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.

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.

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.