Reanimator (2020) by Juscelino Neco & H. P. Lovecraft

Eldritch Fappenings
This review deals with a work that contains excessive cartoon violence and sexuality. Selected images with cartoon depictions of body horror, violence, genitalia and/or sexually explicit contact will be displayed.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

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Lovecraft não era sequer um grande astesão, mas is so também não importa, como o rock e, mais que ele, o punk rock, provou inúmeras vezes. Um artista menos dotado é perfeitamente capaz de Fazer uma obra mais oportuna, historicamente falando, do que um virtuose incapaz de pensar sua própria profissão em termos amplos. Mas isso também não era o caso de Lovecraft, um artesão obviamente limitado e um artista incapaz de seguir as veredas que ele mesmo abria a golpes desajeitados de marreta. Sua dificuldade técnica fica ainda mais evidente em Reanimator, uma de suas obras menos felizes, mas capaz de gerar tantas pérolas pelas mãos de artists mais dotados que o próprio, como o quadrinista Juscelino Neco.

Lovecraft wasn’t even a great artist, but that doesn’t matter either, as rock and, more than that, punk rock, have proven time and time again. A less gifted artist is perfectly capable of making a more timely work, historically speaking, than a virtuoso incapable of thinking about his own profession in broad terms. But that wasn’t the case with Lovecraft either, an obviously limited craftsman and an artist incapable of following the paths he himself opened up with clumsy sledgehammer blows. His technical difficulty is even more evident in Reanimator, one of his less successful works, but capable of generating so many pearls in the hands of artists more gifted than himself, such as the comic artist Juscelino Neco.

Rafael Campos Rocha, foreword to Reanimator (2020)

English translation

Rocha’s introduction to Juscelino Neco’s Reanimator (2020) is irreverent toward Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Yet irreverence has ironically been the cornerstone to the posthumous success of “Herbert West—Reanimator.” This minor tale of Lovecraft’s, his first commercial effort at horror fiction, has been adapted, expanded upon, reimagined, and incorporated into other works innumerable times since its first publication—something that has only been possible because artists have been free to do what they like with this story and its setting and characters, to freely distort and play with tone, characterization, and events as they see fit. To turn the grue-filled six episodes into dark comedies, zombie gorefests, introspective reflections on sexuality, and the mechanistic nature of life…all to entertain, explore, and reexamine what Lovecraft did and did not do.

What Brazilian comic creator Juscelino Neco did was to approach “Herbert West—Reanimator” through the lens of 1960s underground comix. Herbert West and the other characters are cast as anthropomorphic animals, the grungy cousins of Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, and their adventures are sexually explicit, violent, and drug-fueled. Neco put on the page everything that Lovecraft left off the page—and added a few other details of his own along the way.

The beginning is relatively restrained, Herbert West is in medical school. The broad outline of the first portion of Neco’s graphic novel follows the opening episode of Lovecraft’s story, although Neco takes many liberties with the framing of characters and events. As well as making the most of the opportunity to add a little gross-out imagery, such as a full-page pin-up of an autopsy in progress.

A vida não e um filme de terror barato.	Life is not a cheap horror movie.
Reanimator p23	English translation

It is difficult to express how emotive the combination of art and text can be. The instinctive comparison is something like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, but the over-the-top black humor characteristic of the film Re-Animator (1985) is still there. There will be a page of dark panels where West laments the unimaginative bureaucracy that refuses to entertain his ideas about reanimation—and then you turn the page and its West talking to himself while being the bottom in a graphically-portrayed homosexual BDSM scene.

Then West gets an assistant. Someone to help him out.

In Neco’s Reanimator, the porcine assistant is no passive observer of events, but an active partner in West’s operations. They enable West’s experiments, but also his worst impulses. Together the two secure their first victim/experimental subject—and this is where things start to get a little more punk rock. The presence of drugs and the necessity of violence start to ramp up swiftly.

Until, while with a prostitute, the assistant cooks up some reanimation agent like its crack cocaine and injects himself. It does provide new life for spent flesh, but is also suggests a new sideline for West and his friend as drug dealers.

At this point, Neco’s Reanimator has completely abandoned Lovecraft’s narrative for a literal orgy of sex and violence. One that continues to try and outdo itself with almost every turn of the page. There is one scene at a reanimation drug-fueled party that is reminiscent of something like the end of Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989), where the individual ceases to exist.

From there, Neco goes full eldritch, bringing in some of Lovecraft’s other ideas while retaining the same ’60s underground comix shock mentality.

It is never clear, at the end, whether this is something Herbert West and his friend have caused by defying the laws of nature, or just a coincidental apocalypse. In a way, it doesn’t matter. Something fundamental has changed, the scientific genie has been let loose from the bottle and they can’t put it back. The world ends…and Neco doesn’t stop there. The world is fucked. Quite literally.

What stands out about Reanimator (2020) is how fully Neco embraces the remit. Critics have read a homosexual subtext in Lovecraft’s original story, some works like “Herbert West in Love” (2012) by Molly Tanzer and “(UN)Bury Your Gays: A Queering of Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft” by Clinton W. Waters have made that more explicit, but here West’s sexuality is embraced and depicted as an open part of his character. The sex and violence are over-the-top and cartoonish, but that stands in stark contrast to efforts at more realistic portrayal like Reanimator (2008) by Florent Calvez and Herbert West: Carne Fresca (2021) by Luciano Saracino & Rodrigo López.

Reanimator (2020) by Juscelino Neco works on its own terms. It’s fun, disgusting, ribald, edgy, slightly ridiculous, and in the end cosmic in its scope. Readers are left without all the answers, but there’s the impression that one man’s obsession, with the aid and assistance of a friend, has led to the destruction of an entire world. That isn’t how Lovecraft ended the story, but that is the point. To do what Lovecraft would not have done, to use his fiction as a springboard, not to limit creators to only aping what he wrote forever.

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Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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