{lovecraft} – Page 28 – { feuilleton }

Virgil Finlay’s Tarzan

Thanks are due to Ty Reutel for alerting my attention to this one. I’d no idea that the great Virgil Finlay had illustrated Tarzan but here’s the proof, one half of an interior drawing for The Quest of Tarzan in Argosy Weekly for 1941. That’s the first surprise, the second, of course, was that Finlay had copied Frederic Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877) ( below), a sculpture which has been a subject of discussion here recently. I’ve mentioned before my including Leighton’s work in one of my Lovecraft adaptations; I referred to many other artworks in those stories but never made any direct reference to Virgil Finlay even though he was the original illustrator of Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark when it was first published in Weird Tales in 1936. Finlay’s illustrations for that story later appeared with some of my own in the enormous Centipede Press collection of Lovecraft art so it’s strange to find that we were also led to the same Leighton sculpture.

Tarzan illustration has been in my thoughts for the past few weeks while I’ve been at work (again!) on the collected Reverbstorm, many pages of which played variations on Burne Hogarth’s comic adaptations of the Tarzan stories. Reverbstorm is at long last very close to being finally, absolutely finished, and ready for printing in a single definitive volume. No production schedule just yet but any news will be announced here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Frederic Leighton’s sculptures
• Virgil Finlay’s Salomé
• Die Farbe and The Colour Out of Space
• Lovecraft’s favourite artists revisited
• Angelo Colarossi and son
• The monstrous tome
• Men with snakes

Heavy Metal, October 1979: the Lovecraft special

Mr Lovecraft by JK Potter.

HP Lovecraft died seventy-five years ago on 15th March, 1937. Twenty-five years ago I was halfway through drawing my comic strip adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu, conscious at the time that, yes, it was fifty years ago today… I mentioned at the weekend the special Lovecraft edition of Heavy Metal that was published in October 1979; of the many stimuli that led to the drawing of CoC, this magazine was by far the most important. Given the date, now seems as good a time as any to say something about it.

Illustration for the contents page by Stephen R. Bissette.

Heavy Metal was the US offshoot of Métal Hurlant, the sf/fantasy comics magazine founded by Jean Giraud (Moebius), Philippe Druillet and Jean-Pierre Dionnet in 1974. Copies of Métal Hurlant could be found in London but none ever made it further north. The advent of Heavy Metal provided an invaluable introduction to a generation of European artists whose work was otherwise difficult to find. Even better: their stories were being translated into English for the first time. The late 70s was a dizzying period for a Lovecraft reader: HR Giger appeared apparently out of nowhere in 1977 when Big O published the first UK collection of his art (which I couldn’t afford at the time), a book with Necronomicon in the title; a year later Thames & Hudson published Franz Rottensteiner‘s The Fantasy Book, an overview of the genre that devoted eight pages to Lovecraft and Arkham House, and which included many illustrations I’d never seen before; in 1979 Giger was all over the newspapers and magazines thanks to Alien; then in October the Lovecraft special dropped onto the shelves. I was stunned: this was that rare occasion when someone creates exactly the thing you want to see at precisely the right moment.

The Dunwich Horror by Alberto Breccia. A superb adaptation.

Looking back, the issue isn’t quite as good as it seemed at the time: many of the stories are slight, a couple have nothing whatever to do with Lovecraft, and, Breccia aside, none of the artists tackle the major works. What counted in the end was the idea of the issue, the implication that Lovecraft’s imagery was there to be seized and reworked in visual form. There were better issues of the magazine, before and after, but for the next six years this one remained for me a tantalising possibility. They hadn’t got it quite right…what if someone else did? After searching comic shop shelves in vain I eventually decided to have a go myself.

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Cthulhoid and Artflakes

Cthulhoid (2012).

Hot on the scaly heels of my recent Cthulhu God comes a new collage work I was messing with over Christmas. This was done in part as a reaction to the earlier picture which I’m very happy with but which looks cleaner and flatter than I prefer for Lovecraft-related things. I’d also found some new books of copyright-free cephalopoda that I wanted to try playing with. There are trace elements here of Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur but I’ve plundered Haeckel so much in the past it’s better to search elsewhere for source material.

I’ve been selling reproductions of works such as this at CafePress but now have an additional outlet with a new print venture, Artflakes, who asked me late last year to contribute to their site. Artflakes is a German company operating as CafePress does: artists upload their pictures which can then be sold on a variety of products. The product range is smaller than their rivals but they do canvas prints which CafePress don’t. These are costly items but canvas prints tend to be expensive anyway, even at a high street copy shop. On the plus side, being based in Germany means the shipping costs will be slightly cheaper inside Europe. I’ve not uploaded much at the moment but this new piece is there together with six other works. More will be added in the next couple of months.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Cthulhu God

Happy Cthulhumas. I found the time over the past couple of weeks to finish a piece of art begun in September 2008, something I’d half-completed then abandoned due to pressure of other work. I’d quite forgotten about this until I discovered the files when going through some archive discs. What began as a pencil outline is now a lavish piece of vector art which I’ll shortly be making available as a poster design.

I’ve enjoyed creating vector pictures recently, it’s a different discipline to using Photoshop (although the initial art often starts in the sister application), and the hard lines and flat shapes remind me of the similar effects I used to get when I was painting with gouache. Some areas of this piece remain a little too flat but I didn’t want to start shading everything using gradient meshes; if you start down that road you may as well do the whole thing as a Photoshop painting—or a real painting, for that matter. That said, I wouldn’t mind giving this the hyper-realist treatment at a later date.

The original idea was to do a kind of “Cthulhu Buddha”, something like the above variation only coloured with more finesse. I kept thinking this was an original idea only to belatedly realise when I set the figure against a temple background that I’d been imitating the kind of massive Lovecraftian idols that populate the comic strips of Philippe Druillet. The one below is a good example.

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Die Farbe and The Colour Out of Space

Die Farbe (2010).

The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness.

The Colour Out of Space (1927).

Die Farbe (The Colour) is a German feature film by Huan Vu based on HP Lovecraft’s tremendous short story The Colour Out of Space. Vu’s film was completed last year, and has been well-received at film festivals and by Lovecraft aficionados but I’ve been rather tardy in hearing about it. Better late than never.

Having adapted two-and-a-half stories, I tend to take a more than cursory interest in works based on Lovecraft’s fiction. One of the reasons I tackled his works in the first place was out of frustration at the apparent inability of film producers and comic artists to treat the stories as they’d been written. The Colour Out of Space is one of the masterpieces of Lovecraft’s mature period, and was the favourite of his own stories, a skilful blending of horror and science fiction in the tale of a fallen meteorite infecting a farm with an inexplicable process of decay and physical mutation. The mysterious colour is the product of some unearthly substance inside the meteorite which corresponds to no known part of the visible spectrum. This wasn’t the first story of Lovecraft’s that I read—I’d earlier found The Moon-Bog in a ghost story anthology—but it was the first that made a serious impression when I came across it in another anthology at age 12 or 13. Since then, whenever people ask me which Lovecraft stories to read first The Colour Out of Space is always one I recommend.

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