Release: Call of the Sea

07 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Nice to see a new Lovecraftian videogame that’s a rare thing… a roaring success when first released. At least, a success judging by the spoiler-packed reviews.

Trailed a few months back in Digital Art Live, the first reviews for the new Call of the Sea game are now in…

Call of the Sea is an amazing, albeit short, adventure puzzle game. It’s a fully engrossing experience that’s tense, but not scary, and is the perfect game to show to people if they’re interested in the Lovecraftian genre but aren’t fans of [post-1960s] horror. … the thing I love most about Call of the Sea is that it’s not a horror game, yet it’s fully inspired by the Lovecraftian horror genre. A fully optimized and glitchless package. Out of the Blue Games couldn’t have designed a better game for their debut.” (Gaming Trend review).

Call of the Sea is solid adventure with tons of atmosphere [and] shrouded in mystery and easy to dive into. […] it’s hard to ignore just how challenging and charming the title is. (The Escapist)

Call of the Sea is a gorgeous game. It has more of a cartoony style to it, but the levels are highly atmospheric and feature lovely vistas and beautiful use of vibrant color. The areas also feel lived-in and believable. This is certainly the kind of game where you’ll stop and gawk at the scenery every now and again.” (PC Invasion)

There are puzzles, but apparently seamlessly integrated into the story and not fiendish or illogical (as one knocking ‘review’, seemingly from a leftist anti-fan, would have it). The Games Radar review seems to have it about right, on the puzzles…

The puzzles are beautifully balanced too, not so complex you immediately head to YouTube for a solution feeling like your math teacher was totally right about your failures, but not so easy they feel like last-minute set dressing. … It’s a great story, told with heart, and the perfect narration.

It appears to riff on Lovecraft’s idea at the end of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, the one encapsulated in the ideas and plans the “Innsmouth” protagonist has for his cousin in the Canton madhouse, as he spirals up to a new sort of ‘sanity’.

Also ‘fresh from the sea’, New Horror Express interviews film-maker Chad Ferrin on The Deep Ones…

A Lovecraftian horror picture done very much in the 80s mould [… the movie] will be released in the U.S. on 1st May 2021.

Travel in 1937

05 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by in Historical context

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Extracted and cleaned by me from a new magazine upload at Archive.org, here is transport as it was envisioned in Lovecraft’s final year by an illustrator whose name appears to be “Glenn Grore”…

… made all the more interesting today by the slightly sinister black beetle-shape of the car in the bottom-left (one thinks of the “beetle-race” that Lovecraft had supplanting humanity), and the glimpse of a giant airship in the top-left.

Possibly this could give a creative lead for a book-cover designer, considering how best to tackle a book collection of the very best of Lovecraft’s many travel accounts? I imagine such a book as being accounts of the vehicles and travel itself, rather than the destinations. This would not be without some weird interest, for instance his letter recounting a nightmare involving waiting for a sinister tram-car to start. Such a project might appeal to those who are interested both in vintage transport and transport-history, and in Lovecraft-the-man.

Lovecraft auction at PBA Galleries

05 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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The PBA Galleries in Berkeley, California, reportedly have a big public auction of “Science Fiction & Mystery” items on 7th January 2021. 450 choice lots are on the block, including…

* “a wonderful selection of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and related ephemera”.

* “a first edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Outsider” from Arkham House.

* “a large collection of the works of Ray Bradbury, with many signed and scarce pieces”.

A Christmas break

13 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by in Housekeeping

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I’ll be taking a break from Tentaclii over Christmas and New Year. I hope you’ve enjoyed the years of daily postings, until now. There may be occasional postings popping up here, if someone important keels over after too many mince-pies. But otherwise Tentaclii should return to normal daily service on Sunday 3rd January 2021. Indeed, there’s already a ‘Picture Postals’ post cued up for the Friday of that week.

In the meantime, you may consider perusing the vast Tentaclii archives of 3,500+ posts.

Richard Corben (1940-2020)

11 Friday Dec 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, REH

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The major comics artist and creator Richard Corben has passed away.

He came of age as an aspiring young artist in Sunflower, Kansas, and worked for a decade in making animations for business and industrial training purposes. But comics were his love, and from 1970 he produced many horror and science-fiction shorts for Eerie and Creepy magazine (now collected as Creepy Presents Richard Corben) and underground comix titles, including short b&w adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft tales. His black-and-white adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “The Valley of the Worm” (1934) was perhaps the culmination of this period. This was the still highly-regarded Bloodstar (1976), published as a single volume inspired by the French BD format, and was the first to describe itself as a “graphic novel” in the modern sense.

Corben worked for a while as the colourist on Will Eisner’s Spirit magazine, and his own style flowered into full colour. This found a home in Metal Hurlant and Heavy Metal magazine, and such mass-market pulp-inspired work was also able to take full advantage of the uninhibited and anti-censorship mood of the 1973-1986 period. His finely painted and sensual airbrushed style became a well-known feature in the early Heavy Metal magazine, and other titles as they introduced colour sections. But his signature colour style found an even larger audience when he created the classic album cover for Meatloaf’s best-selling rock album Bat out of Hell (1977). As the times changed, from 1986–1994 Corben ran his own Fantagor Press to publish his work.

His colour and strong composition gained him a cult following over the years, but his black-and-white work is what most Lovecraftians will cherish him for. This is exemplified by his collected Haunt of Horror: Lovecraft (2008), containing his short masterly adaptations done in fine black-and-white and printed on paper able to reproduce subtle gradations and shades.

Added to Open Lovecraft

10 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Added to the ‘Open Lovecraft’ page on this blog…

* Y. Hashimoto, “Spectacular Tentacular: Transmedial Tentacles and Their Hegemonic Struggles in Cthulhu and Godzilla”, Between: Journal of the Italian Association for the Theory and Comparative History of Literature, Vol. 10, No. 20, November 2020.

* J. Olivia, “Lovecraft’s Fear of the Unknown and Unimaginable” (Undergraduate dissertation for Charles University in Prague, 2020).

* E. Taxier, “Two Ambiguities in Object-Oriented Aesthetic Interpretation”, Open Philosophy, Vol. 3, Issue 1, 2020. (Sees two ambiguities forming a problem to aesthetic commentary arising from Graham Harman’s discussions of Lovecraft).