. Robert M. Price.
* Publishers Weekly reports that sales in U.S. comic-book shops hit a new high in 2025 at $2.2 billion. Said anecdotally to be largely due to the influx of a new paying audience in the form of Generation Z (now ages 14 to 27). I guess many are earning wages now — and thus many Z-ers can walk into their local comic-shop with far more than dad’s pocket-money in their wallets. A further guess would be that many will also have recovered from childhood manga overdoses, and are now discovering the joys of Proper Comics. Theoretically, such demographic and economic changes should also feed into Lovecraft and Lovecraft-related sales, especially as the U.S economy booms.
* In the academic Game Studies book Video Games and Mental Health (2025), the chapter “The Sanity Metre: Madness as a manageable resource”. Sanity as a finite resource… “renders madness operationalisable for a game’s code, has its historical roots in psychiatric discourse and its cultural roots in cosmic horror”. The editors kindly offer the book free, in its Kindle ebook version.
* Also in games, the forthcoming Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth has a free audio phone-app ‘trailer’ from Chaosium…
Our coming board-game Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth takes you on three adventures set in and around [Innsmouth. It is trailed by the new] Miskatonic Tales app (not required to play), which offers immersive audio recordings of the introductions and all paragraphs from the three scenarios. Simply select a scenario and a paragraph number, and the app will read the corresponding passage from the storybook. You can adjust the background music, volume, and playback speed.
* Talking of Innsmouth, Francois Baranger’s fully illustrated edition of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is now pre-ordering, for “release later this year”. If you know the tale well and just want the art, apparently the sumptious large-format artbook is already available in French.
* Up for auction, Gahan Wilson’s original sketch of a stylized bust of H.P. Lovecraft. Apparently… “the inspiration for the original statuette for the World Fantasy Awards”, rather than the other way around?
* The catalogue for the coming auction of The Peter Hansen Collection of Comics, seemingly the largest collection of vintage British comics yet to come to auction. With high resolution images of original artwork/layouts, unwatermarked, and available without registration. Effectively, a free online exhibition. Also includes some early fanzines, comic-related toys and trading-cards. A few British underground issues, in one lot. A few art-posters, such as the Barry Windsor-Smith poster seen below. No newspaper strips, that I noticed, other than a bound collection of U.S. one-page Sunday newspaper strips all from 1945. Here’s my pick…
* Now available, Blood N Thunder 2025 Special Edition magazine. Includes…
Pulp historian and novelist Will Murray tells the complete story behind “The Golden Vulture”, a Shadow novel originally written by Doc Savage scribe Lester Dent in 1932 but shelved for six years until being revised by Walter B. Gibson, chief chronicler of The Shadow’s exploits. [Plus] a comprehensive history of “The Bat, the legendary master criminal who first appeared in a 1920 play subsequently adapted several times to film and TV. Most importantly, The Bat was acknowledged by Bob Kane to have influenced the creation of a certain Caped Crusader still plying his trade in movies and comics.
* And finally, new to me is a Lovecraft Tarot pack from Spain. 78 cards, and to my experienced eye the artwork doesn’t appear to be AI generated. Might also be useful for writers, providing randomised starting-point ideas for a basic plot framework? Seemingly new, and not yet sold-out.
— End-quotes —
Lovecraft on the value of pomposity-picking humour and “amusements of a lighter sort”. What he says seems to be relevant to cartooning and comics.
“There is art and sanity in psychological deflation …. One of the most contemptible ostentations of the human primate is a priggish dignity and particularly about non-essentials of form, custom, convention, regularity, and so on. It is this devastating pusillanimity which has created the repulsive beast called Babbitus Americanus, and which has paved the downward path toward standardisation, time-table helotry, and glorified mass-mediocrity. No saviour is more deserving of praise than one who can jolt and kick these cow-like conformers into something like a semblance of vitality, individuality, and well-proportioned perspective — who can air out their stuffy and meaningless primness and precision, and give them at least a pinch of that basic sense of humour, porportion, relativity, and cosmic irony which makes real men as distinguished from grotesque sawdust-stuffed homunculi. All hats off to the lusty deflater!” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, January 1930.
“One of the greatest obstacles to be combated during this unsettled era is the mistaken notion that amateur journalism is a non-essential and a luxury, unworthy of attention or support amidst the national stress. The prevalence of this opinion is difficult to account for, since its logic is so feeble. It is universally recognised that in times like these, some form of relaxation is absolutely indispensable if the poise and sanity of the people are to be preserved. Amusements of a lighter sort are patronised with increased frequency, and have risen to the dignity of essentials in the maintenance of the national morale. If, then, the flimsiest of pleasures be accorded the respect and favour of the public, what may we not say for amateur journalism, whose function is not only to entertain and relieve the mind, but to uplift and instruct as well?” — Lovecraft during wartime, in the United Amateur for May 1918.
“… comicality always depends wholly on the system of thought and values held by the perceiver; that, in short, ridiculousness is relative, and conditioned by the truth, inflexibility, or paramountcy of certain common ideas which are absolute to the multitude yet merely virtual to the closer inquirer. Intelligence and education, as they open new fields of risibility, close old ones; so that the laughing-stock of one stage of culture is often the gospel of the next, and vice versa. [Thus] we perceive the difficulty of laying down permanent laws of laughter in an age when all standards are plastic. […] is it not possible that some of the Philistine hyperticklishness at unaccustomed whimsies springs from a lack of that deeper and more pervasive humour which sees in all human life and effort an ironic comedy? Verily, laughter is an art for the discriminating.” — Lovecraft in The Conservative, July 1923.