HP Lovecraft – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Illustrating Hyperborea

The Book of Hyperborea (1996). Cover art by Robert H. Knox.

“My Hyperborean tales, it seems to me, with their primordial, prehuman and sometimes premundane background and figures, are the closest to the Cthulhu Mythos, but most of them are written in a vein of grotesque humor that differentiates them vastly.” — Clark Ashton Smith

Since re-reading Clark Ashton Smith’s The Tale of Satampra Zeiros I’ve been revisiting more of Smith’s stories set in the lost world of Hyperborea. And having put together a post some years ago that gathered all the original illustrations for Smith’s Zothique cycle, I thought I’d try and do the same for another of his story series. As I noted in the earlier post, we’re fortunate today that it’s so easy to see illustrations that in the past would have been impossible to find unless you owned (or had access to) a huge collection of pulp magazines. Pulp illustrations aren’t always very good—in the case of the early issues of Weird Tales, they’re frequently amateurish—but those that illustrate new fiction for the first time are historically important if nothing else.

Lost Worlds: Volume 1 (1974). Cover art by Bruce Pennington. Lost Worlds was a single-volume collection published by Arkham House (USA) and Neville Spearman (UK). The Panther paperback covers by Bruce Pennington could easily be used on other books but these were the first Smith volumes I owned.

The first Hyperborea stories were among Smith’s earliest prose fantasies, owing something to Lord Dunsany on the one hand (HP Lovecraft detected a Dunsanian quality), and the writers of antiquity on the other, the name “Hyperborea” (“Behind the North Wind”) being borrowed from the Greeks. The northern location is about the only feature of the continent that the Greek writers would recognise, Smith’s world being a temperate pre-Ice Age realm of mountains and verdant jungles. Dinosaurs and megafauna share the lands with human inhabitants for whom sorcery is a common practice. As with Zothique, the cycle was an influential one. Lin Carter in the introduction to his Ballantine collection, Hyperborea (1971), suggests that the name of the continent might have prompted Robert E. Howard to set his Conan stories in “the Hyborean Age”. This could be the case: Howard and Smith were writing for the same publications, and the first Conan story was published in Weird Tales shortly after The Tale of Satampra Zeiros; but Howard was also reading the Greeks as well. A more substantial influence may be found in Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon, a world in which aspects of Hyperborea and Zothique are combined. Sword and sorcery begins “behind the North Wind”, in other words, although there’s very little sword-play in Smith’s fiction, that was Leiber and Howard’s department.

Lost Worlds: Volume 2 (1974). Cover art by Bruce Pennington.

The original Hyperborea illustrations are fewer than those for Zothique. As with the later cycle, several of the stories are unillustrated, while others were given lacklustre artwork. In the earlier post I followed the story order chosen by Lin Carter which attempted to contrive an internal chronology for the cycle. Carter did the same with his Hyperborea collection so I’ve followed his example once again. Later collections, like Will Murray’s Book of Hyperborea, tend to order the stories by publication date.

The Seven Geases, Weird Tales, October 1934.

An illustration of Tsathoggua by Smith himself. The toad-god turns up in person in this story.

The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan, Weird Tales, June 1932.

Continue reading “Illustrating Hyperborea”

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

Innsmouth, Japanese-style

When it comes to film and TV dramas based on the writings of HP Lovecraft I’ve always been very selective, to a degree that I avoid most adaptations unless they receive reviews good enough to provoke my curiosity. I do, however, keep an eye out for unusual (or unusually inventive) adaptations whose shortcomings I’m prepared to forgive if they promise to be more than another wearying trudge through cinematic cliches. Such is the case with this Japanese TV adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth which was written and directed by Chiaki Konaka in 1992.

Konaka’s adaptation isn’t immediately attractive, being shot entirely on video, a very unsympathetic format for horror productions when the harshness of the image works against any attempts to create an eerie atmosphere. (Even The Stone Tape suffers in this area.) Konaka presents a sketch of Lovecraft’s story which he updates to the present day and moves to contemporary Japan, with no explanation as to why the Japanese coastline is a home to towns with names like “Innsmouth”, “Arkham” and “Dunwich”. Lovecraft’s detailed history of the blighted backwater and its inhabitants is also ignored. Konaka’s narrative begins with an unnamed photo-journalist (Renji Ishibashi) securing a job at a travel magazine where he convinces the editor that the remote coastal town of “Insumasu” is worthy of a feature. As with the anonymous narrator of Lovecraft’s story, the photographer is drawn to the place as much by ancestral impulses as by his curiosity about a place where a strange fish-human corpse has been washed ashore.

Konaka’s direction is more functional than suspenseful, with the photographer’s biographical history telegraphed so much in advance that none of the revelations come as a surprise. The soundtrack is also very uneven, being a collage of music borrowed from other films: there’s a brief snatch of Goblin’s Suspiria score at one point, and I think the repeated flute refrain is borrowed from a Preisner score. This is a well-made adaptation all the same even if the Japanese Innsmouth isn’t as deteriorated as the decayed fishing town that Lovecraft describes. (To be fair, any film depicting Lovecraft’s Innsmouth would require a serious budget to do the place justice.) Fishy details abound, and Konaka uses green light as a recurrent motif that refers to Innsmouth’s secret history, like an inversion of the emerald glow that signifies magic or the supernatural in John Boorman’s Excalibur. I was especially pleased to see borrowings from the George Hay Necronomicon during a cermonial invocation to Dagon that takes place in a cave. Later on we see a copy of the Hay book being perused by the curator of the Innsmouth museum. This makes a change from the tiresome ubiquity of the “Simon” Necronomicon whose sigils are always turning up in Lovecraftian adaptations when people are at a loss to create symbols of their own. The symbology in the Hay book was the work of Robert Turner, an occultist with an aesthetic sensibility more finely attuned to the world of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Chiaki Konaka has been described as bringing a Lovecraftian influence to his other work but when most of this is anime scripts for juvenile fare like the Digimon franchise you can’t expect very much. One of his credits is for something called Cthulhu’s Secret Record but I’ve no idea what this might be. Konaka’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth many be viewed in full here. The translated subtitles are larger than I prefer (and in vivid green) but I’m still pleased that someone went to the trouble of making this curio available to a wider audience.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive