Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

On the table

02 Monday Dec 2019

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Nerdstash interviews…

T.R. Knight at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. He is teaching a class called the Tabletop Game Writing Lab. Its specific focus is teaching the art of designing a tabletop roleplaying game, more specifically, Call of Cthulhu.

In other news from the gamer-verse, Open Cthulhu is now online. An old-school RPG, it seems to be aiming to be properly Lovecraftian rather than ‘machine-guns vs. Cthulhu’. And more importantly, to be free of trademark entanglements. See the background discussion on the project and the legal elements.

The Great Old Ones

01 Sunday Dec 2019

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The metal band The Great Old Ones have a new Cosmicism album out, and it seems to be going down well in metal music circles. Metal Storm has a short review that’s accessible to clueless newbs like myself…

Soaring, entrancing black metal with a pleasant variation in tempo dominates, interspersed with various dreamlike melodic breaks that serve to reinforce a more ethereal vibe, all topped off by front man Benjamin Guerry howling tales of colors out of space, horrors at Dunwich, and crawling chaoses.

Blambot

29 Friday Nov 2019

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Blambot will be having a 30%-off sale, starting Monday 2nd December. They specialise in digital comic-book lettering fonts, production quality but at a much lower cost than the $80-ers over at ComicCraft. Probably about a dozen are well-suited to the summoning of eldritch comics.

Those looking for digital comics production software for the desktop may also be interested to know that Poser Pro 11 is down to a bargain $164 this weekend, and that Clip Studio Paint EX (Manga Studio) is 50% off at $109.

However, at Black Friday prices, getting Poser + Comic Life 3 would be the alternative and about $70 cheaper. Thus enabling you to spend the saved $70 on two or three workhorse lettering fonts from Blambot. Comic Life is the way to go if you want panel/page layout, lettering and balloons to be as simple as possible, but still have nice slick output. Could be augmented with the free Krita, for additional over-inking work. Krita’s brushes have improved enormously with the latest 4.x version.

All the above use perpetual licences, so there’s none of that ‘subscription/rental’ malarkey.

Deutsche Lovecraft / Lovecrafter

19 Tuesday Nov 2019

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Registration will open soon for the Deutsche Cthulhu Convention in Germany. I spotted a deadline of February 2020 for payment, presumably for a summer 2020 event.

Last noted here very briefly in 2014, the event seems to be a large German Cthulhu convention hosted by the German Lovecraft Society in a castle in Lower Saxony. Their tablet-tastic site doesn’t play nicely with Google Translate, so I can’t quite get a sense of how gamer/scholarly the event’s balance is. But they appear to have some sort of core symposium element.

Finding it made me aware of their Lovecrafter magazine. Here’s the pleasing cover of the July 2018 issue, and paper copies are available by mail-order.

Within are…

* A look at a horror and fantasy fanzine of the 1970s (presumably a German one).

* Lovecraft, the first 50 years – a survey of publishing Lovecraft in Germany, with publisher interviews.

* Fear of the Known – on the myths of Lovecraft in the digital world.

* Between protest and delusion – Cthulthu’s role in 1968.

… and some RPG game stuff.

Moi, Lovecraft

14 Thursday Nov 2019

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Moi, Lovecraft is a new book illustrated by Yann Sougey-Fils, with texts by Jean-Christophe Malevil. H.P. Lovecraft returns to the hospital on 10th March 1937, and in the five days before his death he “tells his story in the first person”.

It’s from the tiny press Editions des Tourments, and runs 112 pages. It doesn’t seem to be using the letters translated to French, but I’m guessing it may perhaps be counterpointing scenes from Lovecraft’s “death diary” with happier scenes from his life? Nor is it clear how heavily the book is illustrated.

Anyway, Moi, Lovecraft is published in French in about a week’s time. The same artist has a 64-page colour ‘BD’ French comics adaptation of The Dreams in the Witch House, to be published by the same press alongside Moi, Lovecraft. 64-pages is standard in France, and as such it’s not quite what the Anglosphere would call ‘a graphic novel’ (compared to the 130 pages of art one would expect here, in a 152 page trade paperback), more of a long graphic story.

Gage Prentiss bust

04 Monday Nov 2019

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Recently up for sale at The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, and sold, a Lovecraft Bust.

Gage Prentiss, the celebrated weird sculptor of Providence, has sculpted a life-sized statue of HPL which hopefully will soon have a permanent home in Providence. This bust of HPL is a replica of the full sized one, but at 10 inches by 5 inches, it’s much easier to ship and put on display in your home. It’s a tasteful and fitting tribute to the master of weird fiction.

Very appealing, and it definitely seems to evoke the dreamier side of Lovecraft.