09 Wednesday Oct 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A French BD* adaptation of Lovecraft’s Home Brew shocker “Herbert West” by David Peeters. The book appears to have been released spring 2019 after a successful Kickstarter, and is now listed as sold out. Here’s a look at the black-and-white edition.
* BD = French shorthand term for a long comic-book, usually with a complete story, in their A4 ‘album’ format of at least 64 pages (sometimes 72 inc. cover).
07 Monday Oct 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
In Germany…
Comic strip artist and illustrator Andreas Hartung from Berlin and The Dunwich Orchestra are adapting H.P. Lovecraft’s classic weird-fiction story “The Color from Space” as a dark, episodic multimedia picture show with an atmospheric live soundtrack and a matching stage show.
The “Lovecraft as a multimedia picture show” article runs through Google Translate fine, and the foot of the article has links to two YouTube videos of part of the show.
06 Sunday Oct 2019
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
It wasn’t just wall-to-wall hippies, back in 1966. Here we see evidence for the spreading of the word about Lovecraft to mystery buffs, via the Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine (March 1966). One assumes that “The Festival” was provided for free by Derleth, in exchange for the intro blurb which strongly puffs the three Arkham House volumes of Lovecraft.
01 Tuesday Oct 2019
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
26 Thursday Sep 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Richard Stanley gave a short interview to a local Austin newspaper. One of those annoying local newspapers in the USA which spams the world with its headlines and links… and then brutally blocks all visitors from outside America, displaying a message that make the said visitors feel like a criminal hacker.
But anyway… there’s a free VPN in my Opera browser, so here for all the world to read are some of the article’s Lovecraft and Howard-relevant quotes from Stanley.
His successful new Colour Out of Space movie is “designed for late nights where most of the audience would have to be slightly drunk or on some kind of substance or another.”
“He was my mother’s favorite author,” Stanley says. “She read me Lovecraft when I was a child. … I would have read ‘Color’ myself by the time I was 12.”
“Before I die, I would very much love to do a proper, fully blown sword-and-sorcery movie. I’ve mostly made science fiction, but I’m a big fantasy guy. There’s plenty of unfinished business out there.”
25 Wednesday Sep 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A new 96-page art-story book from France, Les Carnets de Lovecraft: La Cite sans nom (translates as ‘Lovecraft’s Notebooks: The City With No Name’). At first I thought it might be Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book with entries faced with pleasingly traditional pen-and-ink sketches. But it seems it’s a heavily illustrated edition of “The Nameless City” in French translation. The book is due 16th October 2019.
The same young artist did a heavily illustrated “Dagon” book in the same series, released August 2019. This art sample, done in pencil, indicates the approach of the Les Carnets de Lovecraft series. Not an artnovel or a ‘BD’ (short graphic novel), but a heavily illustrated book of a short story.
24 Tuesday Sep 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A few of the newly-posted Lovecraftian illustrations on DeviantArt, since the last such post here at Tentaclii…
“Cthulu” by Moebius emulator FoxyTomcat of the USA.
Qodaet (Eder Nogueira) of Brazil is doing a Lovecraft series in red crayon, with a somewhat ‘brass-rubbing’ look to them.
Altar of the Faceless God – Nyarlathotep by TRXPICS. See also his March 2019 Yog Sothoth.
Wanderer Of The Misty Dreamlands by OliverInk of the USA.
23 Monday Sep 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
New from Hippocampus Press, the book Providence After Dark and Other Writings by T.E.D. Klein. Currently on their “New” page with a shipping date of “November 2019”.
Of Lovecraft interest…
I. On Lovecraft
Providence After Dark.
The United Amateur.
A Dreamer’s Tales [introduction to the 5th edition of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, Arkham House, 1986].
Remembering Arkham House.
The Festival [recollections of the First World Fantasy Convention, Providence 1975].
The Old Gent.
T.E.D. Klein: Master of Ceremonies [1987 interview by Carl T. Ford].
II. On Other Authors
Frank Belknap Long.
etc…
Discovering the first place of publication for his First World Fantasy Convention report led me to a new booklet cover featuring Lovecraft, new in the sense that I hadn’t seen it before. The 52-page booklet had what appear to be three heavyweight convention reports all focused around musings on Lovecraft and Providence. I wouldn’t mind reading it but I see it’s become mildly collectable, so the price is now beyond me, and it’s not yet on Archive.org.
22 Sunday Sep 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Starting tomorrow, little Titchfield in the south of England (UK) has a mini-Lovecraft theatre festival.
18 Wednesday Sep 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
S. T. Joshi heads out West, in his latest blog post. He also visits the Art Institute of Chicago and the Field Museum, lucky fellow. He further reports that he has now composed, in response to weird poems…
a total of twelve [choral] compositions, which may run to as much as 50 or 60 minutes. Enough for a CD!
He also has them in musical notation software, which potentially means they’re also available for translation into fully synchrotroniced cosmic synths via the likes of the Sibelius software.
17 Tuesday Sep 2019
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Maps, Odd scratchings
It strikes me that there are now enough pictures of College Street to be able to recreate this area in a 3D first-person videogame, following my picture-sourcing and resulting cavalcade of discoveries of the last week (see my posts and Patreon-only posts here at Tentaclii). Only Lovecraft’s central ‘garden court’ itself is still elusive in ground-level photography. [Update: Ken Faig has good maps showing precise boundaries around No. 66 and the location of the cat-shed].
A 3D recreation of the area could be set-dressed almost exactly as it would have been when Lovecraft was living at 66 College Street, complete with seasonal and atmospheric effects.
The game environment could also stretch all the way down College Street, as that other end of the street is well-documented visually — this section would usefully offer offices for an investigative RPG game. The resulting completed environment could then be released under GPL (open source), so that anyone could devise and build a game from that base environment. Or just virtually stroll around in it.
If “monsters n’ machine-guns” are felt to be needed then the could also be an underground element, re: the tunnels under the hill…
“Did we know, he asked, his sombre eyes intent on our faces, that recently, when early buildings on Benefit Street and College Street were razed to make way for new ones, deep tunnel-like pits, seemingly bottomless and of undetermined usefulness, were discovered in the ancient cellars?” — memoir of a visit by Lovecraft in 1934, by Dorothy C. Walter.
The disused Providence East Side Railway Tunnel under the hill could also feature. At the far end the tunnels could give access to the Seekonk River shoreline and perhaps even a short boat trip through heavy fog to the Twin Islands in the river. Wrapping the game’s horizons in a heavy Halloween fog and night would mean less work, re: making backdrops showing views of distant horizons.
The environment space I’ve outline above offers a fairly limited, and thus manageable, set of places:
The Paxton/Arsdale Boarding House.
The Carrie Tower.
Van Wickle Gate.
The lawns and reception on the main Brown University frontage.
The John Hay Library.
Lovecraft’s house, lane and garden.
The Alpha Delta Phi fraternity house.
The Providence Athenaeum.
Offices on lower College Street.
Court House on lower College Street.
Tunnels under College Hill.
Apart from a working looped tram (trolley-car) line, no vehicles would be required. A basic set of NPCs would be students and faculty, artists from the School of Design, various librarians and curators, and the more elderly retired residents. There would probably be a need to make and animate the tall elm trees and cats from scratch, but that’s not impossible for a talented game-making team. The Egypt-set edition of the Assassin’s Creed game has shown that convincing cats and cat-luring/petting can be done well in 3D videogames. All the rest of a game could be left to those who wished to build their game on top of this base game-world. A basic starting point for a game could be that the Cats of Ulthar have sent emissaries into the real world, seeking Lovecraft’s help in the Dreamlands, but then find themselves mute and treated as normal cats. Lovecraft is the only one who can ‘talk’ to the Ulthar cats, but only partially — even he must collect old lore and folklore that will enable him to speak with them.
Such a faithful and authentic recreation would probably do quite well on Kickstarter or similar. Especially if it was: i) to be made by a reliable team with some RISD and/or Brown endorsement; ii) the end result would be be GPL’d (open source); iii) and it would be made with a major free game-engine such as Unreal.
15 Sunday Sep 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The new feature-length movie adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” appears to have been a success, both critically and in terms of being picked up for cinema distribution in the USA. Here in the UK it opens in London in early October. The movie seems to have had to get through a ‘double-hate’, with early negative reviews not only from haters of Lovecraft but also from haters of the lead actor Nic Cage. But it appears to have moved past those with ease.
On the back of a renewed interest in pastoral/rural science-fiction, Clifford D. Simak’s best novel Way Station has been picked up for a TV movie adaptation. Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, two of the new Planet of the Apes reboots) is to adapt it as a “large-scale sci-fi thriller”. It’ll be a single TV movie, apparently, rather than a mini-series. Let’s hope he doesn’t bring the Cloverfield found-footage look (camera so shaky and unsteady as to make the movie unwatchable) to Way Station. As usual with anything ‘Simak’, be very careful what you read about his work — blurb writers for Simak seem to delight in giving huge plot-spoilers.
One suspects that, inevitably, some modern political correctness will get slipped into the script. Perhaps in the 2020s the political equivalent of the Christian movie-snippers will arise, if they haven’t already done so. Those old-school snippers would deftly edit or blip out all the profanity and nudity and gore in a movie and produce a ‘clean version’.
