DMR surveys the heroic fantasy paintings of Michael Whelan, as translated to rock album covers from their original paperback covers. Also has two Lovecraft horror examples.
Michael Whelan
19 Tuesday Mar 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts
A Lovecraft Dream
14 Thursday Mar 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
A new short animation, featuring a dreaming Lovecraft…
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkpj9h99g1w?start=29&w=560&h=315]
I assume hand-made drawings and then Adobe After Effects for the layering and animation.
Lovecraft’s Journal
13 Wednesday Mar 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Todd Theyer is gearing up to Kickstart a printed Lovecraftian bundle of his own letter-pressed goodness, to be named “Lovecraft’s Journal”. It will evoke and hint at the progress of a scientific expedition to the maddening wilds of Siberia, via a field journal complete with maps, field drawings, newspapers cuttings and suchlike story-props. The project is planning its launch to align with the timing of NeconomiCon 2019, but you can follow the previews on Instagram.
New facsimile of “The Lurking Fear”
10 Sunday Mar 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Necronomicon Press now has a reprint of Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear” in something close to its original Home Brew magazine serial format from 1923. For this edition Robert H. Knox has revivified the illustrations done by Clark Ashton Smith, although the colourizing seems to me to be a bit too garish for the tone of the story. Still, for collectors of Smith’s art this will probably be rather desirable.
The Spine Chillers
07 Thursday Mar 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
British comedy writer Ben Clark’s The Spine Chillers is a short graphic novel that treats readers to yet another fictional Lovecraft. Only just released, it’s getting good reviews which say it’s a laugh-out-loud comedy.
The set-up is that H.P. Lovecraft lives in a grotty boarding-house with Edgar Allen Poe and Ambrose Bierce. Something is hiding in the attic. Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) turns up to investigate. Sadly the art is in child-o-vision. Which won’t entice many to part with a hefty £14 for it in paper, but apparently the writing is brilliant. One suspects that it’s a little bit more of a pitch for a TV series or movie than it is a graphic novel. Still, it’s another in the small crop of recent graphic novels featuring Lovecraft as a character.
Elder Props freebies
05 Tuesday Mar 2019
Posted in Fonts, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings
New on Archive.org… Elder Props (1981), an 84 page compendium of printable pages, presumably for use as photocopies made as RPG game prompts and elements. The artist has a nice clean toony ink style, which I like a lot.
If you wanted these in colour, look at Krita’s 4.0’s new ability to auto-paint line-art.
I see that the same book can also be downloaded from the site of the artist for free, though there’s it’s confusing labelled Evil Dead, which makes one think of tiresome video-nasty zombies movies of the 1980s rather than the Neconomicon.
The artist is still working, and has a similar product for the awesome Gravity Falls series. Also free Fonts…
On the record
04 Monday Mar 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
Most folks would be content to bung their new Lovecraft story reading on YouTube, along with the 30 others that now appear there each day. But H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dagon”, “The Cats of Ulthar” & “The Music of Erich Zann” does things more elegantly. A vinyl LP record, superb 12″ sleeve art, and a… “new original score by cinematic instrumentalists Anima Morte”.
Worth a peek just for the quality artwork by Karmazid.
The Shadow Out of Time
02 Saturday Mar 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Here’s a glimpse of the style of the manga-style comics adaptation of The Shadow Out of Time adaptation, recently completed by Gou Tanabe in Japan. This book is apparently getting manga fans excited, and he’s said to have a cult following. Personally it’s not an art style I greatly appreciate, but it’s good to get a full-length adaptation of this major story.
Added to Open Lovecraft
02 Saturday Mar 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Newly added to the Open Lovecraft page on this blog…
* K. Dodd, “Narrative Archaeology: Excavating Object Encounter in Lovecraftian Video Games”, Studies in Gothic Fiction, forthcoming 2019.
* V. Sirangelo, “Sulla natura lunare di Shub-Niggurath: dalla mythopoeia di Howard Phillips Lovecraft a The Moon-Lens di Ramsey Campbell”, Caietele Echinox, Volume 35, 2018. (Short article in French on Shub-Niggurath in Lovecraft and Ramsey Campbell. Part of a special issue on the Neo-Gothic).
Caietele Echinox‘s large archive of themed special issues also looks interesting, though articles need to be bunged through Google Translate unless you can work with English abstracts.
Lovecraft in 3D
01 Friday Mar 2019
Posted in 3D, Lovecraftian arts
Stefano Ciarrocchi is making the first steps to modelling a 3D bust of H.P. Lovecraft using the Blender software. He obviously hasn’t quite got the period clothing yet, as he’s using a 1970s ‘Bill Gates’ collar and tie that Lovecraft would have run screaming from. But it’s an interesting try in 3D.
Masket Charro gets a lot closer, and avoids the ‘uncanny valley’ effect by going a little toony. Still let down by the collar and tie.
In a similar 3D format, the My neighbor Cthulhu scene. Ruined by the crappiest sort of sign lettering. But in this case one can buy and download the 3D model, in which case the lettering could presumably be removed. Although beware that it’s a .Blend file. Though Blender is free, navigating the infernal Blender interface (to cleanly extract a 3D mesh with aligned material zones) is usually a bit of a nightmare.
It helps if you know Miyazaki, to get the sweetly inter-twingled cultural reference in this scene.
If you want to do something similar then the Miyre Store has a good and affordable Lovecraft 3D figure for the Poser software, and there’s a free pack of face expressions for him.
The Lovecraft Geek podcast returns
20 Wednesday Feb 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
I’m pleased to see there’s a new episode of The Lovecraft Geek podcast with Robert M. Price, The Lovecraft Geek Podcast, 19-001. 19 presumably stands for 2019, and the 001 is self-explanatory. My podcatcher software refuses to download locally (“cannot verify talkshoe.com”), but it streams fine.
Price says at the start that he needs more questions sent in. I had sent in a list of questions by email last October, but he doesn’t seem to have got them. More questions are needed, to: criticus@aol.com
He notes that Ulthar Press has a set of Price-edited books lined up. Already published is The Mighty Warriors (summer 2018), his edited collection of new stories likely to interest those who like 1970s sword & sorcery action — with the twist that here we have… “aging once great heroes” rather than rippling youths.
Also announced was the book Narcotic Pnakotic Fragments (I think I heard that correctly, presumably a play on ‘necrotic’), a collection of his essays on the Mythos cycle, from Ulthar Press.
Sounding rather further off in time, and also from Ulthar Press, were various anthology titles. Most interesting to Lovecraft scholars is probably Price’s mention of his The Exham Priory Cycle. Since it will include historic “precursor stories” to Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” as well as new stories influenced by the famous tale.
Chaosium is apparently getting back into everything from action figures to anthologies, and the latter seem likely to include Price’s long-languishing ‘Cycle’ anthology manuscripts. Including one with stories expanding on Lovecraft’s revision tales. Price didn’t say so, but I presume that Chaosium are flush with cash from the success of the big-budget videogame and its associated boost to the sales of the table-top game and related books.
Price’s next Crypt of Cthulhu magazine should ship in the next couple of weeks. Presumably that’ll be #112, but Necronomicon Press doesn’t have its table-of-contents up yet. Although a note elsewhere on the Web-o-sphere tells of one of the scholarly essays in it…
“First and Final Estimates: August Derleth Looks at Weird Tales Magazine” is to be included in Crypt of Cthulhu No. 112 (late 2018 or early 2019). This builds upon Haefele’s earlier discussion in August Derleth Redux: The Weird Tale 1930-1971 (H. Harksen Productions, 2009), emphasizing Derleth’s positive impact on the reputation of Weird Tales magazine.”
‘Trends, Observations and Conclusions’ for Lovecraft RPGs in 2018
19 Tuesday Feb 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A while back I noted a 10,000-word survey of Lovecraft RPG publishing in 2018, which at that point was about to move on to a series of articles scrutinising individual titles.
Now there’s a final part, Cthulhu in 2018: A Retrospective, part 5. In the first section this looks at 2018 Kickstarter campaigns that have yet to ship, and then concludes with a general “Trends, Observations and Conclusions” section. The latter is a useful addition to the articles I linked to in my earlier post.