21 Wednesday Aug 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A Lovecraftian sculptor of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Frenchman Henri Etienne-Martin.
Etienne-Martin’s entry in Dictionary of Modern Sculpture, 1960. Note the outdoor “Homage to Lovecraft”, and he also seems to have made smaller variations of this stair/throne-like sculpture.
From a 1965 exhibition catalogue in French…
From recent auction sales of his work…
“Art et mythe – La cosmogonie d’Etienne-Martin, point de depart des “Mythologies individuelles”” (open access book chapter in French).
20 Tuesday Aug 2019
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.
This week’s “Kittee Tuesday” post is the full-res artwork which fronts my new annotated “The Cats of Ulthar”.
20 Tuesday Aug 2019
As mentioned here a few weeks ago, here is H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Cats of Ulthar” (1920) with my full annotations. This is being issued for the first time today, to celebrate Lovecraft’s birthday.
“The Cats of Ulthar” annotated as a 20-page PDF.
The Adobe Caslon Pro and Garamond fonts have been embedded in the PDF, so you should have no problems with font substitution. For those who like print, simply use any imposition-capable printer driver to print this as a 5-sheet fold-ready booklet. Fold up, then slip it between card covers… and ideally have your resident kitty make a paw-print on the card cover in the blood of a Zoog.
19 Monday Aug 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
The Colour Out of Space, from Cadabra Records. A very limited edition vinyl L.P. pressing with sleeve art, fold-out poster, and liner-notes by S.T. Joshi. Appears to be pre-ordering now, with 33 copies remaining. It’s on, naturally enough, coloured vinyl.
17 Saturday Aug 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Amazon now has a shipping date for Lovecraft’s Letters to Wilfred B. Talman and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully in a 578 page paperback from Hippocampus. Shipping on 20th August 2019 according to Amazon, Lovecraft’s birthday. In addition to the usual Schultz and Joshi annotations and index, the Talman book also has…
“a 6,000-word synopsis for a story, “The Pool”, that Talman never wrote; [Lovecraft’s advice-] synopsis is here presented in an appendix”
A story was later written up from these revision suggestions by Donald R. Burleson, appearing in Crypt of Cthulhu 47, Roodmas 1987. With a cover illustration for the story by Jason Eckhardt.
14 Wednesday Aug 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“What if H.P. Lovecraft had lived in the 1980’s”? Retro computer-heads now have the answer: A 80’s portrait of H.P. Lovecraft in a .PRG Commodore 64 binary executable, for glorious Commodore 64-o-vision.
Not sure about the steampunk cogs… but then I guess he would have been the first to do steampunk, had he lived then.
13 Tuesday Aug 2019
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.
This week’s kittee is a change from long-lost illustrations dug out of archives. The Blessed Felines from Minna Sundberg’s impressive Stand Still Stay Silent graphics novels — available free-to-read online or as nice collected paper editions.
It’s set in a future Scandinavia that has returned to a state of Nordic mythology complete with monsters, magic and cats (one of the few creatures to survive the plague…). A bit ‘young adult’-ish but still enjoyable for the settings and superb quality.
12 Monday Aug 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
I never knew this existed, an Illustrated Fungi from Yuggoth in 52 pages, from 1983. Done in a pleasing and vaguely Moebius-a-like style, and I’d assume presented as facing illustrations for each poem.
It’s not online, so far as I can find. S.T. Joshi gave it a review in 1984. And there were 250 copies produced, according to other notices of the time.
10 Saturday Aug 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Found, another “Lovecraft as character” graphic novel. It’s April 1926, and H.P. Lovecraft teams up with weird-hunter Charles Fort. It turns out to be more about the main Atomic Robo character than Lovecraft, but it’s definitely a Lovecraftian story and what there is of Lovecraft in terms of dialogue is very amusing.
Completely free to read online, or there’s a nice paper version for $25.
There’s a whole series of these books, which started off somewhat military for the ‘origin story’ of Atomic Robo but from issue three run in the Tintin / Blake and Mortimer / Doc Savage sort of mystery-adventure pulp line, with lots of ‘the weird’ and dashes of time-travel. And very deft old-school humour tied to nice pacing. I’ve read the Lovecraft one, and read into some of the others a little, and they’re very enjoyable both in story, framing and art. Definitely ones to stash in your “old-school entertainment” folder.
I’d never heard of the books before, though. It’s so difficult to find out about this sort of thing in comics. The main coverage of comics is wall-to-wall print-the-press-release stuff on the weekly tidal wave of superheroes, manga, juvenile titles. Flanked by a tiny handful of people who can bear to do an occasional review of the depressing and angsty type of comics. You could read Previews magazine for an entire year, and still not know that there are completed graphic novels such as a whole series of Atomic Robo. Not that you’d want to do that, but there’s no curator looking for stuff I want to find, so one has to do it oneself. I mean, I searched and searched such things for a survey in Digital Art Live #35 and am doing the same for the next issue… and yet I still only found Atomic Robo by complete and utter chance.
08 Thursday Aug 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Fine cover art and design for the three volume Arthur Machen: Collected Fiction, to be released late August 2019. At first glance these successfully evoke late-1970s British paperbacks from the likes of Panther and Sphere, for me. I think it’s probably the choice of the main typeface that’s doing that.
08 Thursday Aug 2019
Posted in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
It looks like Nicolas Cage’s big movie of The Colour Out of Space has a 1969-ish vibe to it, rather than being set in the 1920s, judging by the car in this newly released FX shot. I guess that makes sense, as such a date would allow the film-makers to layer in several political subtexts from the period, re: hippy LSD psychedelia, Vietnam defoliants, the anti-DDT books such as Silent Spring etc. In terms of audiences, such a period would also bring it closer to the era of popular shows such as Stranger Things.
The world premiere is at the Toronto International Film Festival, which is September 2019. The London (UK) opening is in early October 2019.
03 Saturday Aug 2019
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
Cornell Collection of Blaschka Invertebrate Models, made in glass.
Boston had…
131 glass models of sea slugs, hydroid jellyfish or craspedotes [made] for the Museum of Natural History Society in Boston in 1880.
… which it’s possible Lovecraft could have seen there, either as a boy or in 1919.
According to the de Camp biography of Lovecraft, he saw their collection of such models at Harvard, and quite early. de Camp, presumably drawing on Sonia’s memory of her courtship of Lovecraft circa Autumn (Fall) 1921, states in the biography that…
Once he [Lovecraft] showed her [Sonia] the display of glass flowers in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard