Time for a look at comics.
The delayed single-volume Lovecraft: Unknown Kadath collected comics series / graphic-novel should be shipping in about two weeks, just in time for the ‘student grant-money arrival’ season. Also to be available as a Kindle ebook. I see there’s also to be a French single-volume edition of this recent Kadath series of comics, with the French translation due early November 2023.
There’s also a French graphic novel or ‘BD’, Le dernier jour de Howard Phillips Lovecraft (‘The Last Day of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’). No page-count that I can find, but presumably it’ll be the usual ‘BD’ length and large page dimensions.
Set to ship just before Halloween 2023…
Romuald Giulivo and artist Jakub Rebelka bring us the dreamlike story of Lovecraft’s final moments in the form of interior dialogues, [in which he] revisits his imaginary lands, memories, his anger and his grey areas. We follow the last journey of a complex and tortured man [who is] convinced that only a comforting eternal night awaits men at the moment of their death. But isn’t an author inherently immortal thanks to his stories of which we are the custodians? Constructed like a strange Gothic cathedral, Lovecraft’s Last Day is an extraordinary graphic novel turning the end of a man into the beginning of a myth.
Sounds good, though only in French. One would have thought that the French ‘BD’ industry would have installed a streamlined AI-assisted insta-translation system by now. They must be missing out on a large chunk of revenue by not doing so. They have so much quality content and back-catalogue material. For grown-ups, self-contained complete stories, great art. Many English readers would gladly pay $10 for that, in ebook.
Later in the year, we have a new maybe-perhaps shipping date for Gou Tanabe’s mammoth H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth graphic novel manga adaptation, in the English Dark Horse translation. Like the single-volume Kadath, this has been much delayed. But Amazon is now suggesting possible UK in-your-hands delivery by 7th December 2023.
By the way, I was able to read The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence graphic novel. Hmmm… entertaining in a ‘Neil Gaiman meets Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens’ sort of way. Very beautiful artwork and lettering. But not really about the Lovecraft I recognise.
And it looks like the older graphic novel / comics biography Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H.P. Lovecraft is now firmly out-of-print. Time for a new affordable e-book edition from PS Publishing?
