The exhibition Tales of Terra: A Lee Brown Coye Retrospective. Running until 2nd March 2024 in Hamilton, New York, at the Picker Art Gallery / Dana Arts Center.

Lee Brown Coye (1907–1981), recognized mostly for his unsettling illustrations in horror anthologies and pulp magazines. His creations for popular pulps such as Weird Tales and stories by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Manly Wade Wellman earned him a place in American illustration history. Featuring examples from Picker Art Gallery’s vast collection of artwork by Coye, along with loans from other regional museums and private collections, Tales of Terra brings into focus the less gruesome side of Coye’s artistic output and puts these works in dialogue with his published illustrations. This retrospective exhibition includes artworks that span Coye’s lifetime, examining his regionalist roots, his fascination with architecture, and his relationship to the places he lived, all of which found a place in his unique takes on the grotesque.

I found two quotes from Those Who Were There…

“In the middle and late forties, Weird Tales had one superior artist, Lee Brown Coye. Coye’s best work featured degenerate and warped humans, who fitted well with the weird inhabitants of Dunwich and Arkham. His illustrations for “The Whippoorwills in the Hills” by Derleth and “The Will of Claude Ashur” by Thompson were masterpieces.” (Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos, 1973).

“Karl Edward Wagner’s masterful tale “Sticks” (Whispers, March 1974) was an homage to the artist Lee Brown Coye, who illustrated several Lovecraft editions from Arkham House in the 1960s. Making use of the stick-lattice figures that Coye made his signature, “Sticks” speaks of these figures as glyphs designed to summon the Great Old Ones.” (Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, Joshi).

Coye’s depiction of Lovecraft writing…

The venue for this (probably one-time) retrospective looks rather remote, and potentially wintery from now on. A glance at the map suggest you’d go from New York City up the Hudson Valley to Albany, then strike west for about 100 miles.

Currently up for sale at honest Abe’s site, Favorite Haunts: A Journey Thro’ H.P. Lovecraft’s Providence (video cassette from Darkhive Associates, 1990). Not sure I’ve ever heard of this one…

Reviewed in Lovecraft Studies No. 24, but that’s not one of the online issues.

No sign of Favorite Haunts on YouTube or Archive.org.

A pleasing Lovecraftian analogue collage at The Sinister Science…

An homage to H. P. Lovecraft by way of Dr. Who and the 1970s.

See also the collage tag posts at The Sinister Science, for more retro-sci-fi collages. Large images, so it may take a while for all of them to load.

Acclaimed graphic novelist Gou Tanabe is set to publish the first episodes of his latest Lovecraft graphic novel. He’s tackling the “Short Stories from the Dreamlands”. First as a series which will be published as usual in Kadokawa’s Monthly Comic Beam magazine, which seems to be sort of Japanese version of the old Heavy Metal magazine. His first episode will be in Japanese in the November 2023 edition, and then the series will be ongoing.

Fairly soon after series completion there should be a fat Japanese trade paperback (his graphic novels are long). If past form is anything to go by, it will then appear in French, then Italian, and (after a grindingly long wait, likely of two years) finally in English. Which raises the perennial question… why is English publication of desirable Japanese or French/Belgian graphic novels so slow? And very often, not done at all?

Anyway, Tanabe’s earlier “Shadow Over Innsmouth” completed its serial run in March 2021. It should be officially published in English at the end of November 2023 and is pre-ordering now.

Tanabe’s “The Dunwich Horror” was completed in May 2023, so I guess we can expect that book in English perhaps at Halloween 2025. The new “Dreamlands” will perhaps complete in May 2024, for an English single-volume publication at Halloween 2026?

1970s TV star David McCallum has passed away.

A formative but almost-forgotten part of my youth. I remember him in the TV show Sapphire and Steel (time-travelling super-agents, ‘gothic horror meets TV sci-fi’) and in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. spy-thriller movies as shown on TV.

Sapphire and Steel is a British sci-fi show which I (and most others) had forgotten, but I vaguely recall enjoying it a lot… and I may well revisit it now.

Anyway, David McCallum also recorded vinyl L.P. records of Lovecraft tales, for the Caedmon label. As you might expect, these are now on Archive.org…

“The Rats in the Walls”
“The Dunwich Horror”
“The Haunter of the Dark”

Regular readers of Tentaclii will know I’ve been reading through the 22 trade paperback collection of the acclaimed series Fables. I was pleased to spot a clear Lovecraft reference, late on. Young Splinter is exploring her new home for the first time, a giant castle magically concealed in the midst of New York City. The exiled fables are moving in too, and so is the Library. There Splinter is drawn to a copy of the Necronomicon…

It’s in a short 20-page side-story which fronts the final three volumes, and the art is not by the regular artist. It also introduces ‘the rats in the walls’ (possibly another Lovecraftian nod?) who are then never encountered again. Looks to me like this ‘short’ is setting up a whole other story-arc, beyond the final volumes. And possibly one with Lovecraftian monsters? Well, now Fables has been sent into the public domain I guess that story can be written… if anyone cares to do it…

The German Lovecraftians have posted their club’s monthly update. Items of note:

* Their annual Lovecrafter double-issue magazine is bagged, stacked and ready to mail.

* Notes what sounds like a survey / overview article elsewhere, on…

Lovecraft in film [which] appeared in the German issue #15 of the film magazine Art of Horror. The feature looks at Lovecraft’s own attitude towards the medium, which was still young at the time, the direct film adaptations of his work, and productions that are indirectly influenced by his ideas on cosmic horror.

* The best of Weird Tales has been published in German as a 100th anniversary slipcase edition containing five hardcover books… “This anniversary edition, limited to 999 copies, contains 111 creepy and bizarre stories from the magazine’s first phase (1923 to 1954). Most of them appear for the first time in German.”

* There’s also a panning review (spoilers) of Alan Moore’s Providence comics series / graphic novel. Spoiler-free quote…

But rarely does it [the ‘inspired by Lovecraft’ thing] happen as clumsily and — in my opinion — disrespectfully as here. [The tale becomes] completely disrespectful after the great first volumes. What a story ‘Providence’ could have told if Moore had limited himself to telling a Lovecraftian story. In the ‘Neonomicon’ he succeeded [but] it’s a real shame that at the end of ‘Providence’] Moore resorts to the cheapest of twists to bring this great series to an utterly undignified end. […] Do yourself a favour and skip the ending [of ‘Providence’]. It’s a fiasco.