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The return of The Thing: Artbook

The most notable feature of the alien organism in John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” is its physical mutability, a quality memorably expressed in John Carpenter’s film adaptation of the story, The Thing. Fitting, then, that The Thing: Artbook is due to be republished later this year in a new edition which adds fresh material to the original volume. I was one of over 350 artists asked to create personal responses to Carpenter’s film in 2016, the results of which were published by Printed In Blood as a heavyweight, large-format hardback. The new book will divide the original into a more manageable two-volume paperback set to which a third volume of fresh material will be added, with all three volumes being contained in a slipcase. The third volume will also be available as a standalone book. Pre-orders may be placed here.

For the reprint there’s the possibility of original contributors doing a new piece, a tempting idea but not something I have the time for at the moment. Last month I started work on a new series of book illustrations which I need to concentrate on even though I wouldn’t mind doing something new based on the film. Before the book was published I guessed that many of the artists would be working variations on favourite scenes or characters, an accurate prediction as it turned out. My own contribution was an attempt to depict some of the moments we don’t see, when transformations are taking place offscreen, but I also had a more complicated, poster-style design in mind which I never managed to work out to my own satisfaction. For now the idea will have to remain frozen in the conceptual ice.

Before starting work on my own drawing I also read John W. Campbell’s story and looked for earlier depictions of his alien. One of the book covers that turned up was the Bantam paperback of Alan Dean Foster’s novelisation (above), a book with a better cover than the UK editions which recycled elements from the film posters. I couldn’t find an artist credit at the time but the cover art is by Jim Burns, a British illustrator best known for his depictions of spacecraft and futuristic technology. Looking for confirmation of his credit turned up a picture of the original painting which has a husky looking at the frozen alien. I can see why the art director wanted the dog removed—the cover is better with all the viewer’s attention drawn to those insectile legs—but Burns’ colour scheme is spoiled by the greenish tinge of the printed version. Ice is a difficult substance to paint well. If I was Burns I would have been a little annoyed that all those icy details had been lost.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Thing: Artbook
• The Thing Group Art Show
• Things

Tsathoggua rising

I said last week that I’d almost finished reworking my portrait of Tsathoggua for the Lovecraft book, and here it is. Tsathoggua first came into the world in a Hyperborea story by Clark Ashton Smith, The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, before being incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos by HP Lovecraft who refers to the god-creature in several of his stories. Where Smith describes a hideous toad-like being, Lovecraft avoids being too closely bound by material specifics, referring to an “amorphous” entity which suggests a range of possibilities for illustration. To be fair to Smith, there is an amorphous and very deadly creature lurking in the temple of Tsathoggua in The Tale of Satampra Zeiros but we never learn whether this is Tsathoggua itself or some other being.

The amorphousness of Lovecraftian entities is a factor which is too often ignored in the world of weird illustration. Cosmic horror thrives on the fluidity of physics and physical matter but many illustrators seem content to copy one another instead of inventing new teratisms, a process that results in the accretion of stereotypes. Cthulhu, as I’m always reminding people, explodes into pieces after being struck by a ship at the end of The Call of Cthulhu, the remnants then recombining when the ship sails away from the scene. Lovecraft never intended his “spawn from the stars” to resemble the accreted stereotype we see today, a kind of Jolly Green Giant with squid mask and bat wings, reaching a brawny and very human arm towards the viewer. The ultimate expression of cosmic amorphousness may be found in the Shoggoths, those alien entities whose default condition is a mass of shapeless, iridescent protoplasm.

It was the amorphous nature of Tsathoggua that I wanted to honour with my original Photoshop creation in 1999. The starting point was a photograph of a cephalopod (I forget now whether it was an octopus or a squid) torn from an old issue of National Geographic. My initial experiments with the picture weren’t intended to develop into Tsathoggua; I didn’t have anything specific in mind when I started but at some point during the production of The Great Old Ones I decided to turn the picture into Smith’s entity with the addition of a toad-like head. Rather than mould the rest of the picture into more recognisable organic shapes it was left in a largely amorphous state. The eye-like shape at the top is a complete mystery to me now, I can’t say why it was there but it felt right so there it stayed. Alan Moore’s text for Tsathoggua identifies the creature with the Kabbalistic sphere of Geburah, “Strength”, a zone imbued with the martial qualities of the planet Mars. This is one of the more arbitrary assignations in The Great Old Ones—there’s nothing especially warlike about the toad-god—but something had to occupy the space, and I’d already finished the picture before Alan started writing his pieces. For the new version I’ve redrawn some areas of the original, but most of the work has been a case of sharpening edges and improving the contrast and modelling. The spiky, crown-like upper half has been emphasised a little in order to complement the martial aspect. And the bulging, convex appearance of the original has been slightly enhanced, giving the impression that the creature’s gravitational mass is of a sufficient density to bend the light around it. None of this should be taken as a negation of Smith’s description of a squatting, pot-bellied toad-god. The icons of the Great Old Ones created by human beings are exactly this: human attempts to represent alien monstrosity. Some acolyte who happens to envision the real Tsathoggua might stammer that “It looked like…a giant toad!” thereby giving a form to the subsequent iconography. But the map is not the territory. Cthulhu doesn’t, and shouldn’t look like the statues either. The Jolly Green Giant needs to ditch the mask and wings and get back to selling canned vegetables.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• H.P.L.
• The Return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth

H.P.L.

It’s that man again. Presenting the latest reworked page from the ongoing reconstruction/improvement of my Haunter of the Dark book. The picture will illustrate “Abdul Alhazred”, the final section of Alan Moore’s text for The Great Old Ones in which HP Lovecraft is positioned at Malkuth, the “Kingdom” in Alan’s eldritch Kabbalah. This makes Lovecraft himself the receptive vessel of the energies descending from the spheres above, while paradoxically being the source of those energies. Or some of them at least… The Great Old Ones is a Mythos Kabbalah which features Dagon, Hastur, Tsathoggua and Yig as well as Cthulhu and the rest. Alan doesn’t subscribe to Kenneth Grant’s baseless theory that Lovecraft really was a receptacle for transmissions from interdimensional entities, but the incorporation of the writer into his own pantheon isn’t unprecedented. Abdul Alhazred was a childhood persona of Lovecraft’s before he assigned the name to the author of Al Azif, or the Necronomicon; further personas may be found in Through the Gates of the Silver Key (“Ward Phillips”), Robert Bloch’s The Suicide in the Study (“Luveh-Keraph, priest of Bast”), and other fictions.

HPL (1937) by Virgil Finlay.

Whether this literary sport warrants the apparently limitless production of Lovecraftian art featuring the man himself, usually sprouting or festooned with tentacles, is a debatable matter. Virgil Finlay began the fantastic portrait trend in 1937 with his memorial depiction of the author writing with a quill pen while dressed in 18th-century garb. The earliest example that I can think of showing Lovecraft paired with the ubiquitous tentacles was the Moebius cover for Lettres d’Arkham in 1975, although there may well be other drawings prior to this. I’ve often wondered what Lovecraft would have made of the deluge of publications and images derived from his work, especially those that place him inside the products of his imagination.

Cover art by Moebius, 1975.

And speaking of which… I was at a loss at first with how to approach a new Lovecraft portrait, all I knew was that one was necessary. The original Malkuth picture from 1999 is another poor Photoshop job which has nevertheless been reused elsewhere on a few occasions, even appearing in 2007 on the cover of an issue of FATE magazine. For the new version I started with the portrait itself, using white lines on black to copy the same portrait photograph that formed the centre of the older picture. This was then duplicated and flipped horizontally to create a kind of Janus head which gives the portrait a suitably weird quality without wreathing it in tentacles. The mirrored head harks back to a sequence of treated photos by JK Potter which I first saw in the Heavy Metal Lovecraft special in 1979. Potter had used the same portrait photo to create effects that were somewhat compromised by poor reproduction, leading me to be believe that I’d created something slightly different to the first panel in his sequence. While researching this post I turned up an earlier version of the artwork which appeared on the back of the first issue of a US fanzine, Fantasy Mongers, also in 1979. The clearer reproduction revealed that the first head in Potter’s sequence is almost identical to my own. Ah well…

Photo art by JK Potter from the back cover of Fantasy Mongers #1, 1979.

The rest of the picture was improvised around this central image. Having drawn the portrait in white-on-black I decided to use a similar technique for the other elements. The Cthulhoid pillars are based on those in my Red-Night Rites painting from 1997, one of which appeared in the 1999 picture. The smaller figure on the right is from one of the photos that Wilfred Talman took while wandering the streets of New York with Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long. This also appeared in the 1999 picture but for the new version I’ve emphasised what appears to be a book that Lovecraft is carrying in his right hand. Searching around for a complementary figure that might represent Abdul Alhazred turned up a 19th-century photo of a character who not only looked the part but is also standing in a manner similar to the Talman Lovecraft. If you look closely he’s also carrying a book, an addition of my own which turns him into the author of Al Azif. The polyhedra supporting the pair aren’t as arbitrary as they may seem. The spheres serve a dual purpose, preventing the figures from floating in space (or standing in water) while also relating to the Sephiroth of Malkuth which is identified with the Earth in the Kabbalistic scheme of planetary associations.

The next reworked picture will be Tsathoggua which is being polished rather than completely overhauled. I’m hoping I might have this done by the end of the month but I’m still chipping away at The Dunwich Horror while doing all this, as well as working on things which pay the bills. (I’ve just finished designing and illustrating another book.) Further progress will be announced in due course.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth

The Return of the Crawling Chaos

Behold Nyarlathotep, v. 3.0, this being yet another revision of an old illustration. Some readers may recognise the imagery from version 2.0 (2009) or even the original that appeared in my Haunter of the Dark book in 1999. Earlier this month the work I’ve been doing for the new edition of the book reached the end of another stage with the completion of all the necessary redrawing of The Dunwich Horror. I’ve also just finished drawing page 24 of the story, the page I’d left half-done when the strip was abandoned in 1989. Everything I do from now on will be new material.

Having got this far I decided to pay a little more attention to the upgrading of the book’s fourth section, The Great Old Ones, by finishing Nyarlathotep, something I began this time last year then set aside when I got involved in rescanning all the old comics pages. As I’ve mentioned before, several of the pieces for this section of the book were some of my earliest digital illustrations, created a few months after I’d bought a secondhand and very underpowered Macintosh computer. Nyarlathotep was an attempt to depict the hybrid nature of a Mythos entity which combines elements of an Egyptian pharaoh, the diabolic “Black Man” of European witch cults, a sinister stage magician or scientist, and the winged abomination that Robert Blake finds lurking in the steeple of the Starry Wisdom church. Version 1 was one of my very first digital collages which suffered as a result of my inexperience with the new medium, hence my eagerness to rework the design in 2009 when Cyaegha, a metal band I’d been working with, requested a Nyarlathotep-themed T-shirt. The first version had been aimed more at the theatrical/scientific aspect of the character, with a poster in the background from John Nevil Maskelyne’s Egyptian Hall in London. For version 2 I added a number of organic elements to bolster the “Haunter of the Dark” side of the character. Version 3 keeps all the details from version 2 while replacing some of the collaged elements with similar ones taken from better sources. The new design is also slightly taller to account for the enlarged page size of the new book.

The Sephiroth chart from the second edition of the book, 2006.

The most notable additions to the new piece are the names of the character in Latin letters and Egyptian hieroglyphs (𓋔𓇋𓄿𓂋𓈌𓊵), the latter being a suggestion from this Reddit post. The Egyptian spelling is conjectural but I have a guidebook to the hieroglyphic language which confirms that most of the letters are the ones they should be. The words aren’t included solely as decoration. The Great Old Ones was a collaboration with Alan Moore in which Alan wrote eleven texts or invocations which position each god or entity on one of the spheres of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Alan was heavily involved with the Kabbalah at this time, being also engaged with the first few issues of Promethea, a story which involves a physical (or metaphysical) journey from Malkuth to Kether. The Great Old Ones takes the same journey in reverse, and from a much darker perspective, like a Lovecraftian equivalent of the Qliphoth, the “nightside” of the Kabbalistic spheres. In Alan’s scheme, Nyarlathotep is positioned at sphere 8, Hod (or “Splendour”), a sphere associated with gods of magic and language like Thoth, Hermes and Mercury. I imagine most Mythos-acquainted occultists would agree with adding Nyarlathotep to this pantheon. In addition to being gods of magic and language, Thoth, Hermes and Mercury also serve as celestial messengers, a function which Lovecraft assigns to Nyarlathotep in The Whisperer in Darkness when one of the Mi-Go declares “To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told.”

As for the rest of The Great Old Ones, I have four more of them still to be reworked, one of which, Abdul Alhazred (or Lovecraft himself) is almost finished. Further progress will be posted here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos

Weekend links 803

Ad for The United States Of America from Helix magazine, 1968.

• American composer Joseph Byrd died this week but I’ve yet to see a proper obituary anywhere. He may not have been a popular artist but he was significant for the one-off album produced in 1968 by his short-lived psychedelic group, The United States Of America. Their self-titled album has been a favourite of mine since it was reissued in the 1980s, one of the few American albums of the period that tried to learn from, and even go beyond, the studio experimentation of Sgt Pepper. The United States Of America didn’t have the resources of the Beatles and Abbey Road but they did have Byrd’s arrangements, together with an energetic rhythm section, an electric violin, a ring modulator, some crude synthesizer components, the voice of Dorothy Moskowitz, and a collection of songs with lyrics that ranged from druggy poetry to barbed portrayals of the nation’s sexual neuroses. The album became an important one for British groups in the 1990s who were looking for inspiration in the wilder margins of psychedelia, especially Stereolab, Portishead (Half Day Closing is a deliberate pastiche), and Broadcast. Byrd did much more than this, of course, and his follow-up release, The American Metaphysical Circus by Joe Byrd And The Field Hippies, has its moments even though it doesn’t reach the heights of its predecessor. Byrd spoke about this period of his career with It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine in 2013.

• At BBC Future: “The most desolate place in the world”: The sea of ice that inspired Frankenstein. Richard Fisher examines the history of the Mer de Glace in fact and fiction with a piece that includes one of my Frankenstein illustrations. The latter are still in print via the deluxe edition from Union Square.

• A Year In The Country looks at a rare book in which Alan Garner’s children describe the making of The Owl Service TV serial.

• The final installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

• At Public Domain Review: Perverse, Grotesque, Sensuous, Inimitable: A Selection of Works by Aubrey Beardsley.

• At Colossal: Ceramics mimic cardboard in Jacques Monneraud’s trompe-l’œil ode to Giorgio Morandi.

• At the Daily Heller: The “narrative abstraction” of Roy Kuhlman‘s cover designs for Grove Press.

• New music: Elemental Studies by Various Artists; and Gleann Ciùin by Claire M. Singer.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Archive Matrix.

• Sensual Hallucinations (1970) by Les Baxter | The Garden Of Earthly Delights (United States Of America cover) (1982) by Snakefinger | Perversion (1992) by Stereolab