French artist Jean-Michel Nicollet isn’t really known as a comic artist but one of his strips appeared in the Métal Hurlant Lovecraft special in September, 1978, and was reprinted in the Heavy Metal Lovecraft special a year later. Nicollet’s three-page story, H.P.L., is a slight thing which you can read below but his paintings present more of the atmosphere of Lovecraft’s fictional worlds than many of the other strips in those issues, including the equally slight contribution from Moebius. Prior to this, Métal Hurlant had been using some of Nicollet’s paintings for cover art, as a result of which one of the same illustrations appeared on the cover of the very first issue of Heavy Metal magazine in 1977. The winged Lovecraft from his comic strip turned up again on the cover of a Robert Bloch story collection for French publisher Nouvelles Éditions Oswald (NéO) in 1980.
Nicollet seems to have retired now from cover work but during the 1970s and 80s he was a very prolific illustrator, especially for NéO. NooSFere has a gallery of his covers which are mostly for reprints of early 20th-century horror, fantasy and adventure tales, also a few detective stories. He seems to have enjoyed illustrating classic detective fiction (photos show him posing with a large Holmesian pipe) so there may well be more covers which aren’t included in the NooSFere list.
The selections I’ve chosen here match my own preferences for cosmic horror and weird fiction, and represent another attempt to look further afield for this type of illustration. French cover design can be unsympathetic to cover illustration, crowding the paintings with poor type choices and purposeless graphics. The uniform layouts of NéO treat the artwork with more respect.
