New on YouTube, “H.P. Lovecraft Poetry, Converted into Goth Alternative Rock by AI”.
Lovecraft rocks
19 Tuesday Mar 2024
Posted AI, Lovecraftian arts
in19 Tuesday Mar 2024
Posted AI, Lovecraftian arts
inNew on YouTube, “H.P. Lovecraft Poetry, Converted into Goth Alternative Rock by AI”.
17 Sunday Mar 2024
Posted Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
inA new podcast on Robert Bloch and the Cthulhu Mythos. I haven’t listened to it yet, but it has encouragingly complete show-notes.
Also new, a sort-of recorded interview with a Lovecraft scholar, “Is it Bobby Derie?”. His words are read by an actor.
13 Wednesday Mar 2024
Posted Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
inBen Tucker’s new Librivox public-domain reading of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.
First appearance of Innsmouth in 1936, first illustration by Frank Utpatel.
Utpatel’s illustration board, showing significant differences from the printed version.
03 Sunday Mar 2024
Posted AI, Lovecraftian arts
inDoes Stable Diffusion 2.1 768 know what Lovecraft looks like, with a simple name prompt of ((H.P. Lovecraft)) ? After all the hoo-ha about celebrity pictures and name-tagging being removed from the training of SD 2.x? Well… yes, sort of. Which is not bad, considering how few good pictures there are of him.
28 Wednesday Feb 2024
Posted Lovecraftian arts, New books
inS.T. Joshi’s blog is back online and has updated. Among the news is a forthcoming (2025)…
volume of Letters to R.H. Barlow. Barlow was in correspondence with a fascinating array of individuals, both in and out of the weird/fantasy/science fiction field, including H. G. Wells, A. Merritt, George Allan England, C. L. Moore, Ernest A. Edkins, August Derleth, and many others. But, aside from his letters to Derleth and to Donald and Howard Wandrei, not many of his own letters survive. The letters he received — many of which are found on a set of three microfilm reels made after his death by his literary executor, George T. Smisor — are full of interesting matter, especially relating to events following Lovecraft’s death in 1937.
Also news of a new two-hour Lovecraft screen documentary from the French, which has so far been seen at “several French festivals”. Apparently an English subtitles version is being prepared. Joshi shows the pleasing promotional poster for the new film.
24 Saturday Feb 2024
Posted AI, Lovecraftian arts
inLovecraft’s long and earliest ‘cosmic’ poem “The Poe-et’s Nightmare” (1916), as an AI generated video adaptation. The project…
aims to decode the poem’s innate symbolic space and to project it into a coherent visual realm with a surreal aesthetics of a graphic antique manuscript, abstracting away from the described events. Eventually, what we observe is a dialogue between the written unseen and the unspeakable evident. The collection consists of 304 unique pieces, one per verse line. Each piece is a 23-second video loop with sound.
15 Thursday Feb 2024
Posted Lovecraftian arts, New books
inH.P. Lovecraft: Zoomorphic Manual, newly backed on Kickstarter. A bestiary of Lovecraft creatures, by a Spanish artist.
Also due in spring 2024, Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book: Weirdly Illustrated by Michael Bukowski. Pre-ordering now.
11 Sunday Feb 2024
Posted Lovecraftian arts
inAt the end of January 2024 on John Coulthart’s blog, he showed an early surrealist drawing “Exquisite Corpse (1927) by Andre Masson, Max Ernst, Max Morise”. The result of three-person collaborative ‘art game’, derived from a children’s game. He doesn’t mention this, but it struck me how similar this is to how later artists have depicted the basic idea of Lovecraft’s bibliophile ‘Great Race’ in “The Shadow Out Of Time”. Including the scale with humans.
The “Exhibition History” (the University of Chicago currently holds the original) only reveals a 1984 showing, but one wonders if Lovecraft might have seen it before “Shadow” (1934-35).
For comparison, however, here is Lovecraft’s own at-the-time drawing of the Great Race…
Not so similar, though admittedly the viewing angle is different. So perhaps it is some later artists who have chosen to accentuate the apparent borrowing from a surrealist experiment?
06 Tuesday Feb 2024
Posted Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
inThere’s a date for Gou Tanabe’s chunky graphic novel adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” in English. Set for the end of July 2024, in a Dark Horse paperback of 288 pages.
Also of possible interest, Monster Cats at the end of May, an anthology of “comic strips about fantastic felines”. Not to be confused with a Mutant Cats graphic novel due at the end of April. In which a ‘green’ energy project gets botched, which unleashes mutant cats from another dimension. Sounds kitty-tastic!
05 Monday Feb 2024
Posted Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
inA new LibriVox audibook reading of “The Call of Cthulhu”. The reader has a laconic American voice. I see he has also done The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath over on Legamus.eu. Both are free.
30 Tuesday Jan 2024
Posted Lovecraftian arts
inA new series of Lovecraft Country sourcebooks from the makers of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, under the series title “Arkham Unveiled” and with the first book possibly titled “Call of Cthulhu: Arkham”. Supposedly the series is to start publishing in February 2024 [update: Amazon now says March 15th] and will then grow to cover Kingsport and Innsmouth etc. Which has been done before by Chaosium, often several times, though possibly not in such a “thick n’ slick” format as in this rather sumptuous and expensive-looking new series.
New Miskatonic University and Dreamlands sourcebooks are also said to be pencilled in. It might be nice to see some inter-twingling between those two, perhaps with several of the professors having investigated first-hand accounts of the Dreamlands and there also being some way to access the Dreamlands via some “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”-like secret device at the University. You’ll recall that in the early “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919) the protagonist sees into ‘cosmic dreamscapes’ via a self-invented device.
29 Monday Jan 2024
Posted Lovecraftian arts
inArtist Francois Baranger has announced his next lavishly illustrated book project. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is currently underway in his studio, for a possible 2025 release. I think this will be his fourth in his illustrated books of H.P. Lovecraft’s tale. Innsmouth will be in the same artistic style as the others.
Looks to me like he may want some photo reference for the bus. His is too 1940s French. I found this a while back, the Newbury area bus from the correct time-period…