07 Saturday May 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A 1968 postcard painted by one “Pennington”, advertising a Lovecraft rock-band concert in California. Could this be Bruce Pennington, doing ‘Lovecraft the writer’ (Dreamlands sunsets etc) via ‘Lovecraft the band’?
Update: No, sadly not Bruce.
03 Tuesday May 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
In the latest short-poetry collection from Libivox, a public-domain reading of the poem “The Dark Pool” by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, published as by ‘Francis Hard’ in the April 1925 edition — along with the Lovecraft/Eddy collaboration “Deaf, Dumb and Blind” and “The Wind That Tramps The World”.
Did the editor pop other poems in, when there was a page to fill? No. This seems to be his only one during the Lovecraft years. But he did have two in the magazine in early 1923, before his editorship…
* “The Closing Hand” in Weird Tales (March 1923).
* “The Snake Fiend” in Weird Tales (April 1923).
“The Dark Pool” runs to two minutes in a fine and well-paced reading.
Meanwhile, over in Canada… Lovecraft’s “At The Mountains of Madness” in an hour, on stage.
02 Monday May 2022
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New books
S.T. Joshi’s blog announces that his new Lovecraft-as-character novel has been published. This is…
my detective novel Honeymoon in Jail, with Lovecraft and Sonia as the detectives … set in the spring of 1928, when HPL came to Brooklyn (unwillingly) to help Sonia set up a new hat shop.
Sounds fun. Available now in ebook and paper at 196 pages. The ebook is £3 in the UK. Possibly just the thing for a wet May ‘Bank Holiday’ Monday, as we often have here in the UK.
Also noted by Joshi is an amusing 1951 Jean Cocteau drawing of one of Lovecraft’s Deep Ones, currently for sale…
27 Wednesday Apr 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Eurogamer magazine has a new interview with the maker of one of the best games of 2020, the acclaimed and strongly Lovecraftian Call of the Sea, “Lovecraft, new studios, and the legacy of Myst”…
“It was one of my favourite games of last year. And you’ve just been nominated for a BAFTA…” [British version of the Oscars, which includes games and TV]
There is of course a constant weekly tidal-wave of Lovecraftian games, comics, metal albums, table-top RPGs and suchlike, and Tentaclii can only briefly note the best here. Of which…
* The Sinking City (2019), the big Lovecraftian Innsmouth-alike videogame of 2019, is now said to be back on the retail shelves after a legal dispute.
* Gou Tanabe’s eagerly awaited manga graphic-novel of “The Dunwich Horror” is taking a break from serial publication in Japanese and will be back in July, which will likely put the English edition back by four months or so.
29 Tuesday Mar 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Beautiful new Moebius-like covers for the Fracoise Bon translations of Lovecraft, these being issued by the publisher Points. These seem to have been paperbacks re-issued with new covers in 2020-21. Try as I might I can’t get the illustrator’s name. [ Update: Borja Gonzalez ] The covers of the earlier mid 2010s edition were rather vague ‘tentacles in the background / big typography’ shovelware-looking stuff. But these are more like French BD comics.
17 Thursday Mar 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
New on the HPLHS store, a Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set. 94 quality role-playing props for Chaosium’s Lovecraftian games, and I guess they could also be adapted to other Lovecraft RPGs. Seems to be shipping now.
Meanwhile, over in Appalachia…
12 Saturday Mar 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“Lovecraft in New York City”, my Photoshop-ing ‘after’ a great original late 1930s-40s picture made by Lee Sievan. We see the Kirk-area of Lower Manhattan, New York City. The Elevated railway is seen on the left.
06 Sunday Mar 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
From Blue Fox, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” in a two-part comics adaptation. Set in 1927 but looks to be something of a free adaptation, judging by the cover of the second book (which appears to introduce a young female to the tale?).
01 Tuesday Mar 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Chaosium has a new video interview with Loic Muzy on “Illustrating Cthulhu”. Loic talks about… “his experiences illustrating Cthulhu Mythos creatures throughout his career”. He’s also at ArtStation.
22 Tuesday Feb 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
Rhode Island Fish Sounds, being marine fish recorded from the 1950s to 1960s…
The sounds range from the “boatwhistle” toots of the oyster toadfish, to the teeth rasps and clicks of the parrotfishes, to the ratchet sounds of the drums and croakers.
Sadly not under Creative Commons.
20 Sunday Feb 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Write Act Repertory of New York, NY are currently accepting submissions from playwrights for their forthcoming Short Play Festivals planned for 2022:
1) “Friend or Poe” (they seem to be interested in Edgar Allan Poe as both man and writer).
2) “World of Lovecraft” (they seem to be interested in the man more than the monsters, and the afterlife re: Lovecraft having “perhaps the craziest literary afterlife this country has ever seen”).
Deadlines: 30th April 2022.
16 Wednesday Feb 2022
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts
The leading Spanish newspaper El Pais this week featured a nicely stylised Lovecraft in a recent cartoon strip by their Max cartoonist, imagining a conversation between Disney and Lovecraft.
The punchline doesn’t translate at all well, but this is the best I can do with it…
COLOSSUS OF THE ARTS: Lovecraft and Disney.
HPL: Come on, Walt, admit it. You feel, as I do, a morbid fascination with evil things. What’s more, you far surpass me when it comes to expressing horror and the abominable. Your best creations have always been the evil characters, admit it.
Disney: That’s not true, Howard. What about Donald Duck?
HPL: Bah, who cares about that colourless wimp? Whereas your Scrooge McDuck, he would laugh at my Cthulhu and his cultists!