A new H.P. Lovecraft Bust by Justin Cissell, albeit digital in Zbrush rather than than fine Parnassian marble.
“… he had fashioned the sculpture in his dreams”
16 Sunday Oct 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts
New book: The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence
15 Saturday Oct 2022
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New books
A new review by Arciapod of the graphic novel The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence (2022), albeit reviewed from one of those annoying highly-compressed…
free preliminary, and likely unedited copy of this book
…of the sort that gets sent out for a graphic-novel review.
But his review usefully reveals that…
One’s enjoyment of this book is directly proportional to how much somebody likes or knows about H.P. Lovecraft. … people familiar with his works will get a far better appreciation for this story than others, and honestly without knowing a bit about him, the finer points of this may fly right over their heads.
Sounds good. Warning: the review has some big spoilers. The Arciapod review has only just been published, but it turns out the book has actually been out since June 2022. I had noticed it in passing, but until now had not heard about the direct Lovecraft connection.
Now… a while back Tentaclii noted the similar-looking ‘A Bestiary of the Twilight’ (Le Bestiaire du Crepuscule, June 2022), a French ‘BD’ (i.e. oversized graphic novel, often in hardcover) also featuring Lovecraft as a character. The French Lovecraftians had mentioned it, and I assumed it had not yet been translated.
Yet I now see that this ‘BD’ has the same 120 page-count as Mr. Providence, and has the same Parisian artist/writer in Daria Schmitt. A little digging finds European comics sources noting the name change. Yes, Le Bestiaire du Crepuscule has been re-titled as The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence for the English edition, and since summer 2022 can now be enjoyed by English readers.
Only as an ebook, admittedly, but at a very reasonable price (probably around $5, for U.S. readers). If you want the dead-tree version it seems you’d have to get the French ‘BD’ and a phrasebook.
The news of this prompted me to see if there was an ebook of the graphic novel biography Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H.P. Lovecraft. No, still just an out-of-print 2017 hardback.
‘The Oblique City’ – Lovecraft in Quebec
11 Tuesday Oct 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
“The Oblique City: H.P. Lovecraft, New France and Quebec”, a new gallery exhibition by comics (BD) artist Christian Quesnel. At the Galerie Montcalm in Canada, running until 8th December 2022…
The latest work by Christian Quesnel, ‘La cité oblique’, a free interpretation of the Quebec travelogue by H.P. Lovecraft … sprawling mists, forgotten deities and poignant creatures
Also I found a podcast interview with the artist, though it doesn’t appear to be in English.
The blurb for the podcast usefully reveals that the works are also in a print volume…
his [BD] album La Cité oblique, published by Editions Alto
Tracking this down, one finds that the book appeared in August 2022 and the blurb reveals more…
Christian Quesnel spent several years creating this magnum opus, which is enriched by Ariane Gelinas’s soaring prose … a parallel history of Quebec … [Lovecraft’s] wanderings through “the city of enigmas walled behind the closed shutters of dream” combine brilliantly with a Lovecraftian tale of the brave deeds of Qartier and Loui Heyber. The result is a highly hallucinatory tribute to the father of the Cthulhu Mythos, as well as a fascinating reworking of the past.
Sounds great. I look forward to seeing the book appear in English.
Lovecrafter #9 and #10
08 Saturday Oct 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
The German Lovecraftians report that…
The new double-issue (9 + 10) of The Lovecrafter magazine was sent out this month by our hard-working cultist Andre. It should have reached our members’ mail-boxes by now.
The theme of the double-issue is “Lovecraft’s Geography” / “Dreamlands”, and TOCs include…
* “Somewhere in the middle of nowhere” examines various locations from Lovecraft’s works in detail.
* Another article goes “the opposite way and describes how role-playing games mix geographical reality and fiction”.
* A further article goes “in search of lost species”.
* An article on “the Cthuloid book portfolio of the Nighttrain publishing house”.
* An interview in which “Rahel and Rene talked extensively with Huan Vu about the current status of the shooting of his Dreamlands project.” (movie?)
* Many RPG game scenarios and game reviews, and more.
They also report a new book…
in [German publisher] Festa’s Weird Fiction series. In November, Dunkle Pforten will be the first of a total of six volumes that will [eventually] contain all the stories by Robert Aickman (1914-1981) in German for the first time.
Forthcoming book: Lovecraft in Holland
01 Saturday Oct 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A forthcoming national Lovecraft story anthology, Lovecraft in Holland. Foreword by Robert M. Price. As you might expect, Mythos tales with a Dutch flavour. I’m guessing the olde Dutch marshlands of New York City could also feature, as Lovecraft is known to have haunted these in the 1920s.
Some monsters
30 Friday Sep 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
No postcards, this Friday. I sometimes feel that visitors coming hoping for monsters may be a little disappointed to find me chuntering about the places Lovecraft knew/visited. So here’s a selection of full-blown monsters, as if from some unfinished and long-lost 1980s Dreamlands book made under the influence of Brian Froud…
Hopgob
Ambler
Poogmush
Waplee
Gobrot
Made with AI and some Photoshop-ing, of course. I’ve discovered the trick of getting an art-gen AI to consistently produce an isolated figure on a plain backdrop. It’s my understanding that raw AI generated art can’t be in copyright, unless then manually reconfigured (e.g. with significant manual over-painting, or the art used for comic-book panels that are then overlaid with text). So, despite my Photoshop fixes and tweaks on the above, all the above five pictures are here placed under full Creative Commons Attribution. Feel free to use them in your RPG etc. If you need better names, Murray Ewing has a new Lovecraftian Title Generator.
Elsewhere this week, Noah Pinion asks “Is AI a Lovecraftian intelligence?”.
Coining it
25 Sunday Sep 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The Republic of Palau, the Pacific island-chain nation, has issued a new pure-silver 20 dollar coin commemorating H.P. Lovecraft. I assume it’s real currency that might buy you ⅔’s of a ginger-beer on one of their beautiful atoll beaches.
But isn’t little Palau supposed to be beneath the rising waves by now, like R’lyeh? Nope. Despite many claims heard in the media, none of the Pacific atoll islands with people on them are shrinking.
Incidentally, looking up the spelling of R’lyeh via search shows that Google doesn’t know what it is when slightly mis-spelled. Bing / DuckDuckGo (the Duck is Bing) does, suggesting Microsoft may now have a wider semantic lookup than Google Search.
Arkham House guide
24 Saturday Sep 2022
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
New on Archive.org to borrow, Horrors and unpleasantries : a bibliographical history & collectors’ price guide to Arkham House (1982). Probably superseded now, as a price-guide, but other aspects of it may interest some.
New book: Providence Omnibus (Spanish)
17 Saturday Sep 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A new Providence Omnibus, being a 720-page complete one-volume translation into Spanish of Alan Moore’s Providence comics series. Due in the Spanish bookshops at the end of September 2022.
Also a new $20 artbook for the Providence series, in English.
Lovecraft’s letters geo-located
15 Thursday Sep 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Lovecraft’s letters geo-located. Sadly it’s “one-record, one map point”, rather than the some vast seething tentacular web of points and connections. Still, the database wranglers appear to have done the basic work, parsing the structured records / list published by the Providence-based archives. Thus it may be possible to get just the Lovecraft data out, and then have software make it into a visual map. The correspondence.ie Web site does have visualisations, but I couldn’t spot one on the list for Lovecraft.
A simpler and more creative task would be an artistic wall-chart map showing all his known correspondents, with a uniformly hand-drawn portrait of each (if their appearance is known). The size of the portrait would indicate the size / duration / importance of the correspondence. With small arrows to indicate any notable non-Lovecraft correspondence with other members of the Circle. With insets on the map to cover New York City, California, the British Isles and the British Empire, etc. In fact, such a big wall-map might be a nice incentive to boost sales of the forthcoming mega-index covering all of Lovecraft’s letters.
Linus, September 2022
14 Wednesday Sep 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
News from Italy. A chunky new issue of Linus magazine devotes itself to H.P. Lovecraft, with a wide range of articles, art, and comics. It’s in Italian, and is available now.
Includes the following interesting titles, in translation, among others:
Monsters at the corner of the street.
Fantastic narratives.
Between absolute materialism and poetry.
The Call of Cthulhu.
On the rays of the moon.
Alan Moore and the call of Lovecraft.
The challenge to represent the Unspeakable.
Adriano Monti-Buzzetti interviews Gou Tanabe.
Dagon – the inhabitant of the dark.
Voluminous at NecronomiCon
09 Friday Sep 2022
Posted in Astronomy, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
A new Voluminous podcast, in this case a live audience reading of Lovecraft’s letters. Voluminous: Live from NecronomiCon reads from the Hartmann letters…
an exchange of letters published in the newspaper between a local astrology enthusiast and the astronomically inclined HPL.