{horror} – { feuilleton }

The Twilight Magus

Presenting my latest cover for Aconyte’s Arkham Horror line, and the third and final book in a trilogy by Tim Pratt.

Carl Sanford, once the Silver Twilight Lodge’s great leader and now presumed dead, lives in anonymity in Spain, plotting revenge against those who betrayed him. Alone, he calculates his first move to achieve power abroad is by being initiated into the mysterious ancient society called the Red Coterie to secretly take it over. Despite Sanford’s reputation, the Red Coterie demands proof of his occult prowess, sending him on a quest to vanquish The Blood Moon, a reclusive blood magus manipulating humans and monsters alike to achieve their own ends. As Sanford uses every scrap of cunning he possesses to outwit his enemies and prove his worth, old foes from Arkham have discovered his existence and are coming to finish him off once and for all.

The brief for this one was for a design that would continue the form of the previous two volumes while incorporating details of Antoni Gaudí’s architecture, Barcelona being one of the story’s locations. I’ve admired Gaudí’s architecture for a long time but I’ve never had the opportunity to use any of it in an illustration before. Most of the details are tiny ones but the unfinished porch of the Sagrada Família is recognisable, as is the iron dragon from the entrance gate of the Park Güell. The windows behind Sarah van Shaw and Carl Sanford are also Gaudí designs.

Less recognisable, but also a Gaudí creation, is the background pattern which is more visible on the back cover of the book. My previous covers for Aconyte have all used Art Deco mofits to complement stories set in the 1920s, with several of them having elaborate background patterns. The Gaudí design was one I hadn’t seen before, a hexagonal tile in which portions of three organic forms—starfish, ammonite and algae—become whole when the tiles are placed together. It’s a beautifully simple and clever design with the additional bonus for this cover of creating a series of spirals and tendrils which suit the Lovecraftian nature of the story. If you search around you’ll find a number of places selling reproductions as either ceramic tiles or coasters in a variety of materials.

The Twilight Magus will be published in July.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

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.

Continue reading “Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich horrors”

Gahan Wilson’s Diner

Gahan Wilson’s macabre humour has provided stories for film and television on a number of occasions but this very short entry is the only one I’ve seen so far. Gahan Wilson’s Diner seems closest to Wilson’s work as a cartoonist, being an attempt to faithfully translate the style of his drawings and their grotesque predicaments to the world of animation. Wilson wrote and designed the film, the direction is credited to Graham Morris and Karen Peterson. Watch it here.

Weekend links 775

The Bride of the Wind (1914) by Oskar Kokoschka.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Fantômas, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain (translated by Cranstoun Metcalfe).

• This week’s Bumper Book of Magic news: the Brazilian edition of the book, titled A Lua e a Serpente: Almanaque de Magia, will be published in June. It’s available for pre-order here.

• “The basis of compilations as far as I’m concerned is, ‘I like this stuff, you may like it too.’” Jon Savage on the art of the compilation album.

• At Public Domain Review: The strange story of Oskar Kokoschka, Hermine Moos, and the Alma Mahler Doll.

• At the Daily Heller: Psychedelics, Day-Glo, Hallmark and The Peculiar Manicule.

• Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, a new version for sale from Important Records.

• The Strange World of…Michael Chapman.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Boris Karloff Day.

• RIP David Thomas of Pere Ubu.

• Dream Machine (1968) by Les Sauterelles | Dream Machine (1980) by The Androids | Dream Machine (1981) by Phantom Band

Kadath and Yog-Sothoth

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.

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.

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