Who knew? Roy Thomas and Gil Kane produced a faithful and polished comics adaptation of Wagner’s grand opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung (DC in four parts from 1989-1991, then a hardback collection in 2002), sans the music. Which may be a blessing, if your ears are averse to screeching Rhine-maidens.

If you want to know the story that Tolkien and Lovecraft knew, this is an accessible way to get it. 200 pages of fine brisk comics cram in 16 hours of opera, but since Roy Thomas is at the helm it’s done very deftly. His translation is fairly straight and not an attempt at “modern and slangy”. The art was by Gil Kane in his prime, doing full-on ‘costume-opera meets superhero’, and he was paired with a top colourist.

Not to be confused with the later 500-page adaptation of the operas by P. Craig Russell. Incidentally, P. Craig Russell’s very lacklustre Jewels of Gawahiar Conan adaptation (seemingly meant to entice dim-witted 10 years old boys into reading) had made me wary of such things, and in researching the worth of the Thomas/Kane Ring of the Nibelung I discovered that Archive.org has once again expanded the scope of the “Borrow” books. Researchers can now ‘nip in and out’ for an hour on a “Borrow” book…

Here at Tentaclii Towers the month of June proved to be a curious in-between sort of thing, partly because the UK continues to wrestle with the flapping and tattered vestiges of lockdown. Somewhere, distantly, there were the unseen howlings of midsummer rites. But here at the Towers the only ceremony was that of the tentacular air-conditioner being wheeled out of its lair for the annual five-day thrumming. Now the Towers loom silent amid a curiously grey and chilly interregnum, as the UK awaits the long-awaited 4th of July — when the pubs and much else will finally re-open.

New or recent books noted here at Tentaclii included: a new essay collection from S.T. Joshi, The Advance of the Weird Tale; a new book in Spanish translation containing Lovecraft’s selected essays on literature, Ensayos Literarios; and a three-volume set of Russian translations of Clark Ashton Smith. I also found a huge free PDF book on Underground Rivers, and noted that Brian Murphy’s well-reviewed book on the history of sword and sorcery is now available in a £5 Kindle ebook edition.

Several magazine-journals were noted, either new or with new issues: The Digest Enthusiast; Occult Detective Magazine; and the new British magazine Hellebore. These were noted because they include non-fiction essays. I don’t normally note magazines if they’re fiction-only.

June saw links to scholarly work and reviews, including: a substantial four-part instructional series on how to do Natural Language Processing, using the Lovecraft fiction corpus as the test set; a call for chapters from the editors of the forthcoming academic book The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft; and a possible call for papers for Mythcon 51 in 2021. I was pleased to see Bobby Derie revisit The Private Life of H.P. Lovecraft (1985), this being a memoir booklet by Lovecraft’s wife Sonia H. Davis, and to see Derie draw on some dates to place a question-mark over the very late and uncorroborated claim that Lovecraft had once read Mein Kampf. Derie’s slightly earlier blog post on Kthulhu Reich (2019) also coincided with my reading the relevant bits of the Bloch letters, and I then usefully correlated the timelines on exactly what Lovecraft would have known of Hitler and the Nazis when writing to Bloch of such things.

I further found a new snippet of data in the Bloch letters which helped me fill a gap in my biography of Kalem member Arthur Leeds. I also became more aware of how Bloch effectively became a sort of ‘substitute Lovecraft’ for a while. I’d welcome a professionally-read audiobook of these ‘in the style of Lovecraft’ early Bloch stories, but there doesn’t appear to be one. In fact, Bloch seems to be singularly ill-served in audio, unless you want Psycho.

My Friday feature ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’ made substantial visits to the Hayden Planetarium, and to the Silver River. Less substantial, but still evocative, peeps were take into Mammoth Cave and Red Hook. My ‘Kittee Tuesday’ blog feature also found enough material to keep the whiskers twitching. One of these kittee posts, on Bloch’s early story “Bubastis”, arose from my reading of the Bloch letters and led me to find yet another early appearance of ‘Lovecraft as character’. I now have so many of these that I’ve started a new ‘Lovecraft as character’ tag on this blog, and I will eventually get around to a neat tabulation of such stories in date order.

In audio, I spotted a new Graham Plowman album; two new and relevant editions of the venerable Stuff To Blow Your Mind podcast; a new Lovecraft Geek podcast; and in video the acclaimed documentary The Rise and Fall of Penn Station (the place Lovecraft alighted when he first entered New York City). Also in audio, I was pleased to learn that VLC can handle a ‘playlist edit’ and I coded a VLC Playlist Edit Maker 1.0 to help make such a thing. Basically, you can edit audio and video without having to wrassle it into and out of editing software. The playlist does it for you, in a mere snippet of text. At present, only VLC does this, but it’s a feature other players should copy.

I’ve also just finished an in-depth interview with Lovecraft illustrator and graphic novelist Jason Thompson (‘Mockman’), for the forthcoming VisNews #11. The next issue of the free Digital Art Live magazine (due any day now) will also have my in-depth review of the PhotoLine software, in which I effectively document how I switched from Photoshop to PhotoLine in June.

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