Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.

Some of the Krazy Kat strips are now in the public domain… which has enabled the Krazy Kat Comics Scan Archive 1916-22. Free, online and public. In mega-zoom-o-vision, and often from the original art boards where possible, by the look of it. Great stuff.

Although the Krazy and Ignatz strip is not, to my knowledge, ever mentioned in letters by Lovecraft, he does seem to allude to it in a letter to Morton of 1924. Lovecraft is telling his friend Morton of the inner goings-on at Weird Tales magazine, and is using the ‘snappy patter’ style learned from his young friend Albert Sandusky (aka “Wisecrack Sandusky”)…

Wot a inside corneal circumnavigation I’m getting on Weird Tales! I want you should tell ’em, Ignatz!

inside corneal circumnavigation = a close-up inside-look. The cornea is part of the human eye.

Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.

Louis Wain, The Cats’ Nightmare.

Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.

German ship-cats by Gerhard Marcks, a 1921 signed print. At this point in time Marcks was starting a six-year employment in a “teaching position at the Bauhaus school in Weimar”.

A later book reprint, with far less fidelity than the signed print and also illustrating how digitising scans of books can further degrade fine detail…

Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.

This week’s kitty is a Dick Francis illustration for the story “Kreativity for Kats” (Galaxy, April 1961), anticipating the now-lost Catscan website by some 40 years. “Kreativity for Kats” was Fritz Leiber’s sequel to his acclaimed “Space Time for Springers” science-fiction cat story.

Over time “Space Time” became the first of a series of ten super-kitten and other cat stories by Leiber, which were collected together in the limited-edition illustrated hardback Gummitch and Friends (1992). I’d guess a new audiobook for that might Kickstart quite well, today, with the permission of the Leiber estate?

Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s keen interest in our mysterious felines.

The opening illustration by Edd Cartier, for L. Ron Hubbard’s story in the newly digest-sized Unknown (February 1942), channelling the European fairy-tale tradition.

Lovecraft once had a long restaurant conversation with the flame-haired and young Hubbard, according to Frank Belknap Long. While impressed by the “extraordinary” lad, he evidently felt Hubbard was too professional and un-cosmic a writer to strike up a correspondence with. One wonders if Hubbard may have written a cat horror story as something of a salute to the recently deceased Lovecraft, on learning about the old gent’s keen interest in felines?