Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

Major Moebius retrospective

12 Thursday Sep 2019

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The Max Ernst Museum in Germany is to host a major retrospective of the art of Moebius. Opening 15th September and running until February 2020, with reasonably-priced tickets. The show will feature 450 works covering his whole range, plus a full catalogue.

The museum is about four miles south of the outskirts of the German city of Cologne. Cologne is about 120 miles east of Calais, or about 100 miles SE of Amsterdam, and is well connected by rail.

For a total comics-arts-o-rama visit, note that it usefully overlaps at the end of January with the huge Angouleme 2020 in France (opens 30th January 2020).

Lovecraft by Bani

09 Monday Sep 2019

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From the book Vita Privata di H.P. Lovecraft, newly on archive.org this week. It’s a 300-page 1987 Italian translation of memoirs of Lovecraft by those who knew him. It appears to be firmly out-of-print, and there are not even second-hand copies listed on the Italian Amazon site. eBay gives me no results for it, either.

Illustrated, albeit with very fuzzy pictures. Here’s his last home, 66 College Street, seen from the elevated walkway along the side of the John Hay Library. The house rose from a lower level, having a whole lower floor below the floors and attic seen here. The lower level appears to have been lost on the move to its new and current site, unless perhaps it was buried there as a cellar.

Kittee Tuesday: Claveloux’s Cats

03 Tuesday Sep 2019

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Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.

This week, a panel of Lovecraft’s trans-lunar leaping Ulthar cat-army from “The Language of Cats” by Nicole Claveloux. The two-page strip appeared in Heavy Metal magazine’s Lovecraft special-issue in October 1979. I see the Heavy Metal online shop still appears to be shipping paper copies of that issue, though I’d guess they might perhaps be reprints rather than 1979 originals.

“The Language of Cats” is not in the fine new The Green Hand and Other Stories collection of Claveloux’s scarcer work. Hopefully the “Cats” strip can eventually be properly re-published in crisp scans, alongside the long masterpiece “Off Season” by Zha and Claveloux (which also appeared in English in Heavy Metal). And ideally without the colourisation which bedevils reprints of older b&w line-art comics these days.

New artbook: Les Montagne Hallucinees

02 Monday Sep 2019

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François Baranger’s Les Montagne Hallucinees, Tome 1 is now listed on Amazon, for an October 2019 release in French from the publisher Bragelonne. The artist is also showing previews at Facebook, which have English text — so I guess an English edition may also happen too…

The format for his At The Mountains of Madness appears to be the same as his 2017 Call of Cthulhu book. Not quite an artnovel — but 14″ tall and with abundant double-page spreads of superb visuals done in his sweeping cinematic style. I assume the approved Joshi texts or the equivalent French translations are being used.

The second and concluding volume of his Mountains is set to appear before Halloween 2020. The first is being delivered on time, so we can reasonably assume the second will be too.

New books: Breccia

31 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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Two new books on Breccia are due soon:

Breccia : Conversations avec Juan Sasturain is transcribed previously-unpublished tape interviews in French translation, plus a detailed chronology and newly published art. 460 pages in French. Amazon says October, the publisher says November 2019.

Alberto Breccia, le Maitre Argentin Insoumis. A book by the curator of recent exhibitions in France on Breccia, who is currently preparing a forthcoming… “major retrospective on Breccia, to be held in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture”. 128 pages, in French but it seems to be well illustrated, and is apparently limited to 800 copies. Both the publisher and Amazon say October 2019.

If you want a taster of his Lovecraft comics art, see Revista El Pendulo No. 1 (1979) which has recently arrived on Archive.org due to an Argentine historical journals digitisation project. This issue has a 15-page Breccia comics adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”. In Spanish, but still worth seeing for the masterly art alone…

The comic is followed by a Lovecraft article by Mosig, again in Spanish. This was graced by a Moebius panel depicting Lovecraft. The article was a Spanish translation of Mosig’s essay “Poet of the Unconscious”, which had first appeared in The Platte Valley Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, April 1978.

The next issue Revista El Pendulo No. 2 (1979) had a short interview with Breccia in Spanish.

Revista El Pendulo seems to have been a brief attempt at publishing an Argentine equivalent of Toutain’s 1984 and its various licensees and imitators, and as such Pendulo’s issues are not ‘safe for work’ today.

The Mosig essay led me to discover that his Mosig at Last (1997) book of collected Lovecraft essays is still available at $7.95 from Necronomicon Press, which means that Lovecraftians and academics can bypass the Cthulhu-sized prices asked for it on Amazon and eBay.

Cadabra news

30 Friday Aug 2019

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From the latest Decibel magazine…

Legendary horror film composer Fabio Frizzi talks about helping to bring H.P. Lovecraft’s poetry to life on I Notturni Di Yuggoth.

Decibel also has an exclusive preview-track online. This new Cadabra album starts pre-orders today. Exclusively in heavy vinyl, with “a new liner essay by S. T. Joshi” plus sleeve art and fold-out poster insert.

For those without a vinyl record-player, note also the forthcoming Karamazid Art Portfolio from Cadabra Records. This is the art for the Cadabra albums to date, done as a set of sumptuous prints. 50 copies only, 14 still available as of today.

New book: Dr. Moebius and Mister Gir

23 Friday Aug 2019

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248 pages of interviews with Moebius, Dr. Moebius and Mister Gir. Translated into English. Sadly, though, we’re going to have to wait until next springtime to get it.

I can imagine a 600-page Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath adaptation by Moebius, but it was never to be.

Starlog magazine: Issue 112 had an interview with him, buried in a Star Trek issue. But it appears to be the only one on Archive.org.

Spellbound

23 Friday Aug 2019

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On Archive.org, a complete set of Spellbound, the 1976-1977 weekly comic for British girls who enjoyed supernatural stories. Mostly witches, ancient amulets, black cats, some time-travel. As was usual at that time, about five or six black and white strips in each issue, with about six pages each, some strips being episodic from week-to-week.

Lots of quite nice line-art and, on many strips, the art is in page-layouts that are quite dynamic (if often rather crowded). These days, the sort of crowded page seen below would be spread across three pages of a monthly American-style comic.

Even if you don’t care to read them, each page has panels that will potentially inspire an artist to think about their own framing, angles, expressions, and suchlike.