A Short History of the Black Mythos

This is a brief history of Mythos fiction by and about Black people. “Mythos” in this context refers specifically to the artificial mythology created by H. P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries, popularly known as the Lovecraft Mythos, and then extended by subsequent authors as the Cthulhu Mythos. To a much lesser degree, it touches on Lovecraftian fiction and cosmic horror by Black authors, but this is focused much more narrowly on Lovecraft, Cthulhu, & the associated Mythos.

The present Negro inhabitants were known to him, and he was very courteously shown about the interior by old Asa and his stout wife Hannah.
H. P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

The house at Olney Court, with its Black inhabitants Asa and Hannah, really existed. It was occupied by William and Delilah Townsend, who had a long association with Lovecraft’s family, Delilah acted as a housekeeper for his aunt and was mentioned in several of his letters. Delilah died in 1944; if anyone wrote to her about Lovecraft or his family, or attempted an interview, it has not come to light. Real people, there all the time, but given little attention, often overlooked, their contributions, even if passive, obfuscated. Think of this as an unintended metaphor: Black people have never been absent from the Mythos, but they are often easily overlooked.

Weird Tales as White Mythic Space (1923-1954)

Jim Crow did not prevent Black people from buying Weird Tales, or writing or illustrating for the magazine. However, there was no survey of fans to see who was buying the pulps, and the letter pages in ‘The Eyrie’ don’t really disclose such things. We know H. P. Lovecraft was white, we know his contemporaries who contributed to the nascent Mythos such as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and August Derleth were white. This wasn’t a conscious decision on Lovecraft’s part, just the way the demographics shook out: after all, he rarely met his fellow pulp writers face-to-face, and a writer’s byline can conceal much if they choose—readers did not know at first that “M. Brundage” or “C. L. Moore” were women, or that “Francis Flagg” was really Henry George Weiss, whose pseudonym may have helped him avoid certain anti-German prejudice after World War I.

Just because researchers cannot (yet) name a specific Black fan who bought and read Weird Tales during Lovecraft’s lifetime, nor a specific Black writer for the magazine during that period, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. Or that it would be unusual if they did. Such things were simply not talked about very openly during the 20s and 30s; and the editorial policy of the early Weird Tales editors Edwin Baird (1923-1924), Farnsworth Wright (1924-1940), and Dorothy McIlwraith (1940-1954) (all white) with regards to race are a closed book to us. No specific comment about race or prejudice in Weird Tales has yet come to light from them; but looking at the stories and art that they accepted and published, we can say a few things.

The bulk of the stories in Weird Tales from 1923-1954 had white protagonists; Black characters (and other people of color) were often supporting characters or antagonists. Black stereotypes were common, although not universal. Racist language, including the N-word, was included from the very first issue, although again, not universal. Stories that focused on Black prejudice, such as “The Last Horror” (1927) by Eli Colter, were relatively rare or “Black Canaan” (1936) by Robert E. Howard; stories that portrayed Black people as parts of voodoo cults or the like, such as “Mother of Serpents” (1936) by Robert Bloch, relatively common. Artistic depictions of Black people tended to follow the line of the stories, see Black People and Africa on the Cover of Weird Tales.

Weird Tales in its initial run might be perceived as a white mythic space, where a Black reader, writer, artist, or any character who wasn’t a stereotype would be out of place in the all-white milieu. The truth is more nuanced; the prevailing prejudice kept Weird Tales from headlining Black protagonists, but not every character was a villain or a racist stereotype. We might not know their names, but there’s no reason to doubt that Black people did read Weird Tales. There may be Black pulp writers who wrote under pseudonyms and haven’t been identified yet. At the same time, it’s fair to say that Weird Tales from 1923-1954 was very, very white, and as a consequence, the early Mythos conceived by Lovecraft and his contemporaries was very white as well.

Jim Crow & August Derleth (1937-1971)

There was no formal law preventing any Black fan or writer from writing their own Mythos fiction or poetry, and with the death of H. P. Lovecraft in 1937 he could hardly have objected if anyone did. Shortly after Lovecraft’s death, his friends August Derleth and Donald Wandrei began their efforts to get Lovecraft published between hard covers. When they failed to entice major publishers to take the job, they formed their own independent publisher, Arkham House, which they would jointly own and run, with Derleth as the major editor and manager of the business until his death in 1971.

Under Derleth’s guidance, Arkham House published not only the work of H. P. Lovecraft, but other pulp writers from Weird Tales and the fantasy and science fiction pulps as well, such as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, Seabury Quinn, Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury. Derleth also became an anthologist of note, with books like Sleep No More (1944) and Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969) drawing heavily from Weird Tales. As a consequence, the contents of these anthologies tended to be mostly white authors; not terribly surprising when you consider how white Weird Tales was in the first place.

Derleth also had a chilling effect on the production of new Mythos fiction outside the control of Arkham House. Claiming to represent Lovecraft’s estate, Derleth made legal threats against folks like C. Hall Thompson who attempted to write their own Mythos fiction. While there is no indication that Derleth was specifically targeting Black writers, the effect of the two policies—focusing on re-printing white authors from Weird Tales and controlling who did write new Mythos fiction—severely restricted the opportunities any writer might have to professionally publish their Mythos fiction, and inadvertently kept the Mythos writer pool pretty much exclusively white men for decades.

This wasn’t an issue limited to Derleth; John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding and also an anthologist, was notedly racist and sexist and likewise excluded many writers that weren’t white men. The lack of diversity was an endemic issue in the science fiction field throughout the Jim Crow era. Amateur publication in fanzines faced fewer restrictions, but organized fandom had its own associated prejudices that often limited Black participation (see Jim Crow, Science Fiction, and WorldCon).

This is a very long way to say that the overall history of Black fans and writers in the Mythos is mostly silent from the 1920s through the 1970s. Black people were almost certainly reading and writing weird fiction, but the peculiar dynamics of the industry, headed by white men and geared toward largely white audiences, severely restricted the diversity of what saw publication. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, however, signaled an end to Jim Crow, and the death of August Derleth in 1971 ended Arkham House’s near-monopoly on Mythos fiction. While it would take time for Mythos publishing to open up, and many prejudices remained, Mythos fiction was now increasingly an equal opportunity field.

Sword & Sorcery to Sword & Soul (1960s-1980s)

The 1960s saw a boom in fantasy paperback publishing. The paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings was immensely popular, as were the Conan the Cimmerian stories of Robert E. Howard with their captivating covers by Frank Frazetta, edited by L. Sprague de Camp. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series by Lin Carter cheaply reprinted a vast range of long-out-of-print fantasy, from Lord Dunsany and William Morriss to H. P. Lovecraft. Readers clamored for more, and writers and artists surged to meet the need.

Robert E. Howard’s particular style, with its focus on action and flawed heroes with a kind of earthy, hardboiled realism distinct from the more ideological good-and-evil of Tolkien, became known as heroic fantasy or Sword & Sorcery. Many imitators swiftly followed, and de Camp and Carter, in particular, wrote new tales of Howard’s Conan or rewrote non-Conan stories as Conan stories for an eager audience. Marvel Comics licensed Conan for comics, and in 1970 Conan the Barbarian was born, the Sword & Sorcery boom spread into comics.

The problem was that these stories from the 1930s being reprinted or adapted in the 1960s and 70s still had intact all of the prejudice of the 1930s. Many of the same racist stereotypes that plagued Weird Tales were being reprinted, and worse, emulated by later authors who were trying to pastiche Robert E. Howard’s style. This became a notable issue with stories like “The Vale of Lost Women”(1967) by Robert E. Howard, which elicited comments from both Black and white fans for its racism. Black fans, though still a minority in organized fandom, were increasingly making their voices heard. One of the most vocal and creative was Charles R. Saunders, whose essay “Die Black Dog! A Look At Racism In Fantasy Literature” (1975) specifically called out Carter and de Camp for continuing these 1930s racist tropes in a post-Jim Crow America.

Saunders’ frustration could be well understood. Black fans of fantasy and weird fiction faced a marketplace stuffed full of books by white people, for white people, starring white protagonists, with Black, indigenous, and other people of color often relegated as supporting characters or antagonists. Black heroes in pulp fiction in the 1930s were rare, and the recycled racism of the 1970s kept them uncommon. Saunders wanted to read fantasy and weird fiction about people like himself, whom he could identify with.

So he wrote it.

Saunders began publishing action-heavy fantasy stories centered on Black protagonists in the mid-1970s, initially in fanzines and then in professional magazines and novels. If Middle Earth and the Hyborian Age are fantasy extensions of Europe, Saunders’ Nyumbani tales are fantasy extensions of Africa. The new mode of fiction has been named Sword & Soul. Saunders also wrote horror fiction, and his story “Jeroboam Henley’s Debt” (1982) is the earliest Cthulhu Mythos story by a Black author that I have found.

Saunders’ influence on genre fiction should not be ignored simply because most of it was in Mythos-adjacent fantasy instead of churning out Lovecraft pastiches. The rise of sword & sorcery and the difficulties it faced with reconciling the 1930s prejudices of the original stories and creators with contemporary audiences paralleled the same struggles being worked out in weird and horror fiction. The subgenres have always been closely aligned, since Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard were friends and correspondents who worked references to each other’s creations into their work.

Increasing Integration (1990s-2011)

As the older generation of fans and writers have died and retired, so too have most of the remaining attitudes toward racial stereotypes in genre fiction. Black fans and writers became more welcomed for their contributions, such as Ex Libris Miskatonici (1993) by Joan C. Stanley and Cthulhu Trek (2008) by Leslie Thomas, and increasing critical attention was paid to the issues of race and prejudice in the life and work of H. P. Lovecraft, his contemporaries, and their literary heirs and followers. Sometimes this was expressed in fiction, such as “Collector the Third: Charles Wilson Hodap (1842-1944)” (1995) by Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., “Nautical-Looking Negroes” (1996) by Peter Cannon & Robert M. Price, and “Shoggoths in Bloom” (2008) by Elizabeth Bear.

More often it found expression in non-fiction biographies, essays, and editorials. The concerted project by editors S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (mostly through Derrick Hussey’s Hippocampus Press) to publish Lovecraft’s entire, uncensored correspondence, as well as his essays and fiction, provided never-before-available insight into and awareness of Lovecraft’s prejudices. Similar efforts resulted in the publication of the complete letters of Robert E. Howard by the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press.

Readers could no longer turn a blind eye to the prejudices of the past, and the tide of public opinion began to shift.

It is difficult to point out any major Black Mythos writers during this period because the field was still opening up. The table of contents of anthologies became more diverse, more small presses were bringing out their own books, magazines, ezines, etc. With proliferation came fracture: there was no single voice that stood out from the rest or dominated the field. H. P. Lovecraft had fallen into the public domain, and many writers and artists focused on revisiting and expanding on Lovecraft’s Mythos. Print-on-demand technology, global logistics, and the advent of crowdfunding led to an explosion in small press anthologies in the mid-2010s.

The Mythos was primed for another explosion in popularity—and notoriety.

Beyond Lovecraft (2011-)

In 2011, Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy Award for her novel Who Fears Death. The award, inaugurated in 1975, was nicknamed “The Howard” after Howard P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, and was a bust of Lovecraft’s head sculpted by weird fiction writer and cartoonist Gahan Wilson. Okorafor published an article on her blog about Lovecraft’s racism & The World Fantasy Award statuette, noting her conflict that one of the highest honors in the field bore the name and image of a noted white supremacist and racist. The post sparked an internet shitstorm, and a petition to change the award. In 2015, the World Fantasy Awards Administration officially replaced the statuette; Lovecraft was no longer the face of the award.

The online outrage revealed some important things: 1) that old prejudices die hard, and 2) that the current generation of Black writers, artists, and fans were increasingly active, prominent, and their voices would be heard.

Some of these Black writers would tackle Lovecraft’s works directly, like Victor LaValle with“The Ballad of Black Tom” (2016) and “Up from Slavery” (2019). Others would tackle Lovecraft and his views themselves, either directly, as with The City We Became (2020) by N. K. Jemisin, or indirectly, as with Ring Shout (2020) by P. Djèlí Clark. Some writers don’t deal with Lovecraft or the Mythos at all but still work with the ideas and tropes of cosmic horror in works like Tentacle (2019) by Rita Indiana and Flowers for the Sea (2021) by Zin E. Rocklyn. Anthologies like Heroes of Red Hook (2016) and EOM: Equal Opportunity Madness (2017) showcases the increasing diversity of Mythos fiction writers.

Tabletop roleplaying games have also begun to address issues of race and diversity more openly. Lovecraftian roleplaying has been around since the 1980s and faced many of the same issues of racial stereotypes as genre fiction, but in recent years game designers and writers have increasingly come to work on addressing the history of racism in weird fiction and how to deal with those issues in play. Chris Spivey of Darker Hue Studios in particular has centered games like Harlem Unbound (2017) and Haunted West (2021) on issues of representation, inclusion, and accuracy.

In 2016, white novelist Matt Ruff published Lovecraft Country (2016), an episodic novel set in 1950s Jim Crow America. The name alleges a connection with Lovecraft, or at least an allegorical Lovecraft country, which is rarely evident in the book—but if found an audience, and perhaps most importantly an adaptation. Misha Greene adapted the novel as a 10-issue series for HBO, starring Jurnee Smollett and Jonathan Majors as the leads. While having about as much to do with Lovecraft as the source novel, the series received strongly positive critical responses, especially for the performances by Smollet and Majors, and raising awareness about sundown towns, Emmett Till, and the Tulsa race massacre.

Lovecraft Country doesn’t ultimately have much to say about Lovecraft, and it wasn’t the first Lovecraft-related film or TV show with Black actors—Ken Foree in From Beyond (1986) and Elliot Knight in The Color Out of Space (2019) being two prominent examples—but it was the first such cinematic work to be focused on Black characters and interests. Lovecraft Country and the response to it illustrate how far things have come from that white mythic space that was the Weird Tales milieu of the 1920s and 30s. Whatever prejudices Lovecraft and his contemporaries held when they were alive, today’s audience largely doesn’t share them. Many actively oppose those same ideologies and are turning cosmic horror and the Mythos—with and without Lovecraft to their own ends, to tell their own stories.

There are many more stories by Black writers to come.

Is There A Black Mythos?

While the above sections have dealt with issues of “Where are the Black Mythos authors?” and “Who are the Black Mythos authors?,” it has largely sidestepped the issue about whether there is any part of the Cthulhu Mythos oriented toward or focused on Black people or Black characters. After all, representation in the 1920s and 30s wasn’t great, but it wasn’t nonexistent either.

H. P. Lovecraft had relatively few stories focused on Black characters, although they are sometimes a part of the subject without appearing. For example, “The Picture in the House” does not include any Black characters, but the eponymous picture from Relatione del Reame di Congo (1591) by Filippo Pigafetta is very much tied into the Colonial depiction of indigenous Africans. Stories like “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” “Winged Death” (1934) by Hazel Heald & H. P. Lovecraft, and poems like “The Outpost” touch on Colonial Africa and its peoples. Subsequent writers have written stories referencing or based on those tales, like “Magna Mater” (2015) by Arinn Dembo. Other writers got in on the idea of setting Mythos or Mythos-adjacent stories in Africa, such as “The Tree-Men of M’bwa” (1932) by Donald Wandrei. So one could definitely make an argument that that a subset of Mythos fiction deals with a Lovecraftian version of Africa and its peoples. This line of reasoning has been picked up especially by tabletop game designers, with books like Secrets of Kenya (2007), Secrets of Morocco (2008), and Secrets of the Congo (2009) expanding on ideas from Lovecraft and elsewhere.

Lovecraft himself seems to have had vague ideas about a more cohesive mythology involving Africa in general. “Medusa’s Coil” (1939) by Zealia Bishop & H. P. Lovecraft references a tribe from “Arthur Jermyn,” the ruins of Zimbabwe from “The Outpost,” and possibly the worship of Cthulhu and Tsathoggua among certain African peoples hinted at in “Winged Death.” However, that story is notably one of his most blatantly racist, and there are very few who have chosen to try and build off of it, one example being “Hairwork” (2015) by Gemma Files.

Outside of Lovecraft’s own work, there are tie-in works from his fellow Mythos co-creators and collaborators. For example, Robert Bloch’s depiction of Haiti in “Mother of Serpents” (1936), Henry S. Whitehead’s Canevin tales including “Cassius” (1931), Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane tales set in Africa, and the Conan stories set in Hyborian Age Kush. Individual works display the author’s own prejudices and don’t always reflect Lovecraft’s own themes in the Mythos—Lovecraft, for example, didn’t reference voodoo very much in his fiction, and made it clear that the cult of Cthulhu in “The Call of Cthulhu” was distinct from that religion. While some later writers like L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter have picked up and expanded on Black characters in Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age, for the most part, the shift in social awareness that came with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States appears to have precluded a great deal of interest in revisiting or reviving some of the characters and ideas in these works, which are often firmly enmeshed with bigotry or ideas of white supremacy.

The focus so far has been on derivative works from Lovecraft and his contemporaries, but many other Mythos writers included Black characters. The issue is, the work of writers like Ramey Campbell, Brian Lumley, W. H. Pugmire, Stephen King, etc. are all under copyright; using their work requires permission, which often isn’t asked for or granted. The communal atmosphere of a shared setting hasn’t really come together in the same way as it was with Lovecraft & co. in the 1920s and 30s—N. K. Jemisin, for instance, isn’t borrowing Black Tom from Victor LaValle for a story, nor is P. Djèlí Clark dropping references to Charles Saunders’ Imaro in Ring Shout.

That means that many stories today are being written that call back to Lovecraft and his life or beliefs, but they are effectively being written as independent works, not talking to each other, not building off one another. If there isn’t sharing, there isn’t a shared Mythos. So while there are a lot of stories that have spun out from “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Dunwich Horror,” the cluster of derivative works that directly reference Black characters in Lovecraft’s fiction tends to be fairly few by comparison. Outside of the roleplaying games, there has not so far been the same level of interest in expanding on that material in fiction; works like “The Ballad of Black Tom” which inserts original Black characters into an existing Lovecraft setting seem more common, and that is understandable.

In part, this is because there isn’t a lot in Lovecraft specifically Black-oriented to work with, and what is there is often not a positive portrayal. The same could be said for most of his contemporaries. These were pulp stories where the characterization of Black people in various contexts—the Caribbean, the American South, and various parts of Africa—could and did get by with stereotypes, prejudices, Colonialist attitudes, and just plain lazy research that would not fly today. In Lovecraft’s day, the idea that Great Zimbabwe was the result of some unknown white civilization because the indigenous Black Africans were deemed incapable of civilization was commonly accepted. Today, a glance at the Wikipedia page shows how incorrect this view was. So how do writers today reconcile the bad anthropology in “The Outpost” with the contemporary understanding of Great Zimbabwe’s history?

Most just don’t. That isn’t a needle that most writers are interested in threading. Nor can you really blame anyone who would rather work on an original setting or mythology instead of writing a gloss to Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard’s take on Black people. The lack of interest can generally be seen in the lack of publication: there is no anthology of Cthulhu Mythos stories set in Africa, for example…and perhaps that is a good thing. Because for most of the Mythos’ history, such stories would have been written by white people, for a presumed white audience, showcasing the biases of their era. There are already dozens of anthologies that accomplish that quite well without focusing on what white authors think of a pre-decolonization Africa.

Apologies & Disclaimers

I had initially planned to make this “A Short History of the BIPOC Mythos” (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), but the scope of such a work was too much for the format. The same obstacles in place for publishing Black authors also were in place for indigenous writers and people of color, with few differences—and those mostly having to do with works in translation or non-English language publication—but the specifics of prejudices expressed by Lovecraft & co. reflect broader cultural trends that really require their own essays to talk about. So, apologies for not addressing any other specific race or ethnicity. Not trying to discount their contributions, just too much to focus on in a single essay.

A disclaimer: I have used “Black” throughout. In the United States especially, “Black” as a racial categorization has been applied equally to African Americans, Black British, Black Hispanics, Afro-Caribbeans, Indigenous Australians, Melanesians, etc., and has given rise to a Black identity that reaches across those individual ethnicities (e.g. Black Lives Matter). It seemed more correct to use a term that addressed a broader Black identity than to narrowly specify “African American” or the like.

Finally, there are any number of works by Black authors not included here. I tried to touch on all the major works I am aware of, but I can’t read everything. If you think I’ve missed something significant, please leave a comment and let me know.

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

Yuggoth Rising: Erster Act (2012) by Sebastien Dietz

En Episches Abenteuer in den Welten H. P. Lovecrafts
Back cover copy of Yuggoth Rising #1

“An Epic Adventure in the world of H. P. Lovecraft,” is what is promised, and that is what writer/artist Sebastien Dietz sets out to deliver. Yuggoth Rising is a German-language black-and-white 9-issue independent comic series, originally produced by Undergroundcomix.de in 2012. While physical issues were limited in number and now quite scarce, the series is collected in both German and English through Comixology/Amazon Kindle in three acts, beginning with Yuggoth Rising: Erster Act (Deutsch) / Yuggoth Rising: First Act (English, translated by Craig Stanton).

The epic adventure gets off on a bit of a left foot. February 1930, the Great Depression is settling in as our protagonist, an unemployed but educated young woman, returns to New York City—and on the ship runs into Lionel P. Hatecraft, author of popular romances.

At first glance, this is a set-up for a farce; in light of what comes later, it may be more appropriate to think of it as an unsubtle hint that while this takes place in the world of Lovecraft’s Mythos, this is not the world we know, the one that Lovecraft inhabited. Like the future envisaged by Robert W. Chambers in “The Repairer of Reputations,” or the 1920s and 30s envisaged in the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, this is a subtly different setting.

Dietz’ art is detailed, and cityscapes, streets, buildings, and ships are especially well-executed; he has an eye for splashes of darkness that stand out against the page. If there’s a criticism of his work, it is his human figures, whose heads are often slightly oversized in proportion to their bodies—but that’s more in the nature of a stylistic convention than a flaw. When he does break out for splash pages, the effect is worth it.

It’s not a tale told exclusively in comic panels. The end of each issue is punctuated by letters, articles, pages from magazines and newspapers, a convention used in other works to give the series a lived-in feel, to expand on things happening in many places during the same time period. Some of which are connected, and some of which are not.

Dietz’ story takes a broadly familiar shape: different threads, interweaving; widely separated characters working their way together until they meet. A young woman down on her luck, a brilliant expert in Mayan script, a millionaire embroiled in an international conspiracy, a slightly seedy newspaper porter on the werewolf-and-alien beat…ancient mysteries, the hunt for Planet X, and the Unaussprechlichen Kulten. The story moves at its own pace, neither too slowly or too quickly in this first act, these first three issues…

…but it just the opening act, the preliminaries. What revelations are here are just the beginning; our characters haven’t all met yet, the epic adventure has just begun. Taken by itself, it is promising…but readers shouldn’t be expecting “At the Mountains of Madness” or “The Shadow Out of Time,” although it takes a few cues from those works. Dietz’ inspirations more likely lie in Call of Cthulhu the Roleplaying Game, or the slightly pulpier adventures of August Derleth’s Trail of Cthulhu. The story of Yuggoth Rising—if the name isn’t clue enough—is things moving into place, the stars becoming right, cults and investigators getting into position, to destroy the world or redeem it.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because “when the stars are right” is the natural end-game of the Mythos; the Ragnorok or End Times, the eschatological frontier that looms in the unspecified future. Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows worked with that idea at the end of Providence, Jonas Anderson & Daniel Thollin did the same in 1000 Ögon: Cthulhu, and there are dozens of literary examples, in Cthulhu’s Reign and elsewhere. As with every Mythos story, it is less the tropes that are important than how it is told, how the characters develop and toward what end.

None of which a reader can tell in Yuggoth Rising: Erster Act, not on a first reading. On subsequent readings, readers can pick out more details, foreshadowings, hints that maybe they overlooked. Dietz has done a very credible job in setting the stage…and it is fortunate that this is a case where readers of both English and German have the opportunity to read it to the end, even if only digitally.

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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De Rode Ridder 124: Necronomicon (1987) by Karel Biddeloo

De Rode Ridder (“The Red Knight”) is a long-running Flemish-language medieval fantasy comic created by Willy Vandersteen in 1959, based on a series of children’s novels by Leopold Vermeiren in the 1940s. Roughly comparable to Prince Valiant, although not quite as consistent in storyline, as de Rode Ridder involves many standalone episodes and more fantasy and even science fiction elements. Vandersteen, who is credited with writing and drawing the strip for the first 43 albums (although gruntwork was done by others in his studio), passed it on to Karel Biddeloo, who wrote and drew the next 150 or so albums of De Rode Ridder’s adventures. About in the middle of Biddeloo’s run was album 124: Necronomicon, with Biddeloo joined by Urssla Lundmark (colorist) and Anita Schauwvlieghe (lettering).

While at sea returning from Byzantium, Johan, the Red Knight, is besieged by harpies…who are defeated with the aid of the Seal of Ishtar, which Johan acquired in the last album, Oniria. Except the amulet that de Rode Ritter pulls out from underneath his tunic may look a bit familiar:

The Goddess of Venus is the most excellent Queen INANNA, called of the Babylonians ISHTAR. She is the goddess of Passion, both of Love and of War, depending on her sign and the time of her appearance in the heavens. […]

This is her Seal, which you must engrave on Copper, Venus being exalted in the heavens, with no one about watching its construction. Being finished, it is to be wrapped in the purest silk and lain safely away, only to be removed when need arises, at any time.
Simon Necronomicon 14-15

The Seal of Innana/Ishtar from the Simon *Necronomicon*

The Simon Necronomicon was first published in 1977, and by 1980 was released as a mass-market affordable paperback, to grace the New Age shelves of bookstores forevermore. While the impact of the Simon Necronomicon on Lovecraftian occult literature is sizable—see Dan Harms & John Wisdom Gonce III’s The Necronomicon Files for details—the artistic impact of it is often more apparent. The Gate Sigil on the cover of the book, created by artist Khem Caigan, has gone on to be appropriated by dozens or hundreds of artists for illustrations, comics, album covers, tattoos, and various and sundry merch.

The other illustrations in the book provided the first real visual occult symbols of the Mythos. While Lovecraft and Derleth had described their Elder Signs, and Robert W. Chambers had mentioned the Yellow Sign, Lord Dunsany the Sign of Mung, etc., there was no consistent popular depiction of these symbols or gestures—it was up to the readers to imagine what they would look like. Now, thanks to the Simon Necronomicon, there was a visual reference for various occult signs and talismans. Not surprising, then, that writer/artists like Karel Biddeloo opted to work them in.

Not the Simon Necronomicon gate sigil on the back cover of the upper-right panel.

The Necronomicon of this Rode Ridder album isn’t a cheap paperback however, but a full-blown grimoire stored in a pillar of flame in a cavern beneath the earth, with a will of its own. A group of cultists working with Johan’s old foe, the sorceress Demoniah, manipulate him into retrieving the book for them. What follows is a rather typical adventure, full of action and a bit more swords & sorcery than horror—and I rather suspect that since the cultists are “der Meesters van de Swarte Kring” (“the Masters of the Black Circle”) that Biddeloo was also inspired in part by Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, which includes “The People of the Black Circle.” The Necronomicon survived the destruction of the Swarte Kring, and would reappear in album 128: De Boeienkoning (“The Escape Artist, lit. “The King of Fetters,” much as how Houdini was sometimes billed “the Handcuff King”).

The *Necronomicon* literally flies off to its next adventure.

De Rode Ridder: Necronomicon is a fairly typical dip-of-the-toes into the Mythos; while Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, et al. don’t merit a mention, that’s probably as much as because Biddeloo was drawing from the Simon Necronomicon rather than directly from Lovecraft for inspiration; if this had been published after The Evil Dead came out in Belgium, the Necronomicon might be bound in human skin with a face on it! The book itself becomes a typical MacGuffin, since for all its portentous power it does not do much of anything by itself. For readers already familiar with the Necronomicon, it might be a fun or cute reference that gives de Rode Ridder another adventure; for those whose first experience with the Necronomicon was reading about it in this comic…perhaps this was their first step toward reading Lovecraft.

In terms of art, Karel Biddeloo is no Hal Foster, and the coloring sometimes muddies what might be better linework, yet it is still a very competent product with occasional dynamic illustrations that break out of the panel borders and breathe a little life into the work.

Regrettably, the adventures of de Rode Ridder have never been translated into English, although the Belgian albums and reprints are fairly available from European booksellers.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Vom Jenseits und andere Erzählungen (2013) by Erik Kriek

Erik Kriek hat etwas sehr Heikles gewagt: in Zeichnungen einzugangen, was man am besten und effektivsten der Phantasie des Lesers überlässt. Jeder, der ein Erzählung von H. P. Lovecraft, dem Meister der amerikanischen Ostküsten-Horrorgeschichten, liest, macht sich eigene Vorstellungen von den Monstern. Ich lasals kleiner Jungemeine erste Lovecraft-Geschichte, als mein Vater mir eine dicke Anthologie mit englischen und amerikanischen Horrorgeschichten schenkte: Vor und nach Mitternacht. Die sparsamen Illustrationen stammten von Eppo Doeve, unde heute, sechzig Jahre später, steht dieses Buch immer noch in meinem Regal, sind die Erzählungen in meinem Gedächtnis, befinden sich die Bilder auf meiner Netzhaut. Merkwürdige Zeichnungen, unvollständig, sparsam und, so wie es sich gehört, in Schwarzweiẞ. Das BUch hat eine lebenslange Faszination ausgelöst: Immer noch kaufe ich regelmässig Horror. Es erscheint keine Neuausgabe von Ambrose Bierce oder Roald Dahl, in die ich nicht hineinschaue, um ze sehen, ob darin – wie kurz auch immer – nicht doch etwas Neues steht.

Erik Kriek has dared to do something very tricky: to capture in drawings what is best and most effectively left to the reader’s imagination. Everyone who reads a tale by H. P. Lovecraft, the master of American East Coast horror stories, creates Monsters from his own Imagination. I read my first Lovecraft story as a young boy when my father gave me a thick anthology of English and American horror stories: Before and After Midnight. The sparse illustrations were by Eppo Doeve, and today, sixty years later, this book is still on my shelf, the stories are in my memory, the images are on my retina. Strange drawings, incomplete, sparse and, as it should be, in black and white. The book triggered a lifelong fascination: I still buy horror regularly. No new edition of Ambrose Bierce or Roald Dahl appears that I don’t look into to see if there isn’t something new in it – however briefly.

Forward by Gerard Soeteman

English translation

Vom Jenseits und andere Erzählungen (“From Beyond and other Tales,” 2013, Avant-Verlag) is a German-language collection of graphic adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories “The Outsider,” “The Color Out of Space,” “Dagon,” “From Beyond,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” The adaptations are very faithful to the original, often down to the level of the language, which is often directly quoting from the German-language translation of Lovecraft’s stories.

Kriek’s adaptation of “The Colour Out of Space”

Kriek, who is both writer and artist, has lavished most of his creativity on the art itself—with great care and attention to the setting and costumes of the characters, putting them in period-appropriate dress and rooms, giving them little quirks Lovecraft didn’t mention but might well have imagined. The style makes heavy use of shadows for the panes of the face and the set of the body, very reminiscent of the black-and-white artwork of 1970s Warren horror magazines like Creepy or Eerie, but cleaner and starker. The clear-cut reality of the normal frames gives Kriek’s wilder, more imaginative and fantastic pages more impact.

Note how the panels have slanted, no longer even and orderly, and the Dutch angle used. Visual rhetoric for “The world has gone wrong.”

There have been so many graphic adaptations of Lovecraft’s fiction over the years by so many artists, it is difficult to find points for fair comparison—or perhaps it is better to say, it’s hard to know where to start.

“The Outsider,” for example, is a 2,595 word short story; Kriek adapted it in six pages. Alec Preston Stevens also adapted “The Outsider” in six pages in Prime Cuts #1 (1987), so too did Bhob Stewart and Steve Harper in Monsters Attack #2 (1989), and Devon Devereaux and Tom Pomplun in Graphic Classics: H. P. Lovecraft (2002); Hernán Rodríguez did it in 14 pages (as “The Stranger”) in Heavy Metal (vol. 32, no. 8, Fall 2008), Tanabe Gou stretched it out to 24 pages for his 2007 collection …and because they are all adaptations of the same story, a really deep analysis could almost go line-by-line and panel-by-panel in comparison.

The same could be said for most of Lovecraft’s other stories. He did not leave a particularly large body of work, but nearly every story and many of the poems he wrote or had a hand in have been adapted in some fashion at some point by somebody—even relatively obscure works like the revision “Medusa’s Coil” is represented by “Medusa’s Curse” (1995) by Sakura Mizuki (桜水樹氏) and “Nelle Spire di Medusa” (2019) by Massimo Rosi & Tommaso Campanini. Probably only Edgar Allan Poe has received better coverage in the comics.

Which might beg the question: why? What does a new graphic adaptation of Lovecraft bring to the audience that wasn’t there before? Was there something lacking about all the previous adaptations of “The Outsider” that moved Kriek to try his hand at Lovecraft in his own vivid style? Kriek’s adaptation in particular is very faithful to the original; he was not adapting the stories to his own times, not injecting any contemporary value or message into Lovecraft’s narrative. These adaptations are a genuine effort to do justice Lovecraft’s original vision, while also showcasing Kriek’s own interpretation.

The candelabra gives a Gothic touch, which makes the sudden high-tech appearance of the resonator all the more disturbing.

Which might be the answer in itself. Comic adaptations of Lovecraft exist because the stories are there in the public domain. No one can stop you. They are mountains to be climbed, caves to be spelunked. The fact that you are not the first to climb to the top of a particular mountain does not take away from the achievement of doing it. Anyone who completes a comic adaptation of “From Beyond” or “The Color Out of Space” may be competing, in some philosophical fashion, with every other artist who seeks to express the inexpressible in some fixed medium, but there is never going to be any final winner. Someone else is bound to come along and try their hand at it…but people can point to books like Vom Jenseits und andere Erzählungen and say: “Already, here’s what I did. What have you got?”

The Black housemaid, and the use of the narrator’s first name, are subtle differences from Lovecraft’s version of “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”

Kriek’s collection ends with “Vom Jenseits” (“From Beyond”) by Milan Hulsing, which is not the short story of the same name but a short biography of H. P. Lovecraft illustrated with a few choice pictures based on photographs of Lovecraft and his life. “Jenseits” is the German term for “on the other side” or “beyond,” but it can also refer to the afterlife, the underworld, the next world—in other words, there are some connotations that may or may not quite line up exactly with the English terms. Euphemistically, we are doing the same thing; catching a glimpse of another world…only the resonator is the book in our hands.

Addendum: I could not end this review without including this anecdote from the introduction:

Lovecrafts Erzählung Das Ding auf der Schwelle faszinierte und fasziniert mich noch immer so, dass ich sie, als eine Hollywood-Produzentin mich bat, einen Polit-Thriller zu schreiben, zu einem Drehbuch umgerbeitet habe. Um die geforderte Aktualität hineinzubekommen, dachte ich mir einen sehr wichtigen Berater eines neugewählten amerikanischen Präsidenten aus, der in einer kleinen neuenglischen Stadt à la Lovecraft landet. Man erlebt, wie er durch Seelenwanderung allmählich verrückt wird und zu glauben beginnt, dass das Ende der Welt, wenn es nicht sowieso schon bevorsteht, von ihm herbeigeführt werden muss. Als vollkommen Wahnsinniger reist er zerück nach Washington, um dort als Mitglied des Nationalen Sicherheitsrats dem Präsidenten verhängnisvolle Ratschläge zu geben … Die Produzentin lehnte das Drehbuch ab: „Wahnsinnige würden in Washington niemals in solche Positionen gelangen.“ Und dann … kam Oliver North, um Reagan zu dienen, und – später – taten Bushs Ratgeber ihre segensreich Arbeit so, dass die Vereinigten Staaten in maẞlose Schulden gestürzt wurden, um heillose Kriege zu führen und zu bezahlen … tja.

Lovecraft’s tale “The Thing on the Doorstep” fascinated and still fascinates me so much that when a Hollywood producer asked me to write a political thriller, I reworked it into a screenplay. To get the required topicality in, I thought up a very important advisor to a newly elected American president who ends up in a small New England town à la Lovecraft. You see him gradually go insane through transmigration of souls and begin to believe that the end of the world, if it isn’t imminent anyway, must be brought about by him. As a complete madman, he travels back to Washington to give disastrous advice to the president as a member of the National Security Council … The producer rejected the script: “Insane people would never get into such positions in Washington.” And then … Oliver North came to serve Reagan, and – later – Bush’s advisors did their beneficent work in such a way that the United States was plunged into gross debt to wage and pay for hopeless wars … oh well.

Forward by Gerard Soeteman

English translation

English-language readers in the United States have a bad habit of not paying attention to what happens outside the Anglosphere, but the non-English-speaking world is large, and they pay attention to what we do here…because it affects them too. The resonator lets those from beyond see us as well as we see them; it translates both ways…and the world of H. P. Lovecraft is so much bigger and weirder than we can imagine.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Die Faust des Cthulhu Teil 1: Opfergaben (2014) by Marco Felici

In naher zukunft existiert die menschliche zivilisation, wie wir sie kennen, nicht mehr. Alte wesen sind aus ihrem schlaf erwacht und haben die herrschaft über die erde übernommen. Die wenigen überlebenden ergaben such der beuen religion und ihrer propheten. Dies ist die geschichte eines mannes, der sich nicht unterwirft, sondern den kampf gegen die neuen mächte aufnimmt.	In the near future, human civilization as we know it will no longer exist. Ancient beings have awakened from their sleep and have taken control of the earth. The few survivors surrendered to the new religion and its prophets. This is the story of a man who does not submit, but takes up the fight against the new powers.
Back cover of Die Faust des Cthulhu 1.	English translation

Die Faust des Cthulhu (The Fist of Cthulhu) is an independently published, black-and-white, German-language post-apocalyptic action-horror comic from writer/artist Marco Felici (lettering by Till Felix, cover colors & title design for issues 2-4 by Olaf Hänsel). Published irregularly, the series appears to consist of four separate issues and a collected edition:

Teil 1: Opfergaben (Part 1: Offerings) (2014)
Teil 2: Offenbarung (Part 2: Epiphany) (2015)
Teil 3: Untergang (Part 3: Downfall) (2018)
Teil 4: Übermacht (Part 4: Superiority) (2020)
Sammelband (Collected) (2022)

(Note: the listing I’ve seen for the collected edition says it collects the first five issues, so I may well be missing one.)

The art and story are strongly reminiscent of American underground comix of the 1970s-1980s, with the occasional shade of Richard Corben (especially in the color covers on issues 2-4), or Eastman and Laird’s early, relatively grungy-looking black-and-white issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, long before the children’s cartoon softened their image and sensibilities. Story-wise, there may also be more than a touch of a manga influence, with shades of Fist of the North Star or other post-apocalyptic action-adventure series. Surprisingly, there’s also a touch of luchador influence, with the humanoid monsters sometimes going masked, at least initially.

We open on the scene of a sacrifice to the Old Gods.

Fundamentally, the story is straightforward: a mysterious stranger takes exception to one of the regular innocent sacrifices to the Old Ones, and deals with a cultist and his minion—a half-human spawn of elder beings. Of course, our hero soon shows that he isn’t entirely human either…imagine if Wilbur Whateley decided he related more with his mother than Yog-Sothoth and chose to try and rid the world of eldritch horrors, and you’ve about got the scope of the series. Along the way, a kid sees him fight and becomes witness-cum-sidekick as they travel through the hellscape of the future.

Down below, the dismembered bodies of the sacrifices are fed to… something.

The art is a mix of that underground comix serviceable-enough grunginess and moments of interesting character and creature design. Backgrounds tend to give way to action lines or solid blocks of black or white, which makes sense in black-and-white comics where the focus is on the figures more than the surroundings.

Mythos references are a bit scanty; Die Faust des Cthulhu isn’t a pastiche in the sense that it wants to expand on the lore in vast detail, and while there is a bit of exposition the actions tend to speak louder than words, and the explicit connections to the Mythos are usually relegated to a few exclamations in the heat of battle. There is more of an element of Robert E. Howard to the story than Lovecraft; the nameless hero is of the same mind as Conan that if something bleeds then it can die, even if the thought is not expressed in so many words. Readers hoping for deep pathos or character development may be disappointed, but primarily this is fun. A guy with a pair of knives wrestles tentacled monsters and cuts them apart. It’s closer to sword and sorcery than cosmic horror.

Sometimes that’s silly. Sometimes that’s awesome.

It is not clear how many copies of a given issue are printed, but given the scarcity probably not many; readers interested in tracking down a few should check out German comic shops or eBay.

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

Lovecraft (1994) by Reinhard Kleist & Roland Hueve

Lovecraft. H. P. Lovecraft. Saft Dir das was?

Nur flüchtig.

Also, paß auf. Schriftsteller. Amerika. 1890-1937. Hat in Edgar Allen Poe—Nachfolge phantastiche Geschichten geschrieben. Origien des Grauens. Versponnen Wissenschaftler und romantische Helder gegen unheimliche und unbekannte Mächte aus den Tiefen des Universums. Ganz eigene, in sich geschlossene Mythologie. Kosmische Götter und Monstren mit merkwürdigen Namen. Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Cthulhu…

Okay, okay. Ende des Klappentextes. Was hast Du vor?

Ich will was über die Lebensgeschichte von Lovecraft machen.

Und was?

Einen Comic.

Einen Comic? In wieviel Bänden?

Lies erst mal!

Lovecraft. H.P. Lovecraft. Mean anything to you?

Just in passing.

Okay, pay attention. Writer. America. 1890-1937. Like Edgar Allen Poe’s succesor—wrote fantastic stories. Origins of horror. Weaves scientists and romantic heroes against sinister and unknown forces from the depths of the universe. Completely separate, self-contained mythology. Cosmic gods and monsters with strange names. Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Cthulhu…

Okay, okay. End of blurb. What are you up to?

I want to do something about Lovecraft’s life story.

And that is?

A comic.

A comic? In how many volumes?

Read it first!

Roland Hüve & Reinhard Kleist, introduction to Lovecraft

English translation

Lovecraft (1994) is a standalone German-language graphic novel in the European format normally associated with bandes dessinée—a slim, full-color hardback. The creation of Roland Hüve (script) and Reinhard Kleist (script & art), the 80-page story is focused on the idea of the character of Randolph Carter as a literary expy and alter ego for H. P. Lovecraft himself. As part of that, it adapts or partially adapts the story of “The Statement of Randolph Carter” as sort of an arching narrative of Lovecraft’s life, drawing on L. Sprague de Camp’s 1975 biography for details.

That bare description doesn’t really do the book justice. While the story is familiar—making Lovecraft himself a central character, part and parcel of the Mythos has been a favored treatment of many comic book creators—the real pleasure of the book is in Kleist’s artwork. The style is impressionistic, shifting, often mixing watercolors and frantic pencils, charcoals, and mixed media to great effect. It is a style very far away from the clean figures and lines of most comics at the time, either in Europe or North America. Much as if Dave McKean‘s lauded covers for The Sandman (1989-1996) were stretched out to fill a book.

Although that still might not be giving Kleist quite enough credit; as an artist, he has his own style, adaptable and varied. It is a visual feast, and readers familiar with Lovecraft’s biography will find many interesting visual references…and some amusing errors. Sonia H. Greene goes from a Juno-esque brunette who was seven years older than Lovecraft in real life to a young, ginger-haired flapper with a bob-cut…until she turns into a succubus.

Following the trend of blending real-life and fiction, more than a few liberties are taken. Don’t try to take it as a straight biography, but as what it is: a flight of fantasy spinning out from Lovecraft’s reputation as a horror writer and the rather neurotic and sexually-inhibited depiction of the man in de Camp’s flawed but ground-breaking biography.

The second story in the book is a separate adaptation by Kleist alone, a much more restrained and deliberately grungier adaptation of “The Music of Erich Zann,” done in black and white and red, a much more sparse style that contrasts neatly with the rather more busy and cluttered compositions of the lead story.

As an adaptation, this one is rather faithful and does more to capture the mood and atmosphere of the story with its bold use of red; it’s an aesthetic choice that serves to suggest and convey the invasion from beyond in a way that a tentacle or a starry blackness doesn’t.

Like many European graphic novels, Lovecraft was never translated into English, so remains fairly obscure among English-reading audiences today. Of course, today it would have to compete with any number of competitors like Lovecraft (2004) by Hans Rodionoff, Enrique Breccia, and Keith Giffen; The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft (2010) by Mac Carter, Tony Salmons, Adam Byrne, and Keaton Kohl, and Some Notes on a Nonentity (2017) by Sam Gafford and Jason C. Eckhardt among many others.

That is a pity, because while the writing may lose something in the translation from the German, the art is compelling and might have universal appeal.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

1000 Ögon: Lovecraft (2014) by Jonas Anderson & Daniel Thollin

Tänk om H.P. Lovecraft hade levt idag och bott i Uppsala! Hur hade hans berättelser sett ut då? Vår bok heter helt enkelt 1000 Ögon: Lovecraft och är vår hyllning till denna skräckens mästare. Vi tolkar några av hans berättelser och placerar dem i vårt 1000 Ögon-universum.	What if H.P. Lovecraft was alive today and lived in Uppsala! What would his stories look like then? Our book is simply called 1000 Eyes: Lovecraft and is our tribute to this master of horror. We interpret some of his stories and place them in our 1000 Eyes universe.
Swedish pitch on Indiegogo	English translation

1000 Ögon (1000 Eyes) is the label for a contemporary Swedish-language series of horror graphic novels (really, thin bandes dessinée-style hardbacks) by the creative team of Jonas Anderson, Anders Björkelid, and Daniel Thollin, the last three published by Albumförlaget. Several of these have Lovecraftian influences, notably Filgia (2013), Lovecraft (2014), and Cthulhu (2015), but like a lot of non-English language publications that don’t make it into translation, they tend to get overlooked by English-reading audiences. The name “1000 ögon” is presumably a reference to the Swedish horror film Skräcken har 1000 ögon (“Fear has 1000 Eyes,” 1970).

This is a bit of a shame because Lovecraft has an interesting basic premise: taking the core of four of Lovecraft’s stories (“The Hound,” “The Shunned House,” “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”), and reworking them in a shared, contemporary setting, keeping what they feel is the essence of Lovecraft’s stories while freely altering the trappings and settings. In this way, the two graverobbing aesthetes of “The Hound” become more notably occult in their predilections (and apparently drive a Citroën GS); the protagonist of “The Shunned House” is a young woman named Cecilia dealing with something more than the standard mildew and black mold in the house, “The Statement of Randolph Carter” involves facetime over a smartphone rather than a field telephone, and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” takes some specific visual cues from the buildings of Uppsala and the Swedish fishing industry.

Like many contemporary takes on the Mythos, Thollin and Anderson each work in references to the Cthulhu Mythos in these stories, even if there were none before. As each one writes and draws their respective episodes independently (“The Shunned House” and “The Statement of Randolph Carter” for Daniel Thollin and “The Hound” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” for Jonas Anderson), this provides a degree of narrative continuity that might otherwise be lacking. Readers get the sense that these stories are connected, expressions of some common threat or body of myth, in a way that might not be obvious otherwise.

For those at least passingly familiar with Swedish architecture or Uppsala in particular, the connectivity of the stories is also geographic and cultural. Which is rather the entire point of this exercise. While Lovecraft never weighed in on localization per se, he did famously note:

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Picture in the House”

Which is to say: horror can be found closer to home than you think. Forget for a moment all those Hollywood horrors set in the United States, don’t think yourself safe just because Lovecraft restricted himself primarily to New England. Horror can be anywhere, closer than you would like…you may be in some corner of Lovecraft Country already and not even know it.

Visually, Thollin’s style is “cleaner” and closer to American-style comic figuring, while Anderson’s is a little scratchier and closer to the Franco-Belgian school, and the digital coloring on Anderson’s work in particular can look a little muddy at times. While it wouldn’t be correct to say that none of the stories being adapted lend themselves to grand visuals, it seems both Thollin and Anderson lean into a more subdued approach, focusing on the human characters and generally keeping things at their scale. So there are few grand visuals, but several clever and well-designed elements, like the stark outcropping of Devil’s Reef, which really stands out when compared to how it is normally portrayed, as barely a bump above the waterline.

Lovecraft was followed up by a sequel titled Cthulhu. Whereas Lovecraft consists of four adaptations, Cthulhu is made up of two original works, both set in Uppsala, before and after the stars are right. The stories maintain much of the same artistic style and themes of the Lovecraft adaptations, but the creators have a little more free play to indulge their imaginations. Readers who dig the style and want to see what happens what Thollin and Anderson move beyond adaptation to pastiche won’t be disappointed.

While you might find Filgia, Lovecraft, and Cthulhu available online in some second-hand bookstores, the best way to order them is probably direct from Albumförlaget.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Vägen till Necronomicon—Creation of the Necronomicon (2017) by Henrik Möller & Lars Krantz

After Lars’ and my collaboration on the book CREATION OF A GOD [ATT BYGGA EN GUD, 2015], the plans of a trilogy began to take shape. While CREATION OF A GOD was a cross between the works of Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany, the second book, CREATION OF THE NECRONOMICON, was pure Lovecraftian fan fiction. The third will be a kind of Clark Ashton Smith-inspired postapocalyptic dark fantasy about three pregnant outlaws running from the law after a trainrobbery [SKAPANDET AV EN MYT —CREATION OF A MYTH, 2018].
Henrik Möller, introduction to Vägen till Necronomicon—Creation of the Necronomicon (2017)

The middle of a trilogy of illustrated books, Vägen till Necronomicon—Creation of the Necronomicon (2017) consists of a text in Swedish and English by Henrik Möller, and black-and-white illustrations by Lars Krantz. While some sellers have categorized this book as a graphic novel, it would probably be more correct to label this an illustrated novel; text and image stand in contrast to one another, complementing one another: where one is sparse, the other is detailed; when one is subdued, the other is vivid. The result is as effective a work of graphic fiction as has yet been produced.

Möller’s description of the work as “fanfiction” is accurate, although that doesn’t quite do it justice. The story is an expansion of Lovecraft’s “The History of the Necronomicon,” retaining the essential elements of the story but expanding the narrative of Abdul Alhazred, adding a Vathek– or 1,001 Nights-style doomed romance. However, like many fans Möller and Krantz chose to weave fact with fiction, and the story has a framing narrative: one night in Providence, H. P. Lovecraft is out in a walk and finds his mind cast back a thousand years.

This is a not-uncommon device, the idea that Lovecraft and his fictional creation were both real, that the Mythos he created was real, at least to him—that the stories he told are occult truth, or even that he found or inherited a copy of the Necronomicon, from which he learned all this eldritch lore. The idea tends to rob Lovecraft of a certain genius, or at least agency; it makes him from a master storyteller to a kind of pulp journalist or cryptic occultist.

However, when carried out with sufficient style, the narrative convention of “the real Necronomicon!” still holds a bit of cachet. The tome, and its creators real and fiction, have achieved that legendary status where fact and fiction easily flow together. There are dozens of Necronomicons in the world today, from comic books to grimoires like Magic of Atlantis: Sauthenerom: The Real Source of the Necronomicon (1985) by Frank G. Ripel & Necronomicon: Il Libro Proibito di Abdul Alhazred (2022) by Mirando Gurzo, long novels to pillowbooks. All variations on the idea of the terrible book whose secrets are so terrible they make the skin crawl and the bright light of day a bit dimmer.

The Necronomicon is a sourcebook of horror. So it should come as no surprise that parts of Möller and Krantz’ book are appropriately horrible.

He fought bravely until the caliph revealed what it was Alhazred had been fed the last three days, holding up the mangled remains of his newborn son. FInally, Alhazred screamed out, a mutes [sic], muffled cry of the soul. The small insect was hiding in his throat. Waiting… Waiting.
Henrik Möller, Vägen till Necronomicon—Creation of the Necronomicon (2017)

This motif of the insect comes from a very small, often overlooked detail about the Necronomicon, which Lovecraft had borrowed from another source:

Original title Al Azif—azif being the word used by Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos’d to be the howling of daemons.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The History of the Necronomicon“

It is a small detail, often overlooked. Some authors credit Alhazred as an arch-cultist, heretic, and magician; others a hero whose dire warnings are often misinterpreted and abused; or a prophet, puppeted about by unseen powers. His life is a function with a single output: the Necronomicon. It is often the book that matters, the text itself, not necessarily where it came from or how it got into its current form.

Yet for Lovecraft, the whole point of “The History of the Necronomicon” is that the story of the text was what was important. The contents could never match the darkest depths of the readers’ imagination. Alhazred is integral to the story; it was the first such book to have a proper author and history, to be more than a strange and terrible name on the shelf in the secret library of some cultist. The story of the Necronomicon is important, because without that story, it is just another odd tome, no more special than the rest.

It is a book born in blood and mystery.

There is an epilogue. The narrative returns to the frame-story. Lovecraft at his typewriter. The temporal loop is closed. In the final pages, the story comes to a bit of an ugly and unsettling close, weaving fact and fiction again:

Finally, on his deathbed, he wrote down all of Alhazred’s writings from memory into what he called his death diary and bequeathed it to his friend Robert Barlow.

After Lovecraft’s death, Barlow took the book to Mexico where he eventually committed suicide. The book is, as of today, still missing.
Henrik Möller, Vägen till Necronomicon—Creation of the Necronomicon (2017)

The truth of Lovecraft’s “death diary” is more prosaic, and perhaps more terrible for that. It was a minute record of Lovecraft’s final, fatal illness and last days, beginning 1 January 1937. While the actual diary is missing, Barlow copied and condensed some entries, which are reproduced in Lovecraft’s Collected Essays volume 5. The entry for March 7th simply reads “hideous pain.”

The reality of the death diary puts the Necronomicon in context. We may fill it with whatever terrible cruelties and eldritch lore we may dream up. The Necronomicon Files by Daniel harms & John Wisdom Gonce III has a list; everything from the secret of telepathy to how to breed worms in the carcasses of camels. The real world is often more prosaic, but no less horrible. Lovecraft’s death diary is an account of adult fears, the yawning death in hospital beds as cancer gnaws at our bowels. A death by inches, punctuated by a thousand indignities, and then…nonexistence. Throwing the gates wide to let the Old Ones come again would at least be a choice.

Henrik Möller is also a filmmaker, and to accompany the publication of Vägen till Necronomicon—Creation of the Necronomicon (2017), he also released a short video adaptation of the work, which is still available on Youtube. The film in narrated by Möller in Swedish and English, to Krantz’ illustrations, with a soundtrack by Möller. If you cannot get the book, it is a good way to experience their story.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven (197?)

Eldritch Fappenings

This review deals with a work of pornography, and the history of erotic art and writing. As part of this review, selected images with cartoon depictions of genitalia and/or sexually explicit contact will be displayed.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

The history of underground comix is necessarily (and often deliberately) vague, but it is a truism that these non-traditional comics often take their inspiration from more traditional peers. The Tijuana bibles (8-pagers, bluesies, etc.) that began to appear in the 1920s or 1930s often took as their subject then-current celebrities or characters from popular comic strips like Popeye, Blondie, and The Phantom. The earliest comic book magazines were nothing more than collections of newspaper strips, although by the end of the 1930s they became original works with their own characters in the recognizable format that still survives today.

Tijuana bibles were explicitly pornographic and often used characters owned by others; as a consequence they were broadly illegal, sold under-the-counter, and the artists and publishers left off dates, names, and other information. As a consequence, dating of many such underground works is often approximate, and in some cases relies on context clues. A Tijuana bible starring The Phantom, for example, could not date before 17 February 1936 when the first daily comic strip starring that character was published; there could be no pornographic depiction of Superman before June 1938 when Action Comics #1 was published, no Batman before Detective Comics #27 (March 1939), no Robin before Detective Comics #38 (April 1940), etc. That still leaves a rather open question as to period of publication, but sometimes the field can be narrowed down further by changes of costume that reflect a given artist’s run.

A sample of Tijuana Bibles featuring comic book characters from the 1930s-1950s.

Such is the case with “Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven,” a 8-page story that was published in Filthy Sunday Funnies (no date or publisher given), which is also published in Original Dirty Comics 2. This is not a Tijuana bible in the traditional 8-pager format, although it is a later work in the same vein of pornographic satire and parody; Filthy Sunday Funnies was one of a number of small side-stapled digest-sized collections of adult comics that were around the same price point (mostly $5) and format, indicating a common publisher…other titles including Trash Comics, Jolly Time Fun Book, Original Dirty Comics, Sexotic Comics, Raunchy Tales from the Arabian Nights, and Gwendoline in “Sin Island.” Some of these are reprints of older Tijuana bibles, others are apparently original works by various unnamed artists.

Some of these works can be roughly attributed to various known artists based on style or character. The Gwendoline collection, for example, involves the character created by John Willie; a gender-bending riff on Jekyll & Hyde in Trash Comics has the hallmarks of John Blackburn. At least one comic references the San Francisco Ball, an adult-oriented independent newspaper from the 1970s that included pornographic comics with an emphasis on parody and satire, including comic book superheroes; Filthy Sunday Funnies may reprint material from the pages of that newspaper, but indexing for the San Francisco Ball is basically non-existent.

Among the artists who did comics for the San Francisco Ball was Lee Carvel, who released several collections of adult comics work, including several parodies of 70s comic book characters, titled Lee Carvel’s Dirty Comics. An online entry for Lee Carvel’s Dirty Comics #2 lists “Batman and Robin in the Occult Coven” among the contents, but that entry is almost identical to another, unsigned collection Original Dirty Comics #3—which does contain “The Occult Coven.” However, it’s known that Carvel signed some of his work—such as “Gonad the Horney” (a Conan the Barbarian spoof)—and none of his signed works Best of San Francisco Ball Comics #1 show similarities to “Batman and Robin in the Occult Coven,” though some other unsigned works do.

Part of the complication is that because pornographic comics were illegal to sell and often used copyrighted characters, they were almost never copyrighted, nor could the creator or publisher enforce their copyright without revealing their identity. As a consequence, pirating was rampant. There are already three possible printings of “Batman and Robin in the Occult Coven” and it isn’t clear which was the original (if any of them are), and which are reprints or pirated editions.

Faced with bibliographic confusion and lack of printing dates, we have to rely on internal evidence to date “Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven.” Given cultural references (parodies of Star Trek, The Lone Ranger, and contemporary superheroes, etc.) the other comics in the collection Filthy Sunday Funnies can be roughly dated to anywhere from the 1960s to the 1970s—but for “The Occult Coven” we can go a step further, as the unnamed artist took deliberate inspiration from a particularly recognizable work.

DC Comics’ character Batman had received his own title starting in 1940; by the 1970s it had become a 52-page anthology magazine, often with a lead story, back-up story, and sometimes a reprint. The editor was Julius Schwartz, who as a teenage fan had been an agent for a couple of Lovecraft’s stories to Astounding and published material about him as fanzines, Batman #241 (14 March 1972) features a distinctive cover by Neal Adams (pencils), Bernie Wrightson (inks), and Gaspar Saladino (lettering):

“Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven” first page

The artist also “swiped” other panels from the same issue and story, for example:

The really interesting part for Mythos fans is the back-up story in Batman #241 is “Secret of the Psychic Siren!” by Mike Freidrich (writer) and Rich Buckler (pencils & inks), where Robin and his telepathic girlfriend Terri Bergstrom run afoul of the cult of Cthulhu. While the Batman comics have long tipped their hat to Lovecraft with Arkham Asylum, this storyline was decades before The Doom That Came To Gotham, a more explicitly Cthulhu Mythos story published starring the Caped Crusader. There are no tentacles waved about, the Necronomicon is mentioned but never appears; the cult-leader is aware that Lovecraft was a pulp writer and might just be insane.

The narrative ends on a cliffhanger; finished up in the story “Death-Point!” next issue (Batman #242, June 1972) by the same creative team, though Dick Giordano inks over Buckler’s pencils. The storyline would mark the last appearance of Terri Bergstrom, and connections to the wider DC universe are pretty much minimal. The Cthulhu cult is little more than an Easter egg tossed out for fans of Lovecraft and the Mythos…but it obviously fired the imagination of at least one would-be pornographer.

“Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven” is a blatant riff off of “Secret of the Psychic Siren!”; the distinctive cover is virtually traced, and there are a number of swipes throughout the 16-page pornographic parody. While the eponymous coven is not explicitly worshipping Cthulhu—they are more focused on sex and murder—it is clearly based on the Cthulhu-worshippers.

While the sex is explicit, Batman is a little stiffly posed—”Secret of the Psychic Siren!” was a Robin-only story, so the Batman character swipes came from somewhere else. The artist apparently took delight in putting some salty language in Batman’s mouth. The strong influence of Batman #241 on the story makes it clear that “Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven” couldn’t have been produced before 1972, and probably dates to the mid-1970s. That might make this one of the first Lovecraftian pornographic comics, although still a bit later than “Tales of the Leather Nun’s Grandmother” by Jaxon in Tales from the Leather Nun (1972).

There is no easily accessible reprint of “Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven” as far as I can find. However, those who want to read “The Secret of the Psychic Siren!” are in luck, as the story and its sequel were republished in Showcase Presents: Robin the Boy Wonder #1 (2008) and Robin: The Bronze Age Omnibus (2020)

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Rhinebeck Gazette • 28 June 1945

In the aftermath of the deep cut on “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” (1946) by John Wilstach, Bill Plott revealed that Wilstach and Lovecraft had been mentioned together before, in a brief news item in The Rhinebeck Gazette, the local newspaper of Rhinebeck, New York, dated 28 June 1945. Armed with this information, the appropriate page was found at the online newspaper archive of the Fulton County History website.

*The Rhinebeck Gazette*, Rhinebeck, NY, 28 June 1945, p4

“Long Pond” is a shallow lake in New York state, located a little over five miles south of Rhinebeck, which itself lies on the east bank of the Hudson River. The 1930 U. S. Census put John Wilstach and his wife at Long Pond Road, which encircles the lake. So we can definitely say that John Wilstach was at Long Pond at the time. What about Lovecraft?

As it happens, we know Lovecraft visited the area twice. The first trip came in May 1929; Lovecraft had taken his first serious trip to the Southern United States via bus, and in New York City he met his friend and fellow pulp-writer Frank Belknap Long, Jr:

From Philadelphia I proceeded to New York, where my young grandchild Frank B. Long & his parents gave me a motor lift up the Hudson shore to Kingston—the ancient town harbouring my artist-fantaisiste friend Bernard Austin Dwyer, whom neither Long nor I had ever met in person before, despite long & interesting correspondence. Dwyer turned out to be as genial & pleasant in person as on paper, & I stayed at his house several days—though Long had to move on & collaborate with his father in a trout-fishing excursion (which turned out absolutely fruitless!). Kingston itself interested me prodigiously, for it is a highly venerable & historical place ful of reliques of the past. The present city is a fusion of two once separate villages—Kingston proper, where my host lives & which is about a mild infland from the Hudson’s west bank, & the river-port of Rondout on the hilly bank itself, where the ferry from Rhinebeck lands & which is now a somewhat picturesque slum.
H. P. Lovecraft to Elizabeth Toldridge, 29 May 1929, Letters to Elizabeth Toldridge 64

The Longs and Lovecraft would have taken the car up the east bank of the Hudson to Rhinebeck, and then the ferry over to the west bank to Kingston (as Rhinebeck is situated some ways from the river, it’s possible the actual drop-off was at Rhinecliff on the river, or that a bus from Rhinebeck took Lovecraft to the ferry). While he was in Kingston with Bernard Austin Dwyer, Lovecraft visited the nearby communities of Hurley (“abt. 3 m. N W of Kingston”) and New Paltz (“16 m. S.”), both on the western side of the river. Lovecraft would then have continued north to Albany, N.Y., and then east to Massachusetts to meet another friend, the printer W. Paul Cook.

Lovecraft mentions this leg of his 1929 trip in varying detail in a number of letters, and the whole trip was recorded in an extensive travelogue, “Travels in the Provinces of America” (Collected Essays 4.32-61). None of these letters or the travelogue mention Wilstach, Long Pond, or any extended stay or exploration of Rhinebeck, though the travelogue mentions the ferry. To give an idea of the scope of the 1929 trip:

I surely had a great trip—over 2 weeks with [Vrest] Orton, over a week more with Long, & then the open road. Richmond—childhood home & favoured haunt of Poe—Williamsburg, 17th century survival & colonial capital of Virginia; Jamestown, birthplace of our culture on this continent; Yorktown, typical Southern colonial village; Fredericksburg, boyhood environment of Genl. Washington; Washington [D. C.]—where I saw the Easter Island images (shades of Lemuria!) in the Smithsonian—Philadelphia, whose new art museum is a breath-taking Greek Acropolis; Kingston, whose ancient stone houses bespeak another culture & another day; Hurley, which a Dutch diplomat has called more Dutch than anything left in Holand; New Paltz, home of the Huguenots; Albany & the Berkshires; good old Athol; Brattleboro & the vivid Vermont hills; & finally home again—best place of all!
H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 5 Jun 1929, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 175

In June 1930, Lovecraft returned to Kingston, N.Y. to visit Dwyer again. There is much less about this trip in Lovecraft’s letters, presumably because he had covered so much of antiquarian interest the year before. A good idea of the trip from one letter is:

My visit with Dwyer in ancient Kingston was extremely delightful. Every clear day we fared forth to the wild and beautiful countryside, & I enjoyed the conversation of one who is in many respects the most spontaneous & [Algernon] Blackwood-like fantaisiste I know.
H. P. Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, 30 Jun 1930, Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei 243

This is the last account we have in Lovecraft’s published letters to any visit to the Kingston/Rhinebeck region. Again, no mention of Wilstach or Long Pond. The reason that Lovecraft did not venture up into that part of New York in later trips is given in 1931:

Finally I shall spend a week or two with Belknap in New York & then probably go home at last, since I doubt if I’ll have the cash to visit Dwyer. He has, by the way, returned to his paternal acres in the hinterland; hence is to be addressed no more at Kingston, but at Box 43, West Shokan, N.Y.
H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 25 Jun 1931, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 313

Without a friend in the region to visit, Lovecraft apparently had no reason to visit Kingston.

Just because there is no corroborating record in Lovecraft’s letters of the weird fictionist visiting the Rhinebeck region in the mid-30s, or any mention of John Wilstach at all, does not immediately invalidate the anecdote in the Rhinebeck Gazette, though it may cast a bit of doubt on the account of Lovecraft’s visit. After a decade or so, memories can grow a little fuzzy; possibly Wilstach met the Longs on their fishing trip in 1929 and misremembered Lovecraft as staying with them for the weekend. Possibly Lovecraft did have a lost weekend in New York State and the references were in letters that haven’t survived. Or maybe Wilstach invented the episode, although that would beg the question of why.

If the account of Lovecraft’s visit to Long Pond has to be judged apocryphal until further evidence emerges, the note at the beginning of the article that Wilstach had just sold an article about Lovecraft to Esquire named “An American Eccentric” is interesting. If this was the original title of “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower,” it means that the article took about six months from submission to publication, and faced at least a few editorial changes during that time, perhaps resulting in some of the oddities in that article. It is notable that this anecdote did not make it into the published Esquire piece, suggesting he either left it out or it was edited out.

While this piece in the Rhinebeck Gazette neither proves or disproves whether Wilstach actually knew Lovecraft in any capacity, it is an interesting addendum to what we know about their potential friendship.

Thanks again to Bill Plott for bringing this to my attention.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.