Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

Gibbous

17 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

Excellent, I see there’s even more quality Lovecraft videogaming set to ooze up from the depths…

Gibbous is a Lovecraftian videogame done in a “traditional 2D animation style” and runs to some 60 hand-painted traditionally-animated scenes of the city of Darkham with 70 “fully voiced” characters. Including a talking kitteh who has been zapped by the Necronomicon. A tome which various cultists in Darkham would very much like to obtain.

The game looks great, and sounds like fun. It seems to be a sort of LucasArts Day of the Tentacle, as if art-directed by junior illustrators at Disney and written by Lovecraft operating in self-parody humour-mode.

Though it remains to be seen if it’s as laugh-out-loud funny as Tentacle, as smoothly animated as old-school Disney, and can avoid the sort of game-stopping head-banging puzzles that so often break story-flow in such games. But the game has been in development for many years, has produced a demo, and it looks like quality. It’s due on Steam for the PC on 7th August 2019, and may be one for Lovecraftians to play along with young relatives who enjoy the likes of Gravity Falls.

Release: 7th August 2019 on Steam.

Update: 16th August and it’s getting very good reviews all round. A classic?

The general approach and cat-character makes me think vaguely of a more glo-paint-coloured Inkscaped version of the Ghostworld title, a game that Microsoft had in development in circa 2013/14 but which they squished while it was still in development.

Podcast: Into The Weird

14 Sunday Jul 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

≈ Leave a comment

Into The Weird: A Marvel Bronze Age Comic Book Podcast is a new one to me. It’s an ongoing audio survey with ten episodes, to date. The show surveys the weird-horror elements depicted in the classic (and, often, no-so classic) Marvel Comics output of the 1970s. Their latest podcast discusses the Lovecraftian in Marvel’s Doctor Strange, specifically in two Marvel Premiere issues from 1972.

Audio: The Horror in the Burying-Ground

11 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

≈ Leave a comment

“The Horror in the Burying-Ground” by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald (c. 1933-34). Newly recorded as a free 35 minute audio story, narrated by Ian Gordon, who always does a good reading.

The Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggests that, given the dating, Lovecraft was having some fun with the story and was not taking it overly seriously…

this is evidently the last of the tales he ghostwrote for her. Much of the story is narrated in a backwoods patois [and was likely meant,] if not as an actual [self]parody, at least as an instance of graveyard humor.

Nevertheless it found its way to Weird Tales and was published May 1937 under Heald’s name.

One wonders if the illustration’s somewhat Lovecraft-like head, looking over the shoulder of and spooking a vaguely Heald-like face, was meant to convey anything to Weird Tales insiders?

Ricardo Parabere’s visualisation of “Mountains of Madness”

10 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

A 256-page Secuencia Grafica 1 (‘graphic sequence’) an ambitious and visually very stylish storyboard/storytelling exercise by Ricardo Parabere for Lovecraft’s “At The Mountains of Madness”. Not a graphic novel, not least because it’s wordless, but more a visual conceptualisation in story sequence. It’s undated by Amazon but, judging by the timing of samples pages released on DeviantArt, it was released early July 2019.

Available now for a modest price on the Kindle via Amazon, in Spain and the UK, and I assume the USA too.

Toward an ‘Open Cthulhu’

07 Sunday Jul 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings

≈ 1 Comment

Tabletop gamers have been having some interesting discussions re: which of Lovecraft’s monsters could be ‘safely’ included in a new ‘open’ RPG. Cthulhu Reborn has a hankering for an open tabletop RPG based on pure Lovecraft, and has three posts which usefully summarise this recent debate. He also does some additional useful digging.

1. Can Cthulhu Be Open?

2. The Safewords of Cthulhu

3. Can Cthulhu Be Open? Part 2.

In the post at link 2, he notes that the debate made him aware of a…

Lovecraftian [‘open game’] RPG in German called FHTAGN. [for which the maker] spent a long time researching the various named beings and gods that are mentioned in short stories to find which are truly Public Domain [in Europe]. … in the interests of making the results of his/her research more accessible to English-speaking audiences, I have extracted the list of “safe” Mythos Entities and translated the relevant names back to English.

This seems useful, re: being researched for the public domain rules in the UK and Europe, and not the USA. One could probably include some of the early Long additions to the Mythos, which are or will shortly be in the public domain by 2020/21.

For cultists and clans one might add…

* The Martense clan (“The Lurking Fear”, with a story setting on a river that ultimately flows down to empty at Red Hook).

* Cthulhu cultists, and also the “undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China” claimed by Castro.

But assuming the German list wants monsters and ‘rites’ only, then The Haunter of the Dark could probably still appear in a game. It would just have to be unnamed as such, but with the same characteristics (lots of sinister lurking silence in darkness, then a sudden single explosive killer fear-lightning release during a storm). It would just have to be used under a more generic name, such as ‘The Dark’ or ‘The Unnamed Dark’, if there really are copyright worries in the UK and Europe.

Looking at ‘published pre-1924’ Lovecraft, I’d also suggest adding to the German list…

* Erich Zann (though not a monster he might have been deemed to have become one, in a new game).

* The Terrible Old Man (ditto).

* The Street (as a monster ‘character-entity’ in its own right).

* The Cats of Ulthar (inexplicably missing from the German list, perhaps because not considered to be monsters).

Alternatively, Zann, The Old Man, the Street and the cats could all be deemed ‘ally class’ elements of the game, helping the players in various ways.

Onslaught of the Ancient Gods

04 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

No fireworks for the 4th July, but a good heavy-rock album seems like the Lovecraftian equivalent.

Getting good reviews from metal-heads, the new metal album Onslaught Of The Ancient Gods (mid June 2019) from an Armenian band.

Track samples available on Bandcamp.

“Combining blackened death metal with elements of melo-death, tech-death, … orchestration and sci-fi synths, [the album] certainly stands apart form much of the extreme metal scene [and] for the most part [the band’s leading light] Erskine pulls everything together expertly. Lovecraft is no rarity in extreme metal lyrics, but where many simply pay lip service to the father of cosmic horror, [the band] Temple of Demigod is a project fully immersed in the Eldritch chaos. Not a flawless album, but to suggest Onslaught Of The Ancient Gods is anything other than a blindingly fun trip into the void would be criminal. Score: 8/10“. — Distorted Sound magazine.

“Onslaught of the Ancient Gods was a surprise hit for me; I was expecting to have some fun with it, but I’ve been addicted to it since its release. It’s exactly the right balance of sinister and cheesy, complex and catchy. It’s a great album if you like tech death but need a reprieve from the noodly side of the genre.” — Toilet ov Hell.

Kittee Tuesday: cats from the Twilight Zone

02 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

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

In August 1983 Twilight Zone magazine treated its readers to H.P. Lovecraft’s “Something about Cats”, with a brief introduction and some explanatory notes by S.T. Joshi. While the essay is now found in better form elsewhere as “Cats and Dogs”, there were illustrations by Jason Eckhardt and two of these featured Lovecraft himself.

Artwork: Lovecraft and astronomy

30 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

Here’s a potential cover for a non-fiction history book on Lovecraft and astronomy. I’ve taken off the pre-existing text (it was the cover for an old booklet from India), fixed an obscuring label, and also re-coloured. It’s 2,900px on the longest size and thus should work for a cover / back-cover on a Lulu.com 6″ x 9″ book.

The space on the right could potentially host a Fivver-commissioned cameo done in the same style, featuring Lovecraft’s face. Or perhaps the Lovecraft silhouette in cameo, with a holding line added around it.