A few personal picks from the many recent ‘Lovecraft the man’ pictures, as posted on DeviantArt…

H.P. Lovecraft by Dvazart.

2020 by perimido. I guess the skeleton penguins are ‘Mountains of Madness’.

Ach-Pe-El by gjsx51.

H.P.Lovecraft – caricature by miguelzuppo.

HPL’s bathroom by Zeephra. As a physical sewn tapestry. Based on a pixelart version.

Inktober, 2020: H.P. Lovecraft by Snipetracker. Specifically, Lovecraft and Sonia while he was writing “Under the Pyramids”. You’ll recall that the story interrupted their Honeymoon.

H.P. Lovecat by JulianDemiurgo.

H.P. Lovecraft by Nick-OG.

Grandpa Whipple and others, rejuvunated through the miracles of technology.

Likely to be using the new Deep Nostalgia service at MyHeritage.

A while back Archive.org put up the legendary science-fiction comics editor Josep Toutain’s first run of his Spanish-language 1984 title (#1 – 30). It’s still there.

The magazine actually ran on to #64. Now Archive.org also has Toutain’s 1984 #30 – #64 in PDF, newly arrived. Plus five Annuals (1980-84) and even two ‘specials’ in the year 1984 that appear to have been showcasing aspiring young comics artists.

The magazine was titled 1984 until the actual year of 1984 swung around… and of course this made an anachronism of the masthead. It was then continued, necessarily re-titled, as Zona 84 (#1 – #96, three annuals, four beginners anthologies, and what appear to have been four poster-magazines — the latter being a format that was hot at that time).

It’s not to be confused with the various licenced editions of the Spanish 1984 which appeared in other languages. In the USA this means Warren’s 1984 (later titled 1994) magazine, which offered a toned-down American competitor to the English edition of Heavy Metal and Marvel’s native Epic magazine. I never saw the Warren 1984 (1994) here in the UK, and it probably never even reached our comics shops, perhaps due to the import censorship and moral panics of the period — and thus never survived to be found later in the comics boxes of second-hand bookshops.

There was also the partial reprint of the Spanish title as a French-language magazine Ere Comprimee (#1 – #42). This seems to have been a high-quality competitor to Metal Hurlant (the French source of Heavy Metal) in France and Belgium, but heavier on the nudity and cartoon violence.

The Warren titles and Ere Comprimee did not just do straight translated reprints of the Spanish issues. They appear to have selected the strips they wanted, adding alongside them local artists and new unique editorial material. I would imagine the words also saw some buffing and shifting in the translations.

Which reminds me that we still need an auto-translate comics reader software for French and Spanish comics. The best we have is Project Naptha (May 2020), a browser addon at the Chrome store. It now works on the Opera browser as well, but can still only do ‘English to other languages’. We need a PDF/CBR reader than can attempt basic auto-translation of comics-lettering from French and Spanish to English. Ideally inline and replacing, as Project Naptha has shown is possible.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that other publishers in Europe also produced their own clones of the Spanish 1984, using translated material from the Spanish magazine. Possibly there are titles from Germany and Italy I’m not aware of.

Such titles also appear to have inspired Cheval Noir (1989-1994), an American Heavy Metal-like title in which Dark Horse reprinted the best continental European comics in English. It offered a mix of standalone shorts, and ongoing strips, in black and white. Probably other long-forgotten magazines were also around in this ‘free’ period between the censorship of the 1950s/60s and the prudish political correctness of the later 1990s. While the stories in these various titles veer toward excuses for titillating 1970s-style nudity and gory battle, the comic art and sci-fi inventiveness is fabulous.

Obvious, when you think about it. There’s a new Lovecraftian Cooking Simulator. Make Lovecraftian horror-themed dishes, try to avoid summoning monsters … get a secret Easter egg. The small mini-game prototype seems to have been rustled up very quickly as part of a game jam, but I like the idea.

A real Lovecraftian Cooking Simulator would involve Lovecraft having to live frugally on $x per day, long periods of semi-starvation (“reducing”, as he politely called it), grocery trips to the local What Cheer in search of bargains and discounted dented cans, midnight meals in seedy dock-front cafes, secretly putting aside titbits for stray cats, immense ice-cream and coffee binges, connoisseurship of various forms of spicy cooked cheese, assiduous avoidance of fish-bars and fish-markets, and a lifelong shunning of booze. There’s quite a set of game mechanics in that lot, I’d suggest, especially if the goal is to fuel Lovecraft enough to produce a masterpiece… while also not allowing either him or his kitties to die, and preventing him from concocting a meal with the wrong sort of deadly left-over ingredients and thus summoning hallucinatory monsters. Possibly occasional visitors from New York would arrive, bearing exotic and unusual foods they had discovered, which could lead to dream-visions of far desert ruins and weird mountain-top water-gardens.

Possibly it could become partly a storytelling board-game, with picture-cards, rather than a fiddly RPG with stats. It could even have some small tabletop figures…

Andrew Leman of the HPLHS reads “The Sea Thing” by Frank Belknap Long (Weird Tales, December 1925) in a new audio reading.

This seems a good post on which to add a link for the latest substantial Lovecraftian videogame, The Shore | Official Release Trailer. Kind of like a Lovecraftian Myst, it seems, with a more cinematic feel and an eerier shoreline setting.