{ feuilleton }

The Seal of Yog-Sothoth, or Old Whateley’s conception of the same. A detail from the delightful kitchen autopsy scene which you’ll find below.

My thanks to Tentaclii for bringing the following to my attention in the most recent HPLinks post. The Actual Anatomy of the Terrible: Gou Tanabe, Weird Ekphrasis, and the History of Lovecraft in Comics is a lengthy academic essay by Timothy Murphy which I doubt I would have seen otherwise. Since Lovecraftian comics is the subject, a combination of vanity and curiosity made me click the link to see whether any of my own work rated a mention. I was surprised to find much more than this, with Murphy discussing and contextualising my adaptations of The Haunter of the Dark and The Call of Cthulhu. The bulk of his essay concerns the series of doorstop adaptations that Gou Tanabe has been producing for the past decade (most of which I’ve only seen as extracts), but Murphy’s knowledge of both Lovecraft’s fiction and comics history is very thorough. Particular attention is paid to Alberto Breccia’s pioneering adaptations of the 1970s; Breccia’s version of The Dunwich Horror was the story that impressed me the most when it appeared in the Heavy Metal Lovecraft special in October 1979. Seeing someone approach Lovecraft’s fiction in a sober, realistic manner was a welcome riposte to the jokey EC formula, and very much in my mind when I decided to start adapting Lovecraft myself seven years later.

Previous hauntings: Caermaen Books (1988), Oneiros (1999), Creation Oneiros (2006).

The biggest surprise in Murphy’s essay (and the reason for my writing all of this) was the end of his appraisal when he says “Lovecraft devotees may regret Coulthart’s abandonment of further adaptations…”, referring to my own version of The Dunwich Horror which stalled in late 1989 when I was asked to start working on the Lord Horror comics series from Savoy Books. A few Dunwich pages and panels were included in my Haunter of the Dark book, most of them in collage form, but the bulk of the story has never been made public. In one of those striking coincidences that often occur when you’ve embarked on a new project, I happened to have resumed work on The Dunwich Horror only a week ago, 36 years after leaving page no. 25 in its pencilled form. A few weeks prior to this I’d been scanning all of my Lovecraft comic art for the new edition of the Haunter of the Dark that I’ve been preparing since January. I’ve already mentioned reworking some of the illustrations from the first edition of the book but this process has scaled up considerably in the past two months. I’d been a little mortified to find that the artwork scans I used for the slightly upgraded edition in 2006 were the same ones I made in 1999 using a desktop scanner that wasn’t as good as those I’ve had since. Sorting through all the artwork again reminded me that my adaptation of The Dunwich Horror had been abandoned very near the end, with only the last two parts of the ten-part story left unfinished. This in turn prompted me to seriously consider finishing the story at last, an idea I’d always dismissed as being difficult if not impossible. My work on the Lord Horror comics in the 1990s led to a change in my penmanship and working methods which meant abandoning the very fine (0.2 mm) Rotring Variant pen that I’d used for drawing all the Lovecraft comics. I still have all my old Rotring pens; what I no longer have is the desire to spend months covering sheets of A3-size paper with lines like those made by an etching needle.

Continue reading “Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich horrors”