Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich horrors

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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.

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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.

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Kadath and Yog-Sothoth

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Last month I posted an updated version of the Yuggoth collage I created in 1994 for the Starry Wisdom story collection. I didn’t mention at the time that one purpose of the reworking was to freshen the piece for a more ambitious updating of my own Lovecraft book, The Haunter of the Dark, a volume which has now been through two different editions. I’m generally resistant to the temptation to tamper with old artwork, something which is always present when you’re using digital tools. I’d much rather create something new. In the case of The Haunter of the Dark, however, this has felt necessary when the plan for the new edition requires adding a quantity of my more recent Lovecraft-related pieces to the older art. The section of the book titled The Great Old Ones was a collaboration with Alan Moore in which deities and locations from the Cthulhu Mythos were mapped across the Sephiroth of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Most of the art for this section was done in 1999 when I’d only been using Photoshop for a couple of years. I was excited by the possibilities the software presented but some of the results look very typical of the period: lots of obvious filtering, and transparent layering of a kind I seldom do today. Since I finished reworking the Yuggoth collage (which happens to be a part of The Great Old Ones section) I’ve also reworked three more pieces: Nyarlathotep, Kadath and Yog-Sothoth. The latter two you see here, Nyarlathotep isn’t quite finished yet. My intention with the new versions has been to retain the idea, and in some cases the composition, of the original, while creating a new piece which avoids the shortcomings of the 1999 versions.

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Kadath, 2025.

Of the two, the original Kadath was a piece I was never happy with. I hadn’t thought very much about how to represent Kadath beyond having a cluster of buildings in a snowy setting. Lovecraft is evasive about the details but the place is essentially a fantastic palace (or maybe a city) in an icy wasteland. My original version collaged together bits of Indian, Thai and Cambodian architecture which created a definite “exotic” appearance but I was never happy about using identifiable temples in this way. The composition was also rather messy. The new piece also takes the collage route, only this time I’ve used architectural details from some of the pavilions built for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. Several of the themed pavilions built for the exposition were fanciful and fantastic extrapolations of the Beaux-Arts style that don’t resemble anything built before or after. The buildings were also temporary constructions so they’re a lot less identifiable than buildings with a longer history.

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Yog-Sothoth, 2025.

As for Yog-Sothoth, this one follows the idea of the original but with better choice of elements and presentation. Once again, details are vague as to Yog-Sothoth’s appearance but I always come back to the description of an inter-dimensional mass of spheres or globes. The original illustration manifested these globes by swiping a variety of globular creatures from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, something that worked quite well but the composition could have been better. The new picture follows suit, only this time I’ve borrowed details from another Haeckel book, Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda radiaria): Eine Monographie (1862), which is less well-known and with illustrations of many more globular or radial organisms than in the other volume.

For the remaining pieces I’m going to be drawing rather than collaging. The results will be posted here in due course.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Lovecraft archive

Weekend links 757

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The Breath of Creation (c. 1926–34) by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn.

• At Wormwoodiana: “…Gresham was well-read enough to know that while magic can be more than a MacGuffin in a fantasy story, neither fantasy nor thriller fiction lets magic unsettle readers much. […] Even when it is good, the supernatural is never safe in a Williams story. Not conventional fantasy by half.” G. Connor Salter on William Lindsay Gresham’s enthusiasm for Charles Williams’ novels.

• At Harper’s Magazine: Christopher Tayler reviews Lawrence Venuti’s translations of Dino Buzzati’s Il deserto dei Tartari (now titled The Stronghold) which was published last year, and The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories which will be out in January.

Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2024. Thanks again for the link here!

• The Approach to J.L. Borges: A Borgesian pastiche in homage to the creator of Ficciones by Ed Simon.

• “HP Lovecraft meets Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser”: an essay from 1992 by Fritz Leiber.

Can performing live on The Old Grey Whistle Test in January, 1974.

• DJ Food says “Let’s have some psychedelia”.

• RIP Zakir Hussain.

Creation Dub 1 (1977) by Lee Perry & The Upsetters | Threat To Creation (1981) by Creation Rebel/New Age Steppers | Theme from ‘Creation’ (1992) by Brian Eno

Another view over Yuggoth

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The original Yuggoth collage, 1994.

Three years ago I resurrected my panorama of R’lyeh from The Call of Cthulhu, a process that took five months from start to finish as I redrew a large and very detailed picture. Last month I spent a much shorter time doing the same for one of the other pieces of art that went missing after being printed in 1994, the Haeckel collage that I titled Yuggoth. I don’t think I’ve mentioned before that this was originally created as a potential cover for the first edition of the Starry Wisdom collection published by Creation Books. My Cthulhu strip had already been accepted for the book when I was asked to create something for the cover. The painting I eventually submitted was rather mediocre, not terrible but I’d only been painting with acrylics for a year or so and was still getting used to the medium. By the time Creation rejected the cover the print deadline was approaching so I had little time to create anything new. Having recently bought a copy of the Dover edition of Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature I decided to try and make a suitably Lovecraftian collage using Haeckel’s prints.

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The original collage as it appeared on the cover of HP Lovecraft: Tales of Horror in 2022. Cover design by Jo Obaroswki.

Yuggoth was the result, created in a day or so after I’d rushed to the local copy shop and returned with a large quantity of paper which I chopped up then tried to assemble into a coherent form. I duly posted the result to Creation unaware that they’d already decided to use some of Peter Smith’s Lovecraft art on the cover. I was okay with this, I liked Smith’s drawings and Yuggoth ended up appearing inside the book. Despite the hasty production process I’d taken the precaution of photocopying the collage before it went into the post, something I did with the rest of the artwork, so even though the original Yuggoth was lost (or stolen or whatever actually happened to all that artwork) I’ve still had something which was usable years later. It was this photocopied version that appeared a few years later in my Haunter of the Dark book, as well as on the cover of the Fall River Lovecraft collection, Tales of Horror, in 2022.

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The reworked Yuggoth collage, 2024.

The photocopied version was usable, then, but not ideal. The original collage had been made with photocopies produced by a machine which didn’t deal very well with the halftones in Haeckel’s plates. This gave the final piece a rough, posterised quality, the roughness being intensified once the whole thing was copied again. The resurrected version has been pieced together from scans of the original Haeckel book with everything in the same size and (almost) the same placement as before, only now all of the halftones and other fine detail are intact. And while I was going to all this trouble I decided to change the architectural details in the original to something more in keeping with the rest of the picture. The planet Yuggoth (or Pluto as human beings know it) is more alluded to than actually described in Lovecraft’s fiction, but we do know that the place is inhabited by a race of fungoid aliens. I’ve always thought of Yuggoth as being architecturally rich as well as inhabited, rather like the alien worlds that Frank R. Paul used to paint for the back covers of Fantastic Adventures magazine, but in my haste to create the collage I’d resorted to copying Cambodian and Thai temples from a book of architectural engravings. These have now been replaced by structures that are more in keeping with the other elements. Using Haeckel for architectural inspiration has a minor history, as I’ve noted before. The French architect and designer René Binet had been looking at Haeckel’s plates in 1900 when he designed the arched gateway for the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Binet later expanded on this design with Esquisses Décoratives, a book of proposals for more Haeckel-derived architecture produced in collaboration with Gustave Geffroy.

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The tinted version you see here is now available as prints and other products at Redbubble. My shop there is still a little understocked but I intend to keep adding to it in the coming months. As before, I’ll mainly be doing prints at Redbubble, all my T-shirt sales are now being handled by Skull Print. The latter emailed their final dates for pre-Xmas orders today: 6th December for overseas and 18th December for the UK. Skull Print will also be taking a break at the beginning of January so they won’t be dealing with any new orders until the 15th of that month. Thanks.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ghost Box and The Infinity Box

Weekend links 753

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Grow (1970) by Linda Brewer.Via.

• The week in work-related reviews: Raymond Tyler reviewed the Bumper Book of Magic at Religious Socialism, while James Palmer did the same at Foreign Policy. Meanwhile, Rob Latham at the Los Angeles Review of Books examined the legacy of the New Wave of science fiction with reviews of New Worlds 224, and The Last Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison’s long-delayed story collection.

• “Incline Press is a private fine press publisher in the UK, stubbornly printing with hand set, metal type on a collection of vintage machines, working with poets and artists to make limited edition books and ephemera.”

• New music: Horses In Your Blood, another dose of unhinged weirdness from Moon Wiring Club; The Source by Jon Palmer; and Ekkorääg by Tarotplane.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Rikki Ducornet The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade (1999).

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “Rare atlas of astronomy from the Dutch Golden Age goes on display in England“.

• Old music: Jon Savage’s Space, a space-themed compilation on Caroline True Records.

• At The Daily Heller: Berman’s Book Boom is a boon to graphic design’s legacy.

• At Public Domain Review: Christoph Jamnitzer’s Neuw Grotteßken Buch (1610).

• Mix of the week: A Dungeon Synth mix by Flickers From The Fen for The Wire.

• At Heavy Metal Magazine: The HP Lovecraft Art of John Holmes.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Laurie Anderson.

I Can Hear The Grass Grow (1967) by The Move | Grow Fins (1972) by Captain Beefheart | The Growing (2011) by The Haxan Cloak