HPLinks #38.
* The latest edition of the journal ImageTexT has “The Actual Anatomy of the Terrible: Gou Tanabe, Weird Ekphrasis, and the History of Lovecraft in Comics”. The first part surveying some of the history of Lovecraft in comics. Open-access, freely available online.
* The Passing Place this week blogs about a new project, having newly embarked on what sounds like a researched… “book about Lovecraft’s creatures and worlds”. The author has some form there. Having already produced a 2022 book, though I don’t think I had noticed it here at Tentaclii, a book titled Lexicromicon: A bluffers guide to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.
For those impatient for this forthcoming book, note that there’s already Anthony Pearsall’s fine The Lovecraft Lexicon: A Reader’s Guide to Persons, Places & Things in the Tales of H.P Lovecraft (2005). Which I only have as a Kindle ebook purchase, not ideal for a quick ‘pull it off the shelf’ consultation. But I’m pleased to say that Passing Place’s post fortuitiously prompted me to check eBay just now, and thus I’ve bagged the Lexicon. In VG paper from a UK seller for a reasonable £12… nice. Normally the price is stuck at three times that. Thanks again to my Patreon patrons, for the PayPal used to bring such little treasures winging onto my book shelves.
* The Pulp Super-Fan looks back at the ‘The Library Lovecraftian’ series, itemising what was in this ill-fated mid-1970s attempt at a small Lovecraftian fiction ‘zine. The third issue managed to attract “The Horror on the Beach: A Tale in the Cthulhu Mythos” by Alan Dean Foster (by then a well-known SF writer, I seem to vaguely recall), but after that it folded.
* New on Archive.org and new to me, scans of what appears to be a full run of Cimoc. This being a Spanish local equivalent of Heavy Metal magazine, and which ran 1981-1996. There’s a wealth of fantasy and science-fiction artwork here, even if you can’t read the stories. How many of these monthly Heavy Metal equivalent Euro-comics were there? Quite a few, it seems, as I also recently discovered the Italian equivalent L’Eternauta, having already known about the various Toutain-edited titles and licenced editions.
* Talking of which, this week up pops Les magazines de bande dessinee en France (2025). It’s a new open-access book with various chapters on the history of the ‘BD’ comics form in France. Includes, among others, in French…
– Influence of the North American underground in adult comics magazines in France, 1969-1976.
– Rock in comic-book magazines from the 1970s and 1980s.
– The place of sex in comic-strip magazines for adults in the 1980s.
* Turns out the major new exhibition ‘Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo’ may have a Lovecraftian feel in their Old Europe macabre mistiness, if the images shown in reviews are anything to go by. On now at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, until 29th June 2025, though with a hefty £17 ticket price. There’s a book catalogue.
* New on Archive.org, a fine scan of Amazing Stories for December 1929, with a delightfully tentacular cover that was new to me. One recalls Tolkien’s “The Watcher in the Water” here, and wonders if he ever saw the magazine in his friend Lewis’s pulp collection.
* Frontier Partisans has a brief “Centennial Salute to H. Rider Haggard”, 100 years after the adventure writer’s death.
* The Silver Key reviews the new biography Robert E. Howard, The Life and Times of a Texas Author (2025), and finds it worthy.
* Limited edition French Paper Art Club fine-art prints, featuring The Art of Francois Baranger. Some are already selling out their editions, with the ‘Mi-Go from space’ print already gone.
* Publisher Fantagraphics is reprinting lesser-known Marvel Comics material as pleasing new books. The first is Lost Marvels Vol. 1: Tower of Shadows (2025) which collects the new comics (not reprint material) that appeared in the Tower of Shadows supernatural anthology news-stand comic from 1969-1971. Included adaptations of Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” and “Pickman’s Model”.
Barry Windsor Smith in his Trimpe-emulating period, original arwork for a page of “The Terrible Old Man”.
* A new free Lovecraft Pulp Style LORA, a style add-on for Stable Diffusion SDXL-based image-generating AI models. The style is too ‘modern card-art for tabletop games’ for me, but some may like it and one user seems to have pushed it more towards Lovecraft’s landscapes.
* Talking of SD, I’ve been running workflow tests to see if a scene from Bondware’s Poser 12 can be translated to a new and convincing artistic style, using Stable Diffusion 1.5. The aim here was to keep exact Photoshop-layer registration with the original Poser render of the 3D scene (here deliberately made to look bad but also ‘SD friendly’). Such that the resulting image then can be consistently re-coloured and parts of it easily masked in Photoshop. Easy consistent clothes / heads / colouring / style being a Holy Grail in SD-made comics. Here a strong Controlnet, using a special type of render from Poser, holds the scene in place while allowing the SD style makeover to happen.
Using a difficult test scene from Poser I’ve had some success, as you can see. In this little demo a Lovecraft-alike visits an alien world and surveys the cosmos through his boyhood telescope. A wonky pose was applied to the Poser figure, meant for a steampunk airship with rigging for the figure’s hand to grasp. And it’s ‘too light, to too dark’, but that’s intentional. Plus getting a likeness of Lovecraft was tricky from a 768px starting render. Anyway… it’s a proof-of-workflow and you get the idea. Now I’m moving on to try to ‘Moebius’ the same scene.
* Talking of which, the new edition of The Comics Grid has the long article “Moebius and Digital Tools: From Experimentation to Remediation”. This examines how… “Moebius used digital tools throughout his career in a variety of ways, ranging from experimentation to remediation and back”. Remediation = ‘fixing unsatisfactory old artwork’.
* A while back I blogged about Novelforge, the offline creative writing editor software with style assistants and a one-time $60 purchase. A new version had added a choice of free remote or local AI creative-writing assistants. Those who tried it then may recall that Novelforge unfortunately lacks a dark mode, but… I now find this can be forced with the latest $10 WindowTop Pro utility. WindowTop forces any Windows software to use a dark mode, while also trying to keep the user interface’s other red-blue-green colours the same. The effect can be toggled with a few keyboard presses. I tried several ‘dark mode forcers’, and this was the one that worked for Novelforge while also keeping the red-blue-green UI icons etc intact.
* On display at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, until the end of June 2025, a selection from their new Lichtman Sci-Fi Fanzine Collection. The selection being exhibited aims to survey the collection’s “breadth and depth”…
… the Robert Lichtman Science Fiction Fanzine Collection amounting to over 15,000 items. This extensive collection spans nearly a century, dating from the late 1930s through 2022, and features commentary, fan fiction, criticism, conference proceedings, and other genres. Along with the printed works, the archive includes correspondence, original art, and several fanzine titles personally published by Lichtman.
It occurs to me that long-time fan collectors could now approach the Library, to see if their own collection might make a welcome and complementary addition (in due course)?
* And finally, Oregon Live has a long article recounting how last December, a couple purchased the sight-unseen contents of a storage unit in Lyons for $60, finding there…
“The original manuscript of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1924 short story, ‘Under the Pyramids’, which Lovecraft wrote on the back of old business letters.”
This turned out to have been stolen from…
James Strand’s collection [which was] probably the finest ever put together of science fiction and fantasy dealing with Lovecraft, [and also] Arkham House and the Arkham House writers. I can’t even think of an institution with a better collection.” (quote by L.W. Currey) […] Drug dealers and street-gang members quickly waltzed in after the medical examiner departed with Strand’s body [after his death]. They ransacked his library, stealing first editions, manuscripts and original art. [ Local police were not interested in the thefts, but …] The FBI [now] estimates $1 million in stolen books and comics have been recovered, but no one knows how many Strand books have disappeared into personal collections, burn piles or other storage lockers. If Strand kept a meticulous inventory, it disappeared in the looting of his home.
One hopes that, at least, no unpublished Lovecraft letters were lost. Such a pity the collection was never shipped to a university archive. But then in the case of some universities, you have to wonder if the archives themselves will be subject to purges a few decades along the line.
— End-quotes —
“I used to have the atlas [Mitchell’s Ancient Atlas], but it was lost during a household removal. Three removes [i.e. house moves], said old Dr. Franklin, are as bad as a fire!” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber Jr., December 1936.
“… the door of some Cyclopean furnace had been thrown wide, and the old mansion stood out black against a veritable holocaust of empyreal fire. The spectacle was a chromatick tumult unearthly and iridescent, nearly every colour having its place — even a vivid and sinister green which seem’d to typify the poisonous corrosion and putrefaction of the decaying elder America.” — Lovecraft to F.B. Long, November 1923, on encountering his own ancestral Simmonsville mansion amidst a violent sunset, during a walking tour of old family places.
“… [my] hands simply paralysed unless I hold’ em over the [portable oil] heater and thaw’ em out afresh for every beastly word. [Though] maybe I’ll survive through the night, since I see a fire has just been started in the furnace” — Lovecraft to Morton, November 1925 (Lovecraft, shivering in his New York room on the edge of Red Hook).
