04 Sunday Jul 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A boxed collection of Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu products from the 1980s. All neatly bundled and presumably warehouse originals that have not been chewed on by ghouls. (Nope, they’re reprints apparently).
Official, and Kickstarting now.
03 Saturday Jul 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
New on DeviantArt…
“The Color out of Space” by Smilodon99, in a rustic woodblock etching style.
“Shadow Over Innsmouth” inspired painting by Thomas-Elliott-Art.
The shady town by GBLXVIII, showing Innsmouth. Creative Commons.
Choose Cthulhu – The Shadow Over Innsmouth Map by Qpiii. A Choose-your-own-Adventure map.
Lovecraftian Species by VanDeWolf. Giving a pleasingly fluid and semi-plant feel.
Portrait of H.P. Lovecraft with a black cat by Ghostexist. Given the age of Lovecraft here it’s unlikely to be meant to depict the beloved cat ‘Trigger-ban’, which ran away and was lost when Lovecraft was just a lad. And which also had green eyes.
And The Shadow In Innsmouth by Nick-Perks. Being The Shadow pulp character. In Innsmouth.
23 Wednesday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A new 64 page comic, Nightmares of Providence #1. It appears to be a one-shot connected with a Kickstarter stretch-goal, part of a campaign for a deluxe collected edition of Alan Moore’s Providence comics. But Nightmares is by other artists/writers. Amazon UK knows nothing, but it should be shipping any day now… if the comics-trade catalogue Previews is to be believed.
16 Wednesday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts
H.P. Lovecraft appears as the ‘big reveal’ at the end of the recently-released serial comic Die #16, and now makes a sustained as-character appearance in the current issue #17. Die is based on a popular RPG game, it seems.
In the comic he is deemed to have died in 1919, after blinding himself because of the horrors he was seeing and learning about. He is here the blind ‘Master of Dreams’ who serves as brief ‘realm-guide and info-dump’ for the super-hero-like RPG team. I say brief, but he appears for 14 pages, which all look superb and are kind of fun. Lovecraft is then rewarded by the team by being easily killed with a single head-bash, because he is “no longer needed” (no… I couldn’t figure that bit out, either…). His death (again) unleashes his hordes of nightmare creature-dreams on his dream-realm and thus on the team. Moral: ‘Don’t kill the Master, because it will unleash his horrors’, I guess.
But then the team just teleport away from the monsters (erm… Wellsian centipedes?) and the brained Lovecraft. Which was rather lame, I thought. Die has superb art and interesting fantasy-horror concepts going on, but possibly some too-easy get-outs. But perhaps that’s the way it is in the table-top RPG version of Die. Don’t like a NPC character? Just kill him off… In trouble? Just teleport away…
I guess now we wait for the trade-paperback for this Die story-arc to see how it all plays out and if it makes sense when read in full. The trade is due early November as Die, Volume 4: Bleed, with 168 pages.
15 Tuesday Jun 2021
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
Another few picks from the new or recent Lovecraft art.
The Music of Erich Zann by Rabbitstein.
Howard Lovecraft-Process by Red-Rus. And the final finished version.
H.P. Lovecraft, Prophet of the Great Old Ones by Airen90. Adapted from one of the several ‘stage magician’ movies, I’m guessing.
Lovecraft by YlarchC. Imagining Cage playing Lovecraft himself, in a TV movie.
Cthulhu Rises by Silberius. (Lovecraft and Sonia in New York City, 1925 at the genesis of “Cthulhu”).
The Cats of Ulthar (BW) by UnworthyReturn.
Alhazred Encounter 10: The Temple of Ong by Tillinghast23. There’s a large series of these, depicting the many quests of Alhazred. Also a similar Fungi from Yuggoth set from a few years ago, and an Ashton Smith set.
Egypt 04 by Blik1976.
Abdul Alhazred by Mgenccinar.
Also noticed was Solomon Kane in the Ruins by ArtofReza.
13 Sunday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
You’re likely to need a tongue like an eel, to do justice to reading aloud Lovecraft’s poetry translated into Swedish. But it’s good to know such a book exists.
Kosmofobi : Dikter om varldar bortom was new from Aleph Bokforlag in 2020, with 176 pages and 10 illustrations…
The book collects all the author’s surviving horror and fantasy poems. These are published in the original side-by-side with Swedish interpretations in free verse. There is also an essay by the prominent Lovecraft expert Robert M. Price, written especially for this Swedish edition.
Also from the same publisher, Jens Heimdahl’s illustrated “Dream Quest”, Soekandet efter det droemda Kadath (2020, 2nd edition). According to the publisher…
Something of an art book, solidly illustrated by Jens Heimdahl, who also has a section on the author and analyzes the story.
They’ve saddled it with a cover with poor ‘shovelware’ typography, but here are some samples of the art…
11 Friday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Picture postals
This week on ‘picture postals’, the man himself. As seen on a series of postcards issued in France under the ‘Dessin Jullian’ imprint, by artist Bernard Jullian and presumably self-published. I’ve been unable to discover dates or any biographical data on Jullian, but the cards appear to be classed as vintage — so perhaps before 2000. These are part of a colour postcard series that included portraits-from-photos of Bram Stoker, Arthur C. Clarke, Poe and other famous writers of the imagination. I’m usually averse to portraits-from-photos, which are nearly always so obviously portraits-from-photos, but here the artist has evoked something of Lovecraft’s arch intelligence.
Also R.E. Howard, from the same series…
09 Wednesday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts
Hijos de Cthulhu digs up another entry for the hypothetical ‘Lovecraft as character’ encyclopedia.
In June 1983 a theatre show called ‘Lovecraft’ premiered at the University of Seville [in Spain]. The show was presented by the University Theater Group “Puppets”, founded in 1979 by various students and professors of the aforementioned University. It was described as…
“A deep and serene music announces that the show begins. Mad and tortured Lovecraft, mysterious and human Lovecraft appears on stage. “We do not intend to do a biographical work on Lovecraft, we have simply been impressed by some visual features of this character that appears to us full of contradictions.”
I wonder if the script and staging directions are still available? They might make for an interesting translation in the Lovecraft Annual 2022, or one of Joshi’s other journals?
06 Sunday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, REH
Black Gate surveys R.E. Howard in Japan in the new “Conan in the Land of the Rising Sun”. He discovers a rich trove of illustrations and maps little-known in the west, and shows them.
[Warning: some art is not safe for viewing in prudish workplaces].
02 Wednesday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“Here There Be Monsters” – The Call Of Cthulhu for Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. As a mega-mod for this famous videogame, unofficial of course…
Strange things have begun to happen across Tamriel. Barbaric cults have begun to practice ancient rites in the dark places of Skyrim. Monsters have grown huge and terrible in the ashes of Red Mountain. And there are whispers across Solstheim of an ancient city name R’lyeh…
Looks great and weighs in at over 700mb, and is now reasonably mature after six years of work. A new major version was just released, the first in a year.
30 Sunday May 2021
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New books
New to me, Kadath, or, The dream quest of Randolph Carter from Sloth Comics of London, 2014. Creator Charles Cutting is an illustrator from Oxford, in the UK. I like the style, and it’s probably even better on paper. There’s lots of it too, with over 100 pages of detailed art.
The first quarter of the adaptation was a webcomic originally on The Illustrated Ape website, then the first issue appeared in 2012 — but a crowd-funder for the rest of the issues is said to have failed. Congratulations to Cutting for getting the book finished and published regardless, especially in the context of the difficult UK scene. One review lamented that…
work of this calibre seems to slip ‘under the radar’ in the comics community
It certainly slipped under my radar, and yet Lovecraft + comics is on the radar for me. But then it’s always been a problem finding out about entertaining completed-story graphic novels for over-18 readers, unless they’re mass-market superhero fare or the sort of angsty politically-correct wrist-slashers that the reviewers flock to.
Anyway, get Kadath for £11.99 (about $17 U.S.) as a new paperback via Sloth (appears to be still in print, delivered by Amazon) and help support Charles with royalties. Or get it used on Amazon for (currently) a little less inc. postage.
29 Saturday May 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
New on Archive.org, a fine scan of Miracle Stories No. 1, Spring 1931. Very evocative art from the era, shown crisply and at large size. Including a full-page tentacles illustration that, with a little Photoshop-ing and colouring, might serve as a new book cover for someone.
