31 Monday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
There’s a crowdfunder to publish a sumptuous illustrated edition of Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark” for Brazil. Apparently as yet unpublished in this translation…
“Lovecraft’s scariest tale in an unpublished version in Brazil, with art by [experienced comics artist] Salvador Sanz.”
It’s already 281% funded, and set to be published in a “widescreen” print edition…
I’m guessing the wide format would allow for English on one side, and Portuguese on the other, and on the same page.
29 Saturday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
So, kiddies, it’s back to school on Tuesday 1st September. Here are a few suggestions for last-minute rush-orders for school stuff, to arrive Monday. All available now on eBay…
The H.P. Lovecraft shoulder bag for all your stuff, robust in black and blood red…
Gym-kit bag…
Stickers…
Cuddly ‘therapy Cthulhu’ doll…
Pencil and pens zip-case…
And matching cute sew-on-patch…
Rare tradez for schoolyard barter…
Sanity-check kit, for testing your xrazee new frendz…
Flag for your stand at the School Clubs recruitment fair…
Notepad for your Club rules and names…
Members’ pin-badge to entice potential Club members to become your minions…
A 3D printed Lovecraft bust, which your Club will diligently seek to smuggle into the School Trophy Cabinet…
29 Saturday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
New on Archive.org and in the open, the book The Novels Of Colin Wilson (1982). With a chapter discussing The Mind Parasites (1967), a novel that attempted to weld together Lovecraft-via-Derleth pulp, 1950’s ‘ray-gun’ science-fiction, and high philosophy.
21 Friday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
There will probably be more to come, but this is my round-up so far for 2020:
* The key website hplovecraft.com has… “completely overhauled and re-organized the “Lovecraft’s Letters” page” as a 130th birthday present. This being the page for the Lovecraft letters as published in book form.
* Portland’s H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival is celebrating Lovecraft’s 130th Birthday on the nearest weekend, via a “streaming event available to stream from anywhere in the U.S.”, and featuring “short films both new and classic from the festival’s 25 year history” and billed as “HPLFF Presents 130 Years of H.P. Lovecraft”. There is also a t-shirt for the event and the Festival’s co-director and “fellow Portland horror writers” ran an online Lovecraftian horror panel.
* The ‘Segundo Festival Literario H.P. Lovecraft’, aka ‘Literario 2do Festival H.P. Lovecraft’, appears to be taking place in Mexico from 20th-22nd August 2020, bringing together Lovecraftian artists, writers and film-makers in Mexico. Last year it was a physical event with stalls, talks and screenings at La Moderna. But this year it was perhaps only virtual. Online already is “Remanentes del pesimismo Schopenhaueriano en al obra de H.P. Lovecraft”, a 45 minute video lecture in Spanish on Schopenhauerian pessimism in Lovecraft. Doubtless more videos from the event will appear online soon.
* Elsewhere in Mexico there was a university event to launch the fourth edition of the La ciudad de las montañas de la locura (At The Mountains of Madness) and the blurb had it that… “there will be talks, short film screenings and will talk about art, science and cinema, all related to the writer.” The Casa Universitaria del Libro de la UANL also has livecasts via Facebook from August 17th to 22nd. “Among the themes will be addressed the relationship between Lovecraft and the First World War, his vision as a popularizer of science, the relationship between cinema and literature, and his poetry.”
* Also in Mexico, the 19th Macabre Film Festival at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico runs… “from August 25th to 30th, and will commemorate a hundred years of German Expressionism, and 130 years since the birth of H.P. Lovecraft”. The PDF Programme.
* Nothing from the Italian or other European Lovecraftians, that I can see. But possibly the search-engines have not yet got around to indexing the latest from across Europe. I get that impression from searches.
* I released my Annotated “Hypnos” at Tentaclii. This is the first substantial annotated edition, as Klinger omitted it from his two volumes, and the notes to be found from S.T. Joshi are fairly short.
* The latest Sept/Oct Halloween issue of Digital Production magazine, the substantial German trade magazine for high-end movie and TV digital FX and similar, was released on Lovecraft’s birthday with a ‘Cthulhu creation’ feature (article not yet online).
* There’s a “Cthulhu Mythos Sale” over on DriveThuRPG, which appears to be one of the largest of the RGP book sites. Tenkar’s Tavern has waded in and selected five of the best, and promises more picks soon.
* RPG gamers also chose the day to unleash Apocthulhu… “successfully launched the PDF edition of the APOCTHULHU Core Rulebook. It’s a 330 page behemoth packed with rules, world building resources, pre-defined settings…”.
* Comics artist Frank Brunner & Friends posted a nice arty ‘birthday-card’ on Facebook…
* A slightly less impressive Cthulhu Minecraft Skin was released. But fun, if you need a Cthulhu in there.
* Makowh released his full reading of “The Rats in the Walls”, accompanied by his own artwork which can be seen in crisper form at ArtStation.
* Harry Piper put together special 130th Birthday musings on “The Cosmic Pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft”.
* And lastly and rather more cheerily, the Journal of Geek Studies chose the day to celebrate Pokécrustacea: the crustacean-inspired Pokémon.
18 Tuesday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Cthulhu medallion by Dan Hiryak, just one of the many goodies recently spotted by Propnomicon who is doing sterling work in tracking Lovecraftian crafts.
15 Saturday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Reviews from R’lyeh considers the new mid-1930s RPG A Cold Fire Within: A Mind-Bending Campaign for Pulp Cthulhu. It seems worth noting here. Not just because it’s a major new Lovecraftian pulp work, albeit done as an RPG, but also because it’s not just mobsters, monsters ‘n machine-guns…
As an [RPG] campaign, A Cold Fire Within does something different. There have been plenty of scenarios for Call of Cthulhu which deal with the science fictional aspects of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, but not a campaign. It is very much not a campaign of Lovecraftian investigative horror in the eldritch sense, but rather one of fringe science — or ‘Science!’ and fringe theories ranging from Theosophy to the Hollow Earth.
It appears to have been launched in February 2020, and requires two other core game-books. Here’s the blurb…
For those who are not gamers there are now twelve recorded ‘play’ episodes of this on YouTube, though as yet no YouTube playlist to collect all these.
For artists there’s also a full look at the “making of” the front cover at Mariusz Gandzel’s ArtStation pages…
12 Wednesday Aug 2020
Dark Worlds Quarterly peers into the old 1970s Carlton Comics, and particularly their Lovecraftian work in the horror monthies… Part One and Part Two.
There’s a link on the first post to the Digital Comic Museum, of claimed “public domain” comics, where they have over 1,000 Charlton scans currently listed. Though sadly missing is Ghostly Haunts #28, December 1972, which Dark Worlds Quarterly spots as effectively featuring Lovecraft as both a cover-star and the lead character in “No Way Out”
With art by Joe Staton.
Ghostly Haunts was Charlton’s answer to the 1970s titles House of Mystery and Tower of Shadows and it ran from 1971-78. #28 also had Steve Ditko interior story, but even so it seems fairly easy to find cheap on eBay in a slightly worn condition. However a little searching online reveals… there’s “No Way Out”. Another item for a potential ‘Lovecraft as Character’ encyclopedia.
Talking of comics, an undergraduate-oriented introductory Comics Studies: A Guidebook book is set for publication in mid-August 2020, from Rutgers University Press.
11 Tuesday Aug 2020
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
My pick of the new Lovecraftian art on DeviantArt, with a few that are also new-to-me.
H. P. Lovecraft Sticker by Kayemby. “I take commissions & sell funky vinyl stickers on eBay.”
Octocat by MorpheusLunae.
From “Under the Pyramids” by Gomro.
H.P.Lovecraft bust by tot-art.
Brain Case by d1sarmon1a.
Night ride by Nashotobi. Successfully evoking the nightscapes of Lovecraft’s New York years. From a forthcoming “occult noir graphic novel called Colton Crux, inspired by the work of H. P. Lovecraft, the movie Inception, and old Noir films”. This has been successfully crowdfunded, is on pre-order and is set to ship in spring 2021.
“The Whisperer in Darkness” by TotemOfHorror (“possible Nyarlathotep form”).
Holmes Lowell Longfellow page by SamInabinet. From his forthcoming Pickman Perspectives which appears to be a book.
Cast a Deadly Spell fan-art. (mis-scanned proportions on DA, corrected here).
“Dreams in the Witch House” by Ronanmc. Borrowing somewhat, but effectively, from Donald Sutherland.
E is for Elder Thing by Armorwing.
“The Haunter of the Dark” by Nele-Diel for the Cthulhuscape game.
“The Haunter of the Dark” by vsqs.
Not new, but new to me, Bast, Goddess of all Cats by Astanael. Part of his extensive Lovecraftian tarot deck in draft sketch from 2017.
Nyarlathotep by Fausto-XIII.
Fishman of Innsmouth by Indecline69.
Captain Marsh! by Wiggers123, who has others from Innsmouth.
“The Music of Erich Zann” by Urikedi.
Lost in the Void by TakeOFFFLy.
The Temptation of St. Lovecraft by John Sumrow, with a nod to Dali’s “The Temptation of St Anthony”.
10 Monday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival presents… the screening event 130 Years of H. P. Lovecraft (streaming) on 22nd August 2020.
09 Sunday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, REH
New on Archive.org…
Howard Collector #5, Summer 1964.
Howard Collector #6, Spring 1965. With the poem “Who is Grandpa Theobold?”, from a letter. This would count as another early use of ‘Lovecraft as character’, albeit not in fiction. I wonder what the likely year on this poem is?
Howard Collector #7, Winter 1965.
Howard Collector #8, Summer 1966.
Also new and of interest is a new Dark Worlds Quarterly survey of Robert E. Howard’s Bran Mak Morn in the Comics.
05 Wednesday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Makers of strange Lovecraftian sonic devices may be interested to learn that a complete run of the journal Experimental Musical Instruments (1985-99) is now newly at Archive.org, with unified TOCs and article synopses. It appears to have been a practical journal by and for makers of working devices and instruments. Lots of practical articles on obscure and self-made instruments. For instance below we see the start of what appears, after much searching, to be the world’s only practical article on “clay bells” (April 1989).
04 Tuesday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Cthulhu on the cover of the Revue de la BnF, the substantial journal of the French National Library. Sadly it’s not open access. The issue, #59 (October 2019), was a world-building special issue and led into a 2020 ‘year of comics’ for the Library.
What is open access and public is the Library’s shorter quarterly ‘lobby magazine’ Chroniques. Issue #87 (January-March 2020) of Chroniques was their special BD (comics) / fantasy / Tolkien issue (they had the big Oxford Tolkien show visiting, and made it even bigger).
The #87 issueof Chroniques well worth a look, even though it’s all in French. I’d recommend a translator software but, amazingly, in 2020 it’s still impossible to translate the text of a PDF in place, without uploading it to some Cloud service or doing a half-baked conversion to MS Word first. Sure, the PDF format is hard to parse. But how difficult can it be to take a 3000px snapshot of a page, OCR and translate the text on it, erase the original text, then return the translated text into the erased area? Project Naptha can do that, though only for English… so why can’t at least one desktop PDF reader software do it? On a page such as this…
Anyway, it may also interest some readers to know that the Library’s CNLJ (children’s literature dept.) produces a very long-running journal in French La Revue des livres pour enfants (Review of Books for Children). This has a two year rolling paywall, during which only free samples are available online. After that it’s open access all the way back to 1965. This back-list reveals choice items such as Nº 242: a Nicole Claveloux special-issue.