Cthulhu medallion by Dan Hiryak, just one of the many goodies recently spotted by Propnomicon who is doing sterling work in tracking Lovecraftian crafts.
Cthulhu medallion
18 Tuesday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts
A Cold Fire Within
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…
Ghostly Haunts #28
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.
New on DeviantArt
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”.
130 Years of H. P. Lovecraft
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.
Howard Collector #5-8, inc. “Who is Grandpa Theobold?”
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.
Experimental Musical Instruments
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).
Revue de la BnF and others
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.
New book: H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Family and Family Friends
03 Monday Aug 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Family and Family Friends is now listed on the Hippocampus Press website. Nice and chunky at 1,110 pages, mostly because of the immense amount of letters to his aunts Lillian Clark and Annie Gamwell. These letters are here given “complete and unabridged” and also in a meticulously annotated and indexed form. There are also “previously unpublished letters written by Lovecraft’s grandfather, Whipple V. Phillips, to his grandson in the 1890s”.
Quite reasonably priced, at $60 for both in paperback. There’s an “Add to cart” button on the page, so I assume they’re shipping now. No sign of them yet on either Amazon USA or UK or eBay, but no doubt they’ll appear there in due course.
The books have a pleasing cover design by Daniel V. Sauer, around evocative art by David C. Verba.
“… fine things come from the intelligent manipulation of lumpish bronze”
29 Wednesday Jul 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Joyner Studio’s Lovecraft bust. Nice, every home and studio should should have one — though I’ve no idea if one can still be ordered. A DeviantArt preview pic reveals the original bronze was made in 2012.
There’s also a more recent Lovecraft, from the same sculptor.
At the Sign of the Cat
28 Tuesday Jul 2020
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
The Lovecraftians of Hungary are seeking sponsors for their planned Spring 2021 national/regional meet-up event, and hope to launch a crowdfunding appeal in October 2020. As such they…
are open to ideas and suggestions, we welcome anyone who can share with us their experience of organizing and running such a campaign.
This also all for 2021, but they also note that…
However, all of the above [re: delay of the national event to 2021] does not apply to the graphics exhibition titled Supernatural Horror in Literature, organised jointly with the Memento Morri Association. Due to the nature of the exhibition and the venue, the opening of this exhibition will continue as planned on 8th September 2020.
The show will, appropriately enough, be at “the Cat (1084 Budapest, Berkocsis utca 23.)” and run for a month.
Entry deadline: 11th August 2020, and physical framed works need to be shipped to Hungary in good time.
The Cat, Budapest.
New book: Miskatonic Country
27 Monday Jul 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Coming soon, a new Call of Cthulhu RPG Keeper’s Guide book…
This book is a guide to every Miskatonic Country scenario for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game published in a book by Chaosium or one of its licensees, and set in the 1920s.
Perhaps also useful for Lovecraft Mythos writers, if only to know what’s already been done in the region in terms of RPG storytelling in the classic Lovecraft period.