17 Friday Apr 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Dark Worlds Quarterly riffles through the old comics boxes and whisks out… Swords vs. Tentacles, being a large gallery of tentacles on the covers of various sword-and-sorcery comics.
Gil Kane, cover for Kull #21, summer 1977. Sadly he didn’t also do the interior story.
13 Monday Apr 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
That cult manga graphic novelist Gou Tanabe was adapting “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” has been known for some time now. He’s already done The Hound and Other Stories, and At The Mountains of Madness, and others, to much acclaim from manga readers. Now it’s been announced via some English manga blogs that his “Innsmouth” adaptation will debut in Japanese in the Japanese-language Comic Beam (link may not be ‘Safe for Work’ in western countries) in May, and conclude in November 2020. I can find no formal announcement / previews on the magazine’s site, but among the magazine’s ‘kawaii’ and ‘suggestive schoolgirl’ covers, there are occasional Lovecraft covers such as this “Shadow Out of Time” cover from May 2018…
His “Time” completed in Japanese serial form in November 2018, and was then published in two volumes in 2019. It is available in French as Dans L’abime du Temps, but I don’t yet see it in an official English version.
11 Saturday Apr 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Another survey of what’s new on DeviantArt, since my last such post…
“When the Shoggoth Spawns” by Mutinate.
“The Shunned House” by NocturnalSea.
“ICSU Archives: Unknown animal sighting” by MilleCuirs.
“Innsmouth at Night” by knight-of-sand.
“Cthulhu Diary – Southampton Docks”, one of a growing series by stayinwonderland.
“The Strange High House in the Mist” by NikolaUzelac.
He has a series illustrating Lovecraft…
07 Tuesday Apr 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
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07 Tuesday Apr 2020
Posted in Historical context, Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
My continuing reading of the Barlow letters, now about half-way, has led me to discover a fine Lovecraftian artwork. Its excellence causes my ‘Kittee Tuesday’ feature to make a brief return.
In early 1934 Lovecraft was in New York and, having just put young Barlow on the bus, he sauntered over to the public library to peruse the new books with Belknap Long. He was rewarded by the sight of a new cat book. Steinlen’s Chats et Autres Betes had been published in Paris in 1933, and was presumably freshly catalogued and on display among the new artbooks. It has 19 black and white etched plates, seemingly very conventional, but with a tipped-in end-paper which is magnificent. Here is a good look at the whisker-twirling work, which we can only imagine had Lovecraft emitting a rare out-loud chuckle when he saw it…
It there’s ever to be a proper Lovecraft Museum in a physical building, this must surely be a prime candidate for one of the giant wall murals at the Cat Cafe.
There’s no Archive.org or other free edition of the book. While the French Gallica site does have the book’s more mundane kitties, it does not have a scan of the ensemble end-paper — presumably prised out and stolen long ago.
The faint lines on the scan are perhaps archival preservation tape applied to prevent cracking. It would be rather fab if a talented DeviantArt artist were to faithfully re-make this at 8k, perhaps with the additional of faint moonlight colour.
What was Steinlen’s inspiration? One wonders if he might have encountered Lovecraft’s story “The Cats of Ulthar” by around 1932, and if so this would be an early Lovecraft illustration. “Ulthar” had been published in Weird Tales in 1926, and presumably such things were known in the Surrealist circles of Paris in the 1920s and 30s. But possibly there were other “king o’ the cats” stories or fairy-tales in France. Can French readers offer any evidence, for a supposition that the Paris Surrealists knew of Weird Tales? Or offer a well-known source in French folk-tale or nursery-rhyme?
05 Sunday Apr 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Possibly a bit of a rarity, HPL : A Tribute (1972), from various authors including Bloch. Currently on AbeBooks. Even if it’s not rare or has since been published elsewhere, the dynamic bit of fannish cover art is new to me.
Mockman has a tribute to what he calls “The Best Lovecraft Fanzine Ever Published”.
03 Friday Apr 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
The real Dunwich in England, in 1919, with the doomed remains of the old church tower still holding out against the depredations of the sea.
02 Thursday Apr 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
The long-running Perfect Bound podcast has a special new episode on a “very specific horror sub-genre” in comics… Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
30 Monday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
A clear look at the cover for Fungi From Yuggoth: An Annotated Edition (2017), via the scan for a copy currently for sale on AbeBooks.
The tight crop on the seller’s scan makes it look vaguely like it might be a booklet. But it was in fact a limited edition 288-page hardcover, copiously annotated. With fine illustrations by Jason C. Eckhardt. 300 copies were issued at $45 each, and a paperback or ebook edition has yet to appear.
David E. Schultz, one of the leading authorities on Lovecraft, has spent decades preparing this annotated edition of the Fungi. He meticulously discusses the origin of the poem (including the influence of Donald Wandrei’s similar cycle, Sonnets of the Midnight Hours), its connections with Lovecraft’s fiction, Lovecraft’s changing thoughts on natural expression in poetry, and the complex history of the poem’s publication — both as individual sonnets and as a unity. Schultz also provides penetrating annotations on every poem.
Whispers from the Ghooric Zone bagged a copy in 2018, and kindly offered potential readers a peep inside.
30 Monday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
Just over a year ago the news was filtering out of the passing of Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire. To mark the occasion, I’m sure he’d have appreciated seeing this slightly cleaned still of Tony Randall, in George Pal’s The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), especially as the star somewhat resembles Wilum in his finest get-up.
28 Saturday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The real-time-comic styled sci-fi AAA vidogame Borderlands 3 has a new strongly Lovecraftian makeover, in the form of its major “Guns, Love, and Tentacles” premium DLC. On release now, it’s apparently it’s a great success and even strongly improves a vital aspect of the game.
Kotaku’s review sums it up (partial spoilers)…
The scenery on Xylourgos is […] a massive (and dead) monstrosity known as Gythian serves as the centerpiece, and inhabitants have built a town directly under its corpse. Gythian is an ever-present aspect of the environment and storyline, with tentacles stretching both literally and metaphorically across the planet’s vast wastelands. [The alien planet] Xylourgos is also cloaked in darkness thanks to a perpetual solar eclipse, the thin glimpses of light that manage to escape casting an eerie blue-green hue over the icy landscape.
Gythian is an obvious homage to Lovecraftian deities like Cthulhu [with] a cult that worships Gythian’s heart as part of some bizarre love ritual. There’s also an NPC [non-player character] who believes himself to be a fishman a la “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and asks the player to lower him into a frozen lake to commune with his fish queen.
Borderlands 3 isn’t a game known for its incredible boss fights. They usually go a little something like this: a giant bad guy appears [at the end of the game’s level] and you shoot them until they die. [Yet here the player at last gets] a boss fight that actually feels difficult, compelling, and rewarding […] it makes a nice change from defeating Borderlands bosses through brute force.
[…] one of the most enjoyable romps I’ve had with the Borderlands series since it debuted in 2009.”
Sounds great. Doubtless there will be a gazillion play-throughs on YouTube before the weekend is out, so go there if you want to see more of what the game looks and plays like.
27 Friday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
Seen below are some good photo-reference pictures for an 18th century suit, and these may be useful for artists seeking to depict H.P. Lovecraft as an 18th century Englishman of letters. Interestingly, if Lovecraft had ever acquired the financial means to purchase a steam-heated English mansion in Devonshire, complete with semi-tropical glass-houses, then he could have settled in England. Since he knew of…
… the legal provision which makes me still able, as the grandson in direct male line of a true-born Englishman, to call myself a rightful British subject.
… but otherwise one imagines that our climate would have dampened his ardour for England, even on a summer visit of a few months.
