Composer Graham Plowman has a new album, The Yellow Sign…

The Yellow Sign.
The Tell-Tale Heart.
Pickman’s Model.
Edge of Darkness.
The Dreamlands.
Tsathoggua.

Also, a year ago I missed the news that he had released a Horror in Lovecraft Country – 2 Hours of Music for Lovecraftian Gaming. Low-intensity, background music. Though note it’s marked “all rights reserved”, and so presumably is not royalty-free ‘out of the box’? In which case I imagine that one has to contact him and arrange a licence, if the music is to be used in a commercial project.

MB3D made with Mandelbulb 3D by nic022, available in physical form 3D-printed on Shapeways. There’s something rather Lovecraftian about this one, especially if one added jewelled eyes in the holes.

The Mandelbulb 3D software is free and here. He also made objects using the free Incendia.

Learning Everyday Penmanship in the 1920s. Quite a craft, it appears, requiring a 90-page how-to manual with lessons!

According to Lovecraft…

“the process of handwriting is no effort at all unless one aims for great legibility & ornamentation. The reason moderns think handwriting is hard, is that they have never practiced it enough to get used to it.” — H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters III.

News of a new spring exhibition in New York City, “Line and Frame: A Survey of European Comic Art”. It opens with a Thursday evening launch event on 27th February 2020 (6pm-8pm) at Danese/Corey (511 West 22nd Street) and then runs until 14th March 2020.

The show will feature the work of 40 comics artists “who specialize in science fiction and fantasy”, including Moebius, Bilal, Breccia, Druillet, Nicole Claveloux, Guido Crepax, Milo Manara, among others. I doubt there’s a chance of seeing Lovecraft related art, but names such as Moebius, Bilal, and Breccia certainly overlap with Lovecraft comics.

Well-timed, the show comes at a point when the continental European comics industry is making a very belated push to produce and market more English translations in the USA. The show is supported by the various national cultural agencies in France, Belgium, Spain, etc.

Sketch by Moebius, being used to promote the show.

In other quality comics news, a “new 250-page graphic-novel Monsters from British writer/ artist Barry Windsor-Smith” is apparently due sometime in 2020 from an as-yet-unknown publisher. The basic premise, originating in a rejected pitch to Marvel for a Hulk storyline, is that… “an abandoned Nazi project in genetic engineering had been covertly revived by the U.S. government”. Judging from the sparse publicity it now appears to have become a graphic-novel somewhat similar to Alan Moore’s Providence, in terms of its adult nature and ambition. Just my guess, but I wonder if there may be some back-story links into aspects of the Lovecraft mythos?

Who knew? San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum has an exhibition on now, “Pre-Code Horror: Scary Stories and Ghastly Graphics from EC Comics”. Ends 1st March 2020. “Code” here refers to the Comics Code, an industry self-censorship system in the USA.

“Ad Alta Voce”: Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a recording from Rai Radio 3 in Italy. A 31 minutes recording from last June, of what appears to be “The Festival” professionally produced in mellifluous Italian and with music. It takes some wrangling of the page to start the recording, rather than the station’s live-stream. Kudos to the station for keeping it online so long and making it public to the world, rather than removing it after a month or only making it available to certain territories — as is so often the case with the BBC and others.