Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich horrors

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.

The Dunwich Horror title page, 1988. I opened the story with a suggestion that Old Whateley’s breeding experiments had been attempted before with less successful results.

The key to revisiting the story came four years ago when I redrew the R’lyeh panorama from The Call of Cthulhu, a digital version done at the same size and with the same amount of detail as the lost/stolen/destroyed/eaten-by-Shoggoths original. (See this post.) This endeavour also took a great deal of time but it’s much easier shading with a Wacom stylus and a large computer screen, especially when you can zoom in and out of all the details. The process proved to my satisfaction that I could replicate my old drawing style in the new medium without punishing my eyesight. And I’d also managed to resurrect a drawing whose loss had been a continual aggravation since 1994. Leaving The Dunwich Horror unfinished had been a similar, if less painful, aggravation, but looking at the artwork again a few weeks ago I could at last see a way to finish the story.

Wilbur Whateley, from one of the completed Dunwich Horror pages, 1989.

This, then, is my major project for the next twelve months. The book as a whole will take at least this long to finish since I always have to attend to paid illustration and design work before anything else. The new Haunter of the Dark will be much closer to my original conception of the book as I first conceived it in 1986, when the idea was to present three stories in comic-strip form together with a few one-off illustrations. After contributing to various story collections over the past 20 years I have a lot more Lovecraft-related illustration to choose from than I would have done in the 1980s. And since the gradual reworking has turned into a full-blown reconceptualisation I’ve decided to enlarge the page size (from Executive to A4) and give the book a new title, The Haunter of the Dark and Other Weird Tales. The original subtitle “…and Other Grotesque Visions” was a suggestion by the first publisher, Oneiros, and not one I was especially happy with, but “Other Weird Tales” wouldn’t have suited a book containing a mere two stories. “Weird Tales” acknowledges the magazine that first published those stories while also using one of my favourite Old English words. “Weird” has a further resonance in relation to the artwork which I always wanted to have the texture of old engraved illustrations. Edward Gorey said he liked engravings because of their weirdness, that quality they have of being realistic representations which only need a slight nudge to become strange or (as Max Ernst demonstrated) surreal.

A new cover design, 2025.

The contents of the new edition will be as follows:

• The Haunter of the Dark ( with rescanned artwork)
• The Call of Cthulhu (with rescanned halftone artwork from The Starry Wisdom)
• The Dunwich Horror (the completed story)
• The Great Old Ones by Alan Moore (with rescanned drawings and reworked digital art)
• The Spawn of the Stars (a Cthulhu portfolio)
• Strange Aeons (a Lovecraftian art portfolio)

The Cthulhu pages are now as good as I can get them for reproductions at this size. Since the artwork was lost (or stolen or whatever…) I’ve always had to resort to compromise by reusing the printed halftone pages from The Starry Wisdom collection or the rougher photocopies I made of the originals before they were posted into oblivion. The new pages are a combination of the halftones and the photocopies, with the latter providing the lettering panels which are less readable in their halftoned form. And the new R’lyeh panorama is now installed in place of the old version. I’m currently thinking about relettering all the comics pages using a digital font based on my 1986 letterforms but this would be a serious chore which I’m putting off for the moment. A more important—and more enjoyable—task is finishing The Dunwich Horror.

For the past two weeks I’d been wondering whether to write anything about all this activity; Timothy Murphy’s piece forced my hand. The coincidence I’ll take as encouragement, one of those synchronicities which make you feel your course is true. You’ll be hearing more of this.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive