09 Sunday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Oh no, call the culture-police! The Tearoom of Despair thinks Alan Moore’s Providence series of comics to be a turgid terror, and has an entertainingly argumentative review to back up his sentiments.
09 Sunday Sep 2018
An early appearance of H.P. Lovecraft in fiction is to be found in “The Black Druid” by Frank Belknap Long, published in Weird Tales for July 1930. The Editor, Farnsworth Wright, knowingly bills the story on the contents page as: “A short tale that compresses a world of cosmic horror in its few pages”, trusting the regular reader to make the connection between “cosmic horror” and Lovecraft.
The picture illustrates the Lovecraft character in his ‘dream form’.
The story is interesting to scholars of Lovecraft’s life for being a knowing bit of fun-poking fictional commentary on Lovecraft, by someone who knew him on a near-everyday basis during the New York years. Lovecraft is only lightly veiled as “Stephen Benefield” and the character has similar concerns, physical attributes and locales. The story also fictionalises Lovecraft’s wife Sonia. Possibly the Bene in the name Benefield was even a comment on Lovecraft’s frugal diet, hinting at beans.
Archive.org’s OCR of the text is middling, but I’ve made the story readable as a PDF and have given it some annotations and a little introduction — along the way solving a very minor scholarly mystery about an entry in Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book.
08 Saturday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Unnamable
I’m pleased to say I’ve been sent a low-res PDF of the new Lovecraft graphic novel He Who Wrote in the Darkness, for review, and am currently half-way through savouring it.
When faced with a low-res PDF many reviewers might have preferred to have been sent a proper Kindle app store review-copy. Because that would have opened with the Amazon app — an app which offers a panel-by-panel ‘guided’ view of comics when reading. For the benefit of other reviewers of graphic novels who want such a ‘guided’ view, here’s what you do when you get an awkward layered PDF (i.e.: where the text is on a separate layer that sits above the art).
1. On your Kindle tablet, add a side-load install of the wholly free Comic Time Reader app as a downloaded .APK file. It does ‘panel detection’ (aka frame-by-frame viewing, aka ‘guided view’), just like Comixology and the Amazon Kindle Viewer do for purchased comics. Given this vital feature, seemingly unique among free apps not tightly tethered to a payments ecosystem, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Comic Time Reader is not present on the Amazon App Store where it would impinge on Amazon’s business model. But it works fine on the 2017 Kindle Fire HD 10″ tablet. The only problem is that the app can’t load PDFs.
2. Then convert your .PDF to .CBR with the Windows desktop freeware Comic Book Archive Creator, at maximum image quality and with .JPG output. Unlike its only free rival Comic Rack, Comic Book Archive Creator can correctly handle a PDF with layered text when converting. Also it appears to save pages at 600dpi, which means that ‘the jaggies’ are minimal on the flattened lettering, balloons and captions. Its only problem is that it works v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and can be a bit of a system hog while it’s working.
3. If you left Comic Book Archive Creator on its default output type, rename its resulting .ZIP file to .CBR format. .CBR is just a bunch of numbered .JPG page-scans inside a re-named .RAR or .ZIP file, so it’s a very flexible format. Now send it over to your Kindle. You’re then ready to read your graphic novel in a ‘guided’ frame-by-frame manner in the excellent free Comic Time Reader. If Comic Time Reader occasionally has trouble detecting a frame edge in a complex layout, you just press and hold in one corner of the frame, then drag your finger to the opposite corner. That tells the app where the frame is.
If you end up with a ridiculously large 600Mb-to-multiGb comic, because the source input was actually high-quality at around 6800-pixels per page and/or a very long graphic novel, then do the following:
1. Simply unzip the page-images to a folder
2. Open the folder with Irfanview, shift-select all images and press “B” to run a batch reduction on them.
3. In the Batch window. selected Advanced and then set a pixel size, say 2400px on one side. Ensure you are setting your output directory to be different than the input directory.
4. Then re-zip the series of images output from Irfanview and re-name into a .CBR or .CBZ file.
Irfanview’s batch has the advantage over Photoshop here, in that it knows how to re-size the pixel dimensions of an image without needing to know the dimensions on both sides. It’s also much faster than Photoshop.
08 Saturday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
Robert McParland’s new book on Myth and Magic in Heavy Metal Music, a side-project from his recent book on the history of the uses of science fiction in 1970s rock music.
07 Friday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Black Gate magazine has just posted “The Beauty in Horror and Sadness: An Interview with Darrell Schweitzer”, scholar of the fantastic and also a practitioner with poems, stories and novels.
It’s part of their “interview series which engages contemporary authors & artists on the theme of ‘Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction'”.
07 Friday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
I see that the new graphic novel of H.P. Lovecraft’s life is available now for the Kindle, titled He Who Wrote in the Darkness. The book is by Alex Nikolavitch and Gervasio-Aon-Lee, and is due in hardback 2nd October 2018 from Pegasus Books. $26 / £19 for 112 pages.
However, Amazon UK has a Kindle edition which is available right now. Nice to see a book get its Kindle edition first, although sadly the price is hardly lower than the hardback. I’ve asked the publisher if it’s possible to send my Kindle HD 10″ a digital review-copy.
“He Who Wrote in the Darkness” opens with a partial but factual recounting of Lovecraft’s New York City period. The reader also sees scenes from his earlier life and the stories, deftly woven into the pages at the points in time when Lovecraft dreams them up or remembers them. The art is simple but clear, and the faces are expressive in the samples. The toony style reminds me a little of the Dreamlands / Kadath comics adaptations which were nicely done in the 1990s by Jason Thompson and published in full in 2012. It looks very promising.
Incidentally, what is the short name for a comic book bio-pic? For movies it’s obviously bio-pic, for graphic novels… not sure. ‘Biography’ seems too grand for many rather slight and under-researched graphic novels, though some (such as the recent chunky Alan Turing one, The Imitation Game) do deserve the term. ‘Bio-comic’ is too clunky and also dismissive sounding. ‘Graphic novel biography’ is both clunky and too ponderous. ‘Life story’ is not going to cover all biographies, which may only cover part of the life. Comixology hasn’t cracked it, putting The Imitation Game under ‘biography’ and ‘historical’. Combining biography and comic as ‘biomic’ sounds like the name of a Saturday Morning Animation’s kid-robot. So I guess we’re stuck with ‘biography’.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“The Human Fear of Total Knowledge”, an excellent long article in The Atlantic for June 2016, which surveys the idea of “infinite libraries” in science fiction and fantasy.
Be warned that the article casually slips in a huge spoiler for two of the most outstanding episodes of the classic David Tennant years in Doctor Who, “Silence in the Library” / “Forest of the Dead”. These run a story back-to-back across the two episodes, and are well worth watching as your first-ever Doctor Who episodes.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Censorship, Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
The Whole Wide World is set for release as a Blu-ray disc on 18th September.
“When a feisty teacher falls for an eccentric pulp writer [Robert. E. Howard], the two begin a tumultuous affair and find they have nothing in common but their passion.”
Currently only listing on Amazon USA, but the page there notes that “This item ships to the United Kingdom”.
For those expecting a depressive gloomy angst-fest about small-town small-mindedness, frontier violence and family illness, ending in tragic suicide… it’s a brighter movie than you might expect.
I read that the 106-minute DVD edition had vital scenes cut. In one Howard discusses his views on racial memory, and in another part Lovecraft is talked about. I hadn’t known about those scenes. It seems that many had seen these scenes in the big-screen version that screened at Sundance and in its cinema run, felt they were integral to the movie, and had expected to see them on the DVD. One hopes that it wasn’t the DVD distributor who demanded they be cut, to forestall a leftist twitterstorm about race. Back in 2012 Bobbie Derie’s blog commented that…
There are certain aspects of the film that make little sense without them [the deleted scenes]
The deleted scenes had been uploaded to YouTube in 2012, and were apparently available until 2015, but have now vanished from the Web. Nor does there appear to be a full script available online.
So we might hope that the Blu-ray has the five or six minutes of deleted scenes on it, which were not on the DVD.
However, I can nowhere find details of Blu-ray having any extras at all. None are mentioned by Multicom in its survey of its summer 2018 releases. It looks to me like it’s just a bare-bones Blu-ray, with the 106-minute cut-down movie shown in a higher resolution than it was on the DVD.
05 Wednesday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Providence’s new Lovecraft statue is today reportedly ‘done’, and now just needs gilding and placing at its site. Latest picture…
And how the sculptor visualised the final look and setting…
04 Tuesday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
The Hungarian Lovecraft Society looks very efficiently organised and active, and their member Kiti Solymosi is currently well into translating Lord of a Visible World among other projects. Also underway in translation is one of Joshi’s shorter versions of his Lovecraft biography.
The Society has an English page on their website and a Facebook page. Their website is also publishing substantial translations of the Letters as long footnoted blog posts, focussing on clearly demarcated topics such as Sonia’s arrival in Providence, etc.
They have just announced that, from this week, they will be taking over the news functions formerly offered by the fine Hungarian Lovecraft blogmag The Black Aether. This means that “The Black Aether will be transformed into a [full] literary magazine” offering a venue for Hungarian weird writers. That’s the direction it seemed to me that it had long been headed in, looking back over its content.
I’m guessing that there may be space at the back of this new magazine for the occasional essay and reviews? So, if you can write in Hungarian or can pay to get an old classic essay translated, this may be a new outlet for some scholarship.
04 Tuesday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
After my recent book discovering the identity and landscape of the Gawain-poet (aka The Pearl-poet), I’m interested in Sir Gawain as a classic English supernatural text. It seems that others are too…
The International Pearl-Poet Society is sponsoring six sessions at the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies (9th–12th May 2019) at Western Michigan University. Session Five is: “Fifty Shades of Green: Hagiography and Demonology in the Pearl-poet Corpus”.
“Between the celestial city and the shady Green Chapel, the miracles of a London bishop and the Leviathan-underworld in the belly of a sea beast, the works of the Pearl-poet [aka the Gawain-poet] explore the full range of the divine and the infernal. The papers in this session will interrogate the poet’s use of hagiographic tropes [trans: the extraordinary aspects expected to be possessed by saints and related supernatural beings] as well as material from folk traditions as he crafts his supernatural narratives.”
Deadline: 15th September 2018. Looks like it’s one of those where you have to be there in person to give the paper, rather than delivering by video-feed.
In a more fannish vein there’s also a call for submissions for The Realm of British Folklore anthology. Deadline is Halloween 2018. Wanted is poetry, fiction and art, all of the non-twee variety and relating to aspects of British folklore.
03 Monday Sep 2018
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Picture postals
Whatever the academic textbooks and Wikipedia tell you, creative and satiric photomontage began before Dada. It was a grassroots and folksy and anonymous thing, and its postcards went far and wide. Here’s such a doctored postcard sent 1915, and it was probably pasted up sometime in the early 1910s.
It pokes fun at the reputation the decaying Newburyport in New England. Which would later be H.P. Lovecraft’s inspiration for Innsmouth. The card’s fun-poking implies that, in Lovecraft’s time, the town already had a certain reputation which the postcard-maker expected would be recognised throughout the region.