Lost Tale: “The Mortal” (1927) by Anonymous

Eldritch Fappenings

The following historical poetry is of a ribald nature, with both suggestive and explicit references to human sexuality. It is presented uncensored, as originally published. Reader discretion is advised.

THE secret of a poem, no less than a jest’s prosperity, lies in the ear of him that hears it. Yield to its spell, accept the poet’s mood: this, after all, is what the sages answer when you ask them of its value. Even though the poet himself, in his other mood, tell you that his art is but sleight of hand, his food enchanter’s food, and offer to show you the trick of it,—believe him not. Wait for this prophetic hour; then give yourself to his passion, his joy or pain […]
—Edmund C. Steadman, “Comment on the Poem” in The Raven (1884) by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1845) is widely considered a classic; a narrative poem of 18 stanzas of six lines each, with a relatively complex meter (primarily trochaic octameter) and rhyme scheme (ABCBBB). The result is distinct and easy to recognize, more difficult to emulate accurately but easy enough to parody. Parodies work in part because of shared familiarity; when kids on a school bus sing “Jingle bells, Batman smells…” it hits because of the subversion of expectations. They all know the tune and the original lyrics, and then it veers off into irreverent and transgressive territory. A bit juvenile, but all in good fun. At some point after its publication and rise to popularity, “The Raven” inspired a number of parodies, some of the explicitly sexual variety.

Ribald poetry and poetic parodies used to be more popular. They still are popular, but there are fewer common cultural touchstones, poems that large portions of the reading public can be expected to be familiar enough with that people can appreciate the parody. The parody songs of Weird Al Yankovic like “Amish Paradise” (1996) are good examples of successful and popular contemporary parody verse, though Yankovic’s work is generally fairly clean. Adult parodies these days are normally much more explicit, taking the form of pornographic parodies of popular movies (e.g. Evil Head, a pornographic parody of the Evil Dead films), comic book characters, or celebrities.

Yet in the publishing environment of the late 19th and early 20th century, explicit parodies were difficult to publish openly. Tijuana bibles like Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven (197?) and Red Sonja and Conan: Hot and Dry (1977) by Randy Crawford were explicitly underground publications, crude and potentially opening the publisher up to prosecution. So there was less openly pornographic work and more publications of a spicy or ribald character. Such is the case with sex-infused parodies of “The Raven” that circulated in the cultural milieu of the early 20th century United States.

One particular group or tradition of poems stands out. In the collection Immortalia (1927), which collected various anonymously authored folksongs, poems, doggerel verse, etc. is a parody of “The Raven” titled “The Mortal.” The poem beings with the lines “Once upon a midnight dreary, When of smoking I was weary”; and instead of a raven appearing, a mortal does—in this specific case, a sex worker. Numerous versions of this poem (under various titles) were published in subsequent decades, all of which have the same theme and much of the same specific language, though with notable variations.

However, “The Mortal” didn’t appear full-grown from the head of some anonymous dirty poet, but appears to draw on an existing tradition of parodies of “The Raven.” The earliest relevant version I’ve found is an untitled parody by Edward Cowles from 1913:

This was the obvious inspiration for a bit of verse titled “Raving”or “The Raving” from 1918:

*The St. Louis Republic*, 29 Mar 1918 (12)

*The St. Louis Republic,* 1 Apr 1918 (12)

Both of these have some distinct parallels in language and theme with the opening to “The Mortal,” especially the rhyme “[…] a wishin’ | To my room to gain admission,” which would become characteristic of “The Mortal” and subsequent poems. The repeated language points to a wider family of parodies of “The Raven” that were current in the 1910s and 20s, of which “The Mortal” and its descendants are a subset. For example, “A Big Time in Norfolk” by E.F.S. begins:

“Once upon an evening dreary, When of smoking I was weary, Got me out and—”
—The Transmitter (Mar 1921) 17

And an unsigned bit of newspaper verse from 1922:

(There is a seperate tradition of temperance poems parodying “The Raven”; see also “Your Health” (1935) by C. M. Young).

In the way different groups of kids had slightly different lyrics to “Jingle bells, Batman smells…” This collection of related verses presents an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast how a dirty poem evolved over time. Four iterations of “The Mortal” are presented here, since they all appear to be in the public domain:

The Mortal (1927)
Raven (1928)
The Raven (1933)
The Raven Maniac (1945)

Each publication formatted the poem differently, not trying to parody the full poem or all of its attributes, but invoking its rhyme scheme and specific lines and imagery. While it is tempting to try and squeeze these into a format closer to Poe’s original stanzas, the changes to the rhyme scheme and meter make that difficult. So these are mostly formatted in a way that eases direct comparison of the texts.

The Mortal (1927)

Once upon a midnight dreary,
When of smoking I was weary,
And had drunk up all my whisky
Only wishing there was more;
Suddenly there came a rapping
As of some fair female tapping
Tapping at my chamber door.
’Tis some chippy that’s a-wishin’
To my room to gain admission.
Well, I’ll rise and let her enter,
Enter though she be a whore,
Only that, and nothing more.

So I opened wide the portal,
And there stood such a mortal
As in all my living moments,
I had never seen before.
She had lost her upper garments,
And of all seductive varmints,
She was sure the warmest baby
Mortal woman ever bore;
And each palpitating bubby
Was so round and firm and chubby,
That my spirits rose within me,
Just my spirits, nothing more.

’Twas the fourteenth of December;
But more clearly I remember
When I woke up in the morning
Of December twenty-four—
Sequel of ten days before.
All that’s left of what passed between us
Is one poor infected penis;
Drooping, red and retrospective,
Penitent, and very sore;
And that penis still is dripping,
Every morning, every evening,
Dripping on the bathroom floor.
And I murmur vows forgotten
Every time I change the cotton.
No more tapping, no more rapping,
No, never, nevermore.

Source: Immortalia: An Anthology of American Ballads, Sailors’ Songs, Cowboy Songs, College Songs, Parodies, Limericks, and Other Humorous Verses and Doggerel (1927) 146-147

“Chippy” is late 19th-century slang for a promisculous woman or sex worker. It’s notable that the action takes place in December, which is in line with “The Raven” being set in “the bleak December,” and there is a sly working of the dates so that the sexually transmitted infection is apparently on the 24th—an unhappy Christmas present! The painful drip is largely associated with gonorrhea.

†

Raven (1928)

Once upon a Midnight dreary
When of smoking I was weary
And I’d drank my pint of whisky
And was wishing there was more.
Suddenly there came a tapping,
Sounding like a female rapping,
Rapping like the very Devil,
Just without my chamber door.
’Tis some chip thought I that’s wishing
To my room to gain admission,
Well I’ll rise and let her enter,
Even if she be a whore,
Only this and nothing more

Then I opened wide the portal,
And there stood such a mortal,
As in all my wildest fancies,
I had never seen before.
She had lost her upper garments,
And of all seductive varmints
She surely was the warmest baby
That woman ever bore.
And each palpitating bubby
Was so smooth and firm and chubby.
That my spirits rose within me,
As I went to close the door,
Just my spirits—nothing more.

And distinctly I remember,
’Twas the 14th of September,
’Twas the 15th when she left me,
When our little dream was o’er.
It was a dream without a sleeping,
With sad reproach and weeping,
She showed me some red spots,
Made she told me by her hymen’s gore.
Aye, the 14th of September
But more clearly I remember,
What I found upon the morning of Sept. 24.
Sequel to ten days before,

All that’s left of what passed between us,
Is one infected penis,
Drooping, sad and retrospective,
Penitent and very sore.
And that penis never skipping,
Every morning, Dripping, Dripping,
Still is dripping, still is dripping.
Dripping on the bath room floor.
And I murmur vows forgotten,
Every time I change the cotton,
No more rapping, no more tapping,
Not for Uncle—never more.

Source: The Book of a Thousand Laughs (1928) 38

This version of the poem is more explicit in what it’s parodying by a change of title, but also makes several notable changes. The scene is moved from December to September, which is probably an error, since September, November, and December all fit the rhyme scheme. The woman “showed me some red spots, Made she told me by her hymen’s gore”—but as she was a sex worker and he caught a disease, this is more likely a reference to chlamydia, a sexually transmitted infection that can cause bleeding between periods.

The last line “Not for Uncle” is likely a bit of 1930s slang where “your Uncle” was used for “myself.” So the understood meaning would be “Not for me.”

‡

The Raven (1933)

Once upon a midnight dreary
When of smoking I was weary,
And had drunk up all my whiskey,
Only wishing there was more;
Just as I was lightly napping,
Suddenly there came a rapping
As of some fair female tapping,
Tapping at my chamber door;
“Tis some chippy that’s awishin?
То my room to gain admission;
Well, I’ll rise and let her enter,
Enter tho’ she be a whore,
Only that and nothing more.

So I opened wide the portal
And there stood such a mortal
As in all my living moments
I had never seen before.
She had lost her upper garments,
And of all seductive varmints
She was sure the warmest baby
Mortal woman ever bore;
And each palpitating bubby
Was so round and firm and chubby
That my spirits rose within me,
Just my spirits, nothing more;
Yes, my spirits; nothing more.

Source: The Wrecks (1933) 58

This is a very truncated version, with the poetic scheme greatly simplified and the infectious epilogue to the encounter completely cut out. Which is likely a result of where it was published; the booklet being much more upbeat and cheerful, a little naughty but not filthy. Interestingly, the poem likely derives more or less directly from “The Mortal,” since the language is much closer to that than to “Raven” (1928).

⹋

The Raven Maniac (1945)

Once upon a midnight dreary,
When of smoking I was weary,
And had drank my pint of whiskey,
And was wishing there was more;
Suddenly there came a tapping,
Sounded like a female rapping,
Rapping like the very devil,
Just outside my chamber door.
’Tis some chippy that’s a’ wishing
To my room to gain admission,
Well, I’ll rise and let her enter,
Even though she be a whore,
Let her enter, nothing more.

So I opened wide the portal,
And there stood such a mortal,
That in all my wildest fancies,
I had never seen before;
She had lost her upper garments,
And of all seductive varmints,
She surely was the warmest baby,
That mortal woman ever bore;
And each palpitating bubbie,
Was so smooth, so round and chubbie,
That my spirits rose within me,
As I closed my chamber door,
Just my spirits, nothing more.

Oh! distinctly I remember,
’Twas the thirteenth of November,
’Twas the fourteenth when she left me,
When our little dream was o’er;
But more clearly I remember,
The nineteenth of November,
Six days later, and she said
The blood was just her Hymen’s gore,
Only blood, and nothing more.

All that’s left of what passed between us,
Is one poor infected penis
Drooping, sad and penitent,
And very VERY sore;
And that penis-never skipping
Still is dripping—STILL IS DRIPPING,
Morning, afternoon, and evening,
Dripping on the bathroom floor,
And I utter vows forgotten,
Every time I change the cotton,
No more rapping, no more tapping
Not for Uncle, NEVERMORE.

Source: Folk Poems and Ballads (1945) 55-56

If “The Raven” (1933) comes straight from “The Mortal,” then “The Raven Maniac” (1945) derives more or less directly from “Raven” (1928). Once again, the setting shifts (14/24 December→ 14/24 September→ 13/19 November), which is as likely to be an error as anything, but the sex worker still has her bleeding and her false claim of virginity. Aside from the dates, the most notable shift is an emphasis on certain words; one can easily imagine this one being read aloud to a raucous crowd.

⸸

One of my fondest childhood memories is The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror rendition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1990). What made the segment stand out is that the poem itself is unchanged; it isn’t a parody in the sense that words are mocked or changed, but in the way the poem’s visuals are reimagined into the particular style of animation, with some added asides. It’s an expansion of the poem in the direction of humor, while retaining its core identity with longing and obsession.

“The Mortal” and its variants are a different direction; much more focused on the easily-imitable (and easily-parodyable) external elements of the poem than it is with Poe’s message. Yet to work effectively as parodies, these poems all have to retain the essential features of Poe’s “The Raven”: an individual is alone and hears a knock upon the door, and opens to find a companion for the night. The sole reminder of that fateful encounter is painful, but at the end, the individual is still alone. In a sense, this could be seen as a moral narrative—the wages of sin—but it is also a distant, mutated echo of Poe’s sentiment.

She is gone.

The narrator is alone.

With only a painful reminder of the love they shared.

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted—nevermore!
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven” (1845)

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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Nécroéroticon (1986) by Anonymous and Adult Frankenstein (2006) by Enrico Teodorani et al.

Eldritch Fappenings
This review concerns graphic adult comic works.
Reader discretion is advised.

The cultural and economic factors that have led to at least two separate European pornographic comics involving the Frankenstein’s Monster and the Lovecraft Mythos intersecting, decades apart but identifiably through some of the same systems and processes, are difficult to articulate. A large part of the issue involves the odd currency that pornographic comics represent to publishers. It can be cheaper and faster to translate an existing work for publication in a new market than to commission and wait for an original work to be published in a given language. This has the odd effect that a number of the same works may be published in different languages, in different countries, years apart, and packaged at each stage as original works. And so readers, writers, and artists may be in communication with each other and sharing influences.

Before the internet, trying to track down the details of where this material was published was difficult. It requires recognizing the same material was published in different media, collating indices to erotic comics magazines (scarce enough data), and making connections with artists, writers, editors, translators, and publishers—data which is often missing or omitted. As a result, some of the data on these works is sketchy or nonexistent. Further digging might yield more details; the work always continues.

What is fascinating to me is that these two works represent independent expressions of the legacy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H. P. Lovecraft’s Mythos fiction, which came together by different people at different times in different ways, yet clearly represent iterations on the same ideas. Horror fans who grew up with both of these mythologies to play with synthesized them into new and original erotic works. Because they are pornographic, the works have largely escaped popular notice and critical scrutiny. Yet for fans of horror, they deserve at least a little recognition. They are, if nothing else, deliciously weird.

Nécroéroticon (1986)

“Franky Stone,” a bald, muscular version of Frankenstein’s Monster, premiered in the black-and-white French comic magazine Supersexy #1 in 1977. The subsequent issues of Supersexy chronicled the continuing adventures of Franky, in and out of bed, as he faced off against various monsters and threats by day and made love with the beautiful Arlette Delapierre, whose company he prefers to his creator, Dr. Stone. Erotic content was limited: bare breasts are on display, and sexual action is often depicted, but without showing the genitals or penetration, using various artistic devices (a gripping hand and carefully placed head, for instance, could completely conceal the penis while implying oral sex.)

Supersexy ended with issue #8, and Franky’s adventures continued in Hypersexy #3 (1978) with the ninth chapter: “Le Nécroéroticon.” This was the chronologically last adventure, although Franky would be republished in the French magazines Miss Eros (1980) and Sexorama (1985). In 1986, all nine chapters would be translated into Spanish by an anonymous translator and published as the 9-issue series La amante de Franksextein, with one chapter per issue, the remaining pages of each issue containing another, non-Franky Stone story. The Spanish issues don’t track in the same order as the original French publication, so “Necroeroticon” appears in issue 8 of La amante de Franksextein.

After a romantic interlude with Arlette, Franky goes to the bookstore to purchase an erotic work in two volumes: the Necroeroticon, which contains some new positions for Arlette and Franky to try. However, in Franky’s haste, he leaves behind the second volume, which is discovered by the villainous Dr. Stone and his assistant Pietr follow:

C’est le Necroerotikon . . . écrit par un Arabe fou du sexe: un nommé Abdul.	Es el Necroerotikon, escrito por un árabe, loco por el sexo, llamado Abdul…	It is the Necroerotikon, written by an Arab, mad for sex, named Abdul.
French	Spanish	English

While the translation is mostly word-for-word, the anonymous translator did have a few moments where they went for the gusto.

Grâce à lui, je me libérerai d’Arlette et récupérerai mon Franky…	Thanks to him, I will free myself from Arlette and get my Franky back…
French	English
Por fin encontré el arma con el cual venceré a esa mujer ladrona e infame. ¡¡El Necroeroticon!!	At last, I have found the weapon with which I will defeat that thieving, vile woman. The Necroeroticon!
Spanish	English

Dr. Stone reads that when the planets are in alignment, and the sex ritual in the first part of the book is performed (which Franky and Arlette are in the middle of), there will be an earthquake that will awaken the sex god Phallocrath (Falocras in the Spanish version). Shortly thereafter, that happens, and Dr. Stone and Pietr (with three young women) go seek out Phallocrath in a cave, and find him. Since explicit sex and genitalia weren’t shown, the “sacrifice” of the three women occurs largely off the page, and Phallocrath is only seen in shadow.

Je suis votre serviteur! Commandez et j’obéirai! J’aime une belle femme pour toi, Phallocrath! Ensuite toutes les femmes de la terre seront tiennes!	Soy vuestro servidor… ¡Mandady, obedeceré! Tengo a una mujer muy bella para ti, Falocras. ¡Enseguida todas las mujeres de la tierra serán tuyas!	I am your servant! Give the command, and I shall obey! I shall find a beautiful woman for you, Phallocrath! And then, all the women of the earth shall be yours!
French	Spanish	English

Unaware of this, Franky and Arlette want to try another ritual… unfortunately, Dr. Stone interrupts the ritual, and Phallocrath loses his powers. Arlette takes the opportunity to dispose of their half of the Necroeroticon.

Je l’ai jeté par la fenêtre… J’aime mieux tes méthodes naturelles et souvaces!	Tiré el libro por la ventana. Me gustan mucho más tus métodos naturales y salvajes.	I threw it out the window… I much prefer your natural, wild methods!
French	Spanish	English

As with El Convento Infernal (1995) by Ignacio Noé & Ricardo Barreiro, we only get glimpses of the Necroeroticon as a kind of grimoire-cum-sex manual. The plot itself is a spicy comedy of errors, with the Lovecraftian elements largely a wink and a nod, with intimations of horrors that never appear on the page, a phallic eldritch entity we never see clearly, and consequences that basically don’t happen. Franky’s status as a Frankenstein’s monster-esque character plays no real role in the story, but Arlette’s assertion that she likes Franky’s natural and unsophisticated methods when it comes to lovemaking is a fitting denouement to the story.

Adult Frankenstein (2006)

Enrico Teodorani (15 May 1970– ) was born in Forlì, Italy; as a teenager in the mid-to-late 1980s began contributing to local fanzines and comics, and started singing in a couple of heavy metal bands. He has long had an affiliation with horror and erotica, and some of his most popular creations follow these trends, including the female western character Djustine, many of whose adventures have been translated and published in English as well.

In the early 2000s, Teodorani was publishing work with X Comics, an Italian-language monthly adult comics anthology magazine. This was a relatively popular format in Europe, and as with Metal Hurlant, there were often comparable volumes in different countries, such as Kiss Comix in Spain, which also had a French translation in France and an English edition in the United States. This meant that the work of a few creators could be available internationally in many languages in different publications, but it kind of makes it tricky to keep track of where everything was being published.

Around 2004, Teodorani began collaborating with various Djustine artists on a series of very short black-and-white works for X Comics that all feature Frankenstein’s Monster; the artists were Marco Guerrieri, Dario Santarelli, Gavino Piredda, Andrea Bulgarelli, Morrik, Luca Malisan, Danilo Loizedda, and Silvano, and the works vary from 1-6 pages. These appear to have been largely filler, but inspired by a 1976/1977 softcore Italian horror comic Frankenstein published by Edizioni Del Vascello/Edifumetto, which got a snapshot history in X Comics #37 (2002).

The Teodorani-written X Comics series appears as fairly disjointed, without a single plotline but more a series of brief erotic interludes in the saga of the Frankenstein’s Monster, the effect of the different artists and their unique takes on the monster, which vary from drawing inspiration from Boris Karloff’s makeup in the early Universal Frankenstein movies to the long-haired, sharp-featured Frankenstein’s Monster of Bernie Wrightson. It is a deliberately eclectic and pulpy mix, which often features Frankenstein’s Monster facing off against some other horror over a naked and nubile woman, and ending with a sex act. All in good fun.

There are two stories with Lovecraftian elements. In the 4-page “Island of Dr. Frankenstein” (artist: Andrea Bulgarelli), Dr. Frankenstein has taken his creation and a young woman to a remote island to use an ancient book to summon an amphibious humanoid from the deep for a sex rite—some clear overtones to “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” although nothing explicit. Frankenstein’s Monster objects, attacks the humanoid from the deep and drives it off, and is rewarded for his trouble.

Some of Bulgarelli’s figurework has a distinct resemblance to John Buscema’s from Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian comics, though none of these are swipes, but all original works. Doctor Frankenstein is sporting a slightly outlandish English-style moustache, but in a comic where he’s dabbling in interspecies sexual relations, that’s hardly his worst character flaw.

The second, and more explicit Lovecraftian entry is the 4-page “Frankenstein, King of Demons” (artist: Silvano), which is the last story in the book. In the second-to-last entry, Frankenstein’s Monster had died and gone to Hell. In this story, in Hell, Frankenstein runs afoul of various Lovecraftian entities and is captured, before being inadvertently summoned by a magician, taking on an armored, costumed appearance very much in keeping with the Dark Age of Comics, and reminiscent of characters like Tim Vigil’s Faust.

“Silvano” is credited for the art, and this is Silvano Calligari, who did some artwork for Djustine, and you can see him having fun here balancing light, nearly non-existent backgrounds with relatively dark, heavily detailed figurework. While other segments in Adult Frankenstein aim for comedy or eroticism, this one is clearly going for horror over titillation.

In 2005, the series was collected and translated into English by Enrico Teodorani, and published as a one-shot titled Adult Frankenstein by Eros Comix, which had handled other English translations of European erotic horror comics, such as Rosano Rossi’s Ramba (1992-1995); Raulo Caceres’ Elizabeth Bathory (2002-2004) and Morbid Tales (2004); and The Young Witches (1991-2005) by multiple writers and artists. An Italian edition with identical title but different cover was apparently published by EF Edizioni in 2008, though I haven’t been able to source a copy to confirm the contents.

When you look at “Nécroéroticon” and Adult Frankenstein side-by-side, it is easy to see the parallels. The creators have taken Mary Shelley and Lovecraft’s creations in very different directions, and the Frankenstein’s Monster is barely recognizable in some of his appearances, marked out from the other characters only by a few tell-tale stitches, while Lovecraft’s Mythos is present more thematically than anything drawn directly from his stories.

Yet both of these works are genuine descendants of an international diaspora of English-language horror media; the shared result of stories, comics, and films that have made their way around the world for over a century and informed the pop culture of countries that Lovecraft, at least, never visited. They are part of an ongoing tradition of erotic horror, a tradition that involves translation across linguistic boundaries so that new audiences can read and maybe be inspired by these works.

Frankenstein’s Monster lurches on…and at least in some iterations, he may have a bit of help from Abdul Alhazred.

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.

Black Sands #1 (1996) by Blair Reynolds & James Reynolds

Eldritch Fappenings
This review concerns a work with adult Lovecraft themes and graphic art.
Reader discretion advised.

Right and proper gentlemen, your attention, please. This is a public announcement: Room 308 Graphics & Publishing will no longer pursue games supplement production. Newly completed, the long-anticipated Call of Cthulhu adventure supplement The Mysteries of Mesoamerica, which was to be RM308’s premier publication, will instead be published by Pagan Publishing with an estimated release date as Summer 2008.

My apologies.

As the lone chief editor, operations manager, financial coordinator, sales representative, and sole artist, illustrator and designer for the entire company, I laboured for several years to get The Mysteries of Mesoamerica, a lavishly illustrated 150-page opus and RM308’s premier publication, into production, devoting many hundreds of hours, early mornings and late evenings, weekends and holidays — every spare scrap of free time — to its design and development, anticipating my return to the games publishing forum. But as 2007 came to a close and I began final preparations for MoM’s release — at the same time preparing the foundation for the next supplement, The Mysteries of the Old West, Volume I (like ‘Mesoamerica, another monster supplement in excess of 175 pages!) — I realized that it would be impossible for RM308 to continue as it had. It was simply too much for one artist: rendering cover art, interior illustrations, NPC portraits, maps, spot art and layout, and struggling to maintain the production schedule of a respectable, marketable games publisher. As the sole proprietor, I concluded that RM308 could never become what I’d originally intended it to be.

It must be said that I had meanwhile also grown increasingly disenchanted and frustrated (again) with the games industry’s orthodoxy, mediocrity, vapidity and apathy. Especially where Lovecraft and roleplaying are concerned, I feel strongly that too many bubbly, juvenile, tender-hearted milksops have infested the genre: Pollyannas promoting a kinder, gentler version of the Cthulhu Mythos by way of Cthulhu plush dolls, Elder Sign earrings, ‘Niggurath nursery rhymes, Miskatonic Christmas carols, and buttloads of other flippant silliness.

And it’s not just the gaming industry. The general population of devotees among “Lovecraftian circles” suffers from a fairy tale misconception of the Mythos, one that I believe would turn poor Howard in his grave if he could see the candy-ass travesty that his grand universe has become. The mainstream Mythos is a dumbed-down and diluted, popularized and trivialized, emasculated cartoon, wholly separate from the dark, unutterable, obscene and blood-soaked savagery that is the true essence of the Mythos, and my contempt for this fashionable, New Age, Hello Kitty Lovecraft is well known.

So no more games. RM308 hereby retires from its ambitions at roleplaying publication. Again, my apologies, especially to Brian Appleton and John Crowe, my trusted colleagues and brothers-in-arms.
Room 308 Graphics & Publishing will now concentrate its efforts on the development of my former personal works, Black Sands: Betrothed (the original), Black Sands: Catalogue of the Ten Thousand Churches, and Black Sands: Temple of the Compass. This “creative course correction” will be more manageable and feasible than full-time game supplement production, and will more faithfully reflect my personal (hardcore) concepts of the greater Mythos. More importantly, the rendering of these books will better serve and honour my lord and master, the Great Phæraoh Ahau Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, Father of Knives, Cæsar of the Ten Thousand Tongues and Architect of the Monument of the Great Rain — blessings be upon His name! I’ve long considered my personal works to be secondary to CoC, but no longer.

Previews will soon be available for your inspection at my new website: www.RM308.com, and I hope to receive your continued support.

Cheers,

Blair Reynolds, Editor-in-Chief
Room 308 Graphics & Publishing

Blair Reynolds died in 2021. A few who knew him or admired his work marked his passing (“Blair Reynolds has left the building”). In the few short years after, much of his presence and memory have vanished from the internet. The above message was posted on the Yog-Sothoth.com forums, now defunct and unlikely to rise again. Blair Reynolds’ website, rm308.com, is long gone, although the Internet Archive contains bits and pieces of what it was. Most of his self-published work remains largely unavailable in hardcopy. Perhaps in five or ten years someone will contact the family, scrape through the archives, and put together an artist retrospective. Maybe then we’ll remember Blair Reynolds for who he was and what he did.

The Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game was first released in 1981. Heavily influenced by RuneQuest (1978) and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1977), CoC brought then-contemporary ideas of roleplaying gaming to then-contemporary ideas of what Lovecraftian horror and the Cthulhu Mythos were. By the end of the decade, however, things were shifting. Horror roleplaying was moving in different directions (Vampire: the Masquerade would be published in 1991), and Lovecraftian horror was becoming more open and accessible to new voices, further from the rigid categorization of the Mythos under August Derleth.

In 1990, John Tynes founded Pagan Publishing, a small group that put out a Call of Cthulhu gaming fanzine called The Unspeakable Oath. This would be the starting point of what would become Delta Green and a variety of contemporary Mythos fiction that spun out of that, reworking and reimagining Lovecraft’s Mythos in new ways (for more on the history of Pagan Publishing, see Shannon Appelcline’s Pagan Publishing: 1990–Present). What struck most readers first and foremost was the cover by Blair Reynolds:

Reynolds’ artwork was featured on all of the issues of The Unspeakable Oath through 8/9 in 1993. It is probably Reynolds’ best-known work, stylistically distinct, often featuring a combination of photorealism, gore, nudity, and ritual elements that many found suggestive, tantalizing, and disturbing. Some of the effect, with distinct foreground characters against a detailed but darker background, suggests a multimedia-like approach, layering elements on top of each other to form the final composition.

At the time, Call of Cthulhu artwork wasn’t transgressive. Decent artists worked for Chaosium, but no one pushed the envelope in terms of what was acceptable for a roleplaying product in the 1990s; there was little gore, little nudity, and the monsters and cultists could often look more goofy than menacing. In an era when horror roleplaying was moving toward a more mature audience with various White Wolf games like Vampire: The Masquerade, it took more than tentacles and fish-people to really sell Lovecraftian horror as being something more than quaint. It needed something fresh, artwork that took chances and hinted at forbidden rites and rituals, monstrosity and corruption. Blair Reynolds provided that edge of mystery and taboo-breaking.

In 1994, Reynolds left Pagan Publishing to form his own Room 308 Publishing, and although he provided some more artwork for other gaming projects, his focus turned to a creator-owned work: Black Sands #1 (1996), the first part of a self-published black-and-white graphic novel written and illustrated by Blair Reynolds with additional works of fiction provided by James Reynolds.

“Black Sands: Betrothed” runs 26 pages. The pages are not laid out as a comic strip, but are a collection of artistically arranged art, some of it sexually explicit, and text. The text consists of excerpts from the 1924 journal of Frank Orand Buhtbaumbe, recounting a dream given to him by the Vision Serpent about his wife Allison, during their honeymoon in Haiti. Buhtbaumble watches his wife have sex with the human form of the Vision Serpent, and in the morning finds her gone; he consults with a friend, Dr. Henry Tiller, in New Orleans, and discovers that it was Nyarlathotep that took his bride. Buhtbaumbe seeks her at an ancient temple and kills many cultists—only to discover that was his wife’s plan all along. Then he wakes from the dream.

Cover and sample pages:

In the introduction to this issue, Reynolds explains:

This is a “cyclic” story, which means simply that portions of the book – Parts I, II, and III – will trade places back and forth each issue. The main body of each issue will always be entitled “Black Sands”, and for the Premiere Issue the main body is devoted to Part II, which takes place in the early 20th century. In addition to the main body, two “preludes” set the stage for upcoming issues, giving you an idea of what is ahead. The preludes for this issue include Part I (prehistory) and Part II (near future). Issue Two will see Part II (20th century) sliding into a prelude spot while Part I moves into the Black Sands main body, and the “meeting” of Hiuto and Messala will be illustrated in full detail, as the event deserves. Part III will take another prelude position in Issue Two and then come full circle to the main body – and the forefront – in Issue Three. Issues afterward will continue in this cyclic fashion, and in this manner the Black Sands saga will unfold.

It was an ambitious plan, and sadly wouldn’t quite come to fruition. But we can see the outline of what Reynolds hoped to accomplish.

The first prelude is “Tunc” (then), which takes the form of a prose account by Commander Torrence MacLaren, 22 April 2103 that runs for two prose pages. There is a heavy Delta Green vibe, a sense that this is a future of secrets where the Mythos is spilling into the open, and that MacLaren is more than he appears.

The second prelude is “Nunc” (now), two pages of prose from the journal of Onufari Iramus El’de Shaideene Messala, in an indeterminate year, but implicitly pre-gunpowder. This is the first appearance of the characters Hiuto and Messala mentioned in the introduction, and based on the last line, their “meeting” would have been vivid, if it had been published:

She was left speckled with the fluids of her escort when I finally go to her, tied her and left her face-down on one of the mattresses.

I made certain to stand where she could see me while I undressed. I wanted her to see the scars, and the marks of faith. And when I opened the haversack I’d brought in with me, it was especially important for her to see the pale mask I withdrew . . . . . . . as well as the polished metal cylinders and needles.

The remaining six pages consist of four works in the form of “files” for some unnamed group or agency. Two of these are labeled in the introduction “Templar File SK60550/312G” and “Templar File HD86179/782V” by James Reynolds, with supporting artwork by Blair. Again, there’s a strong Delta Green vibe to all of these, the idea of hidden narratives of the Mythos in a contemporary setting, buried under layers of government secrecy. Very much in the vein of what would become the SCP wiki format, although less structured.

“SK60550/312G” involves an experiment where student subjects are dosed with the hallucinogenic excrement of a newly discovered insect species. The results are strongly implied to be nasty, although a lot of blanks are left in the record.

“HD86179/782V” is slightly more infamous; the “Dogon Project” has a child born and raised in complete darkness with minimal human contact, echoing various feral child legends and Harry Harlow’s infamous monkey studies. This is the part which gets, if not exactly graphic, more transgressive than typical:

In his twelfth year he discovered masturbation. I still wonder what his source of fantasy was. He even used to try to engage in sex with his feces and food.

Yet there was one particularly interesting twist beyond that:

When he turned nineteen he had formed his own type of language. His grunts and movements were a way of talking to himself. This seemed perfectly natural to me until one day he formed a word, a word that I knew all too well: CTHULHU!

Sample pages from the files:

Black Sands #1 (1996) is as vivid today as it was thirty years ago. There are still boundaries that fiction and art rarely approach, and while I wouldn’t qualify any of this as pornography or even erotica, there is no doubt that this is in the same vein as the Linda Lovecraft anthologies in terms of being very explicit, mature works, with none of the humor or silliness that often cuts the Lovecraftian horror like baking soda in cocaine. If there’s a criticism, it might be that the writing is a little too obsessed with the question of good and evil, too focused on contrasting what the characters are seeing with Christian definitions of good and evil.

Black Sands #2 and subsequent issues would never emerge; in the 90s he returned to illustration for roleplaying games, and then stuck mostly with prose fiction. However, there was a sort of sequel in the 2010s. In 2013, Room 308 published Black Sands: Catalog of the Ten Thousand Churches, Journal No. 1, which republishes the entirety of the “Betrothed” sequence, along with prose chapters. Here, Blair Reynolds abandoned his original plan and rewrote the material as Col. Franklin Mackenzie Keyes’ field notes on various Lovecraftian cults he had encountered in his adventures.

Journal No. 1 was followed by an edited, much less explicit second edition in 2019, which alters the original “Betrothed” art to remove an erect phallus and various vulvas. This was followed by Journal No.2 (2019) and Journal No. 3 (2021) shortly before Blair Reynolds’ death. All of these volumes are illustrated, though nowhere to the degree of Black Sands #1 (1996), and the later volumes make considerable use of public domain and stock art, altered for purpose. They make for fun reading, nowhere near as edgy as the original Black Sands, but with plenty of wit and quite a lot of thought behind the various cults and cultic shenanigans.

It is a sad legacy. Blair Reynolds’ work, prose and art, is largely forgotten today; his great project of Black Sands was never fully completed, at least not according to his original vision, and even the few books he did put out near the end of his life are rare. All are out of print, except for Kindle editions of Black Sands: Catalog of the Ten Thousand Churches, Journal No. 1 (without the “Betrothed” comic), Journal No. 2, and Journal No. 3, which are still available for now.

Maybe, one day, that will change. I hope so. More people deserve to see what Blair Reynolds achieved, or tried to.

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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El Convento Infernal (1995) by Ignacio Noé & Ricardo Barreiro

Eldritch Fappening

The following review concerns a work of Lovecraftian pornography.
It includes nude images and will discuss relevant matters of sexuality in detail.
Reader discretion advised.

Ignacio Noé (1965– ) and Ricardo Barreiro (1949–1999) were two of the Argentinian comic creators who found a niche in European comics, their work often bouncing between Spain, France, and Italy, with translations in many different markets. Their collaboration El Converto Infernal first appeared in the Spanish-language adult comics magazine Kiss Comix in 1995, serialized from issue 49 to issue 56, running 62 pages, lavishly painted and drawn by Noé. The result was popular enough to be translated into several languages, and an English translation by Robert Legault was published in a lightly censored edition by NBM in 1997 as The Convent of Hell.

As the title suggests, The Convent of Hell is a work of nunsploitation. The roots of this genre go deep in European art and literature, including historical accounts that amount to “nuns behaving badly,” like the Nun of Watton, but most contemporary scholars point to La Religieuse (1792) by Denis Diderot, a sympathetic novel about a nun trapped in the legal and social constraints of her order and unable to leave, as a turning point. The work both emphasizes the lack of personal freedom that the nun Suzanne Simonin experiences and offers sharp criticism of the Catholic Church and its institutions. This set the stage for the main erotic line, where nunsploitation erotica is primarily a variation on the “women in prison,” but offering tangential and complementary taboos including lesbianism, sex work, BDSM, and blasphemy—themes which all crop up in greater or lesser degree in works like The Devils (1971), directed by Ken Russell.

First panel, showcasing the remote and isolated location of the fortress-like convent.

Openly erotic explorations of the theme varied widely. Robert E. Howard, for example, owned a copy of The Merry Order of St. Bridget, a flagellation novel involving nuns, and captured the central theme of imprisoned passion in a poem:

NUN

I have anchored my ship to a quiet port;
A land that is holy and blest.
But I gaze through my bars at the tempest’s sport
And I long for the sea’s unrest.
—Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, 23 Jun 1926, Collected Letters 1.98

Exploitation filmmakers, comic book artists, and writers in the 1970s became especially lavish in using nuns, working out several variations on the basic theme, especially in countries with a strong Catholic influence such as Italy, Spain, France, and their diaspora. Nor was Lovecraftian media immune. The underground comic Tales from the Leather Nun (1973) includes one of the first original Lovecraftian comics, “Tale of the Leather Nun’s Grandmother” by writer/artist Jaxon, who owes her youth and beauty to the work of the wizard Alhazred—and who has accidentally turned her vulva into a portal into the cosmic domain of Cthulhu and other eldritch entities.

Barreiro and Noé were quite evidently drawing from an eclectic mix of resources in composing their work, and the graphic novel has a frankly erotic character playing out to many interests. There are elements of sadomasochism, bondage, lesbianism, Satanism, and corruption that come together with supernatural elements. After a brutal opening involving the sexual torture of a novitiate, the nuns uncover a hidden locked door in the basement (possibly a reference to Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy), which inspires in the Mother Superior a dream of a Lovecraftian-flavored Satanic ritual:

While the Church of Satan does include a few Lovecraftian elements, the actual being that emerges in this dream is a monstrously-endowed satyr. An older nun manages to find a reference to the door in a handy copy of the Necronomicon…

The mother superior of the convent doesn’t listen to her, however, and forces the door open, leading to an eruption of phallic-headed tentacles reminiscent of Japanese hentai in one of the most infamous scenes from the graphic novel.

Which gets explicit and quite graphic, leading to the afflicted nun’s death and the sealing of the door. Douglas E. Cowan, who summarizes the graphic novel in greater detail in his book The Forbidden Body: Sex, Horror, and the Religious Imagination, waxes clinical:

When the locks are broken, though, the nuns shrink back in fear as this time a true Lovecraftian horror bursts into the room. A flurry of tentacles, each rubbery arm tipped with a sinister phallus, emerges from whatever unearthly space lies beyond the door. Seizing the first available Marionite sister, it quickly envelops and strips the screaming woman. Fondling her ever more intmately, the tentacled abomination progresses to vaginal, anal, and oral rape—physical manifestations of everything she has sworn to abjure as a consecrated virgin. Although the other nuns are frozen in terror, with every new invasion of the young nun’s body a cut-away panel shows the effect on the Mother Superior, who grows increasingly turned on with each grotesque violation. Finally, the abbess orgasms as the Great Old one lifts the other woman high into the air, sexually impaled, every tentacular phallus ejaculating at once. A rain of eldritch sperm covers her body, and unable to withstand the supernatural assault, she dies naked on the rude stone floor.

We are never told her name. (111-112)

That night, the corrupted Mother Superior goes to unseal the door, and is interrupted by a messenger from God, a child-like angel.

Image truncated because no one needs to see a naked putto.

This sequence—where the corrupted Mother Superior nails the tiny angel to the door and then literally sucks the life out of them through their penis—was omitted from NBM’s edition of The Convent of Hell, probably out of fear that what it was depicting was too close, at least visually, to child sexual abuse material. There are anecdotes that even this mild self-censorship wasn’t sufficient; Steve Fentone in AntiCristo: The Bible of Nasty Nun Snema & Culture reports that: “[…] initial shipments of THE CONVENT OF HELL were reputedly stopped at the Canadian/US border, presumably for the books elements of bestiality and degradation.” (234)

With this sacrifice, the Mother Superior manages to summon a monstrously endowed Beelzebub through the door, in the form of a gigantic satyr. The corruption of the convent is soon complete in an orgy of sex and blood. After a chance encounter with a pair of newlyweds, the Vatican learns of the degradation and sends a special assault force with holy-water-blessed members and flamethrowers to deal with the Satanic infestation, destroy the demon, and block up the doorway once again.

This is not the first erotic comic work to invoke Lovecraftian names and themes; aside from the aforementioned Tales from the Leather Nun, there were works like the Italian comic Ramba, written by Marco Delizia; and the Young Witches series, which was created by Ricardo Barreiro and Francisco Solano López. The conflation of Lovecraftian elements with Satanic elements wasn’t uncommon in this respect, but neither is it really an attraction for those looking for Lovecraftian erotica, instead of Satanic porn with a thin skin of Lovecraftian elements. These few panels reproduced for this review contain basically all the Lovecraftian names and references across 64 pages of art.

El Convento Infernal is definitely a work of art. It is sacrilegious to the point of comedy; occasionally brutal, often over-the-top, yet the artwork is vivid and, as Cowan points out, often draws on classical works of Satanic imagery for reference. There is a vividness to the full-color artwork which is starkly at odds with the sometimes muddy shading of the black-and-white artwork that dominated Kiss Comix at the time. It is an exercise in excess where every episode seeks to grab the reader with at least one can’t-unsee-that image. In that respect, it is a success.

But does it go too far?

This is not a work that delves deep into the psychology of cloistered nuns, although there are hints of sexual repression and political considerations throughout the story; it is primarily, and always, a pornographic work, and some of the acts are violent and nonconsensual. There isn’t any actual bestiality, as Fentone mentions; the great hoofed goat with the enormous phallus is a demon. There is not technically any CSAM; it’s an angel. Yet it is definitely a dark fantasy, and one that is narratively built like a sexploitation horror film if there were no budget on special effects and the actresses would do absolutely anything in front of the camera.

Clark Ashton Smith was living in Auburn, California, when the Catholic order the Sisters of Mercy opened a convent within sight of his cabin in 1939/1940. He sometimes jokingly called it “the Nunnery of Averoigne,” and the sight of the nuns inspired a few poems. Most were relatively sedate affairs, but one speaks of the temptation of the forbidden:

IMPROBABLE DREAM

In my dream a nun,
Proudly bosomed, lunar-pale,
Danced naked in the sun.

—Clark Ashton Smith, Complete Poetry 2.499

El Convento Infernal is, in a much more explicit fashion, just such an improbable dream. More lavish, more detailed, and probably tripping the censors as obscene in some jurisdictions, yet in every sense a pure sexual fantasy that bespeaks a fascination with seeing the untouchable touched, the inviolate violated, witnessing the act of transgression against deeply ingrained cultural taboos.

Outside the United States, there have been multiple editions of this work collected in Spanish, French, and possibly other languages. The English edition has never been reprinted and today is quite scarce. Noé would return to Lovecraftian themes in 2023 when he provided a variant cover for Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu (Zenescope), which is evocative of his earlier work while being in no way tied to it.

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 Fishmen of Innsmouth” 「インスマウスの半魚人」(1959) by H. P. Lovecraft & Shōgo Matsumiya (絵・松宮省吾)

Eldritch Fappenings

This review deals with a work of erotic art and writing.
As part of this review, selected images with depictions of nudity will be displayed.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

My proper introduction to the Japanese-language Cthulhu Mythos came courtesy of Edward Lipsett and Kurodahan Press (2002-2025). For over twenty years, Kurodahan worked to translate into English works that would otherwise never have been available to monolingual Anglophones like myself. Thanks to their efforts I was able to read Asamatsu Ken (朝松健) and Rampo Edogawa (江戸川乱歩) and many others I hadn’t heard of; and I gained an appreciation for the work of the people translating those stories back into English. Now that Kurodahan Press is no more and their titles out of print, I regret I didn’t have the money to buy everything they put out, or the time to read it all.

In Kurodahan’s Night Voices, Night Journeys (2005) the first volume of Lairs of the Hidden Gods stories (an anthology series of Japanese Cthulhu Mythos tales), there is an essay titled “Lovecraftian Landscapes: Four Decades of H.P. Lovecraft and Manga” by Yonezawa Yoshihiro (米澤嘉博) trans. Ryan Morris, where he described an early Lovecraft translation:

It was entitled The Fishmen of Innsmouth (illustrated by Shōgo Matsumiya) and appeared as part of the feature article, The Greatest Horror Stories from Around the World, Illustrated in issue Three of Ugoku Kao (Moving Face), the “tabloid strictly for men,” originally published as an offshoot of the very popular 1950s erotic entertainment magazine Hyaku-man in no Yoru (One Million Nights of One Million People). The subtitle read “Horrors! My face—it’s become… a frog!” The story featured pictures of half-naked women with such outrageous captions as “The Khanakai tribe made sacrifices of young virgins. THe bosoms of these fast-maturing tropically-raised maidens, with their black skin, breasts like ripe peaches, dark eyes that could seduce any man, lips with scents like durian, and gently curving waists hidden only by grass skirts, were but decorations on the altar: offerings to the Demon God.” The illustrations were fine black-and-white ink pieces that had all the mood of a Western horror novel, and although the FIshmen looked more like frogs, they were certainly grotquese. These drawings were perhaps made more accessible thanks to their being in the similar Vein as the “Lost world” monster stories of Oguri Mushitaro and Kayama Shigeru. It was only a four-page illustrated story, but it is most likely the first ever domestic H.P. Lovecraft visual work. (294)

Dr. Justin Mullis asked if I had a copy; I did not, but was able to procure a copy of Moving Faces, vol. 1, no. 3 (Mar 1959) [うごく顔第1巻第3号（1959年3月）]. I then asked a friend, Dr. Dierk Guenther in Japan (who helped out before on “Medusa’s Curse” (1995) by Sakura Mizuki (桜水樹氏)), to translate it into English.

The result is everything that Yonezawa Yoshihiro described in his essay and more. An abbreviated, localized, sexploitation version of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” crammed into four pages for a Japanese men’s magazine. Given when and where it was published, the work also reflects something of the language and attitudes of the postwar period in Japan; reader discretion advised. No translator is credited for the original translation/abridgement. Dierk Guenther’s comments on the translation will be marked by dagger symbols (†) and included at the end of the translated text.

※

A famous story of monsters

The Fishmen of Innsmouth

“Ah, my face, it looks like a frog …”

Author: Lovecraft
Matsumiya Shōgo/Art
[New translation and notes: Dierk Guenther]

(1) “The cheapest way to Arkham town? That would be the bus in the direction of Innsmouth.”

I was celebrating my coming of age with a tour of New England, visiting historic sites as well as researching the distribution patterns of flora and fauna. It was from an agent at the train station of Newburyport that I heard for the first time the name of the town of Innsmouth.

“You seem not to be aware of this. The town can’t be found on maps or tourism brochures. In 1927 the town was hit by a mysterious infectious disease and violent riots that reduced the town’s population. Now the town is dead, and only a few, very peculiar people are living there.”

My interest was immediately raised, and I took the bus to Innsmouth, being the only person on board. The bus driver had uncanny features, looking like half-fish, half-frog.

(2) Soon, the bus arrived in a bleak town. Many houses lined up that were reminders that in earlier times, the town must have been very beautiful and flourishing. Not one single person could be seen. The half frog, half fish bus driver didn’t say one word, and with a gloomy feeling, I looked out of the window at the “town of death”. It was a dark town that felt nauseous with an overall stench of decaying fish.

Soon, an awkwardly constructed stone building, a medieval-style church, could be seen. The entry in the building’s basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And then I saw a priest, who was wrapped in a peculiar vestment. He wore a frightening golden tiara-like crown.

(3) I checked myself in at the hotel Gilman House, of which I had heard from the agent in Newburyport, left my luggage there, and went into town. All the ghost-like people whom I met occasionally, who seemed to come out of nowhere, looked like half-frog, half-fish, and were unsettling. And then, by coincidence, I met a white-haired elderly person. His name was Zadok Allan, and he was 96 years old. He appeared frightened and had the peculiar habit of sometimes looking behind himself.

Luring the old man by offering him whiskey, we went to a part of the beach with no one around and here I spoke with Zadok.

The area was wrapped in an atmosphere of death and destruction and the unbearable stench of raw fish filled the air.

“Can you tell me why the blooming Innsmouth became like this?”

“That was a truly horrible thing.”

Around the time these events unfolded, there was a friend of the old man by the name of Matt Eliot, who on an island chain in the South Pacific traded with the natives living there†. Among these natives was the tribe of the Kanakys, who paid respect to evil gods that lived under the sea.

(4) On the island where the Kanakys lived there was a peculiar ruin. On its wall were engraved terrifying images of fish and frogs and random monstrous creatures. The Kanakys claimed that when the island rose out of the sea, evil gods lived in this building. Thanks to the evil gods, the Kanakys could catch a lot of fish and other creatures from the depths of the sea. In return, the Kanakys offered young virgins as living sacrifice to the evil gods.

The islanders held twice a year a big festival, on the evening before the May Festival and on All Saints’ Day. Young women of dark skin and firm, full breasts stirred the hearts of men like a vaguely ominous bell. Their lips tasted of the aroma of the durian fruit. They were tropical-bred and quick to become passionate. Wearing at their curved hips a ceremonial waist loincloth, they were taken to an altar as a human sacrifice to the dark gods.

Although they did not say “I am sad. Although I dreamt of living together with you. What fate, being given to the depth of the sea,” the young women cried in their hearts.

Especially, the hearts of the young men who led their lovers to the altar were filled with anguish. The altar was set up on a canoe, and together with the sacrificial victims, it was thrown into the sea. How the gods then disposed of the sacrifices I cannot say.

And then at one point, the evil gods came on land. They told the Kanakys: “If you mix your blood with ours, then at first children that resemble humans will be born, but the children will be like the evil gods and can also live in the depths of the sea.”

(5) This appealed to the islanders. They thought if they could live on the sea floor they would be free like the fish, and so began to mate with the evil gods. It is possible that the evil gods were an amphibious species who in old times had vanished from the land. These evil gods were beyond death, and even their descendants continued to live on.

When Elliott arrived on the island, strangely, the Kanakys had vanished. Captain Obed said: “With no natives around, we can’t do any profitable business. Well, as there seems to be no other way, can we attract the evil gods from the sea?”

Elliott served under the captain, and he was opposed to this idea. However, the captain stubbornly refused to listen. In those days, Innsmouth was a town that survived on the seafaring trade. Especially if Obed’s ship (or: business) would hit a slump, it was absolutely obvious that the town would fall into decline.

“To make matters worse, one can’t even catch fish in the town. Look, those Kanakys got their blessings from these evil gods, aren’t they? They could catch fish in unlimited quantities. If we make money, the city’s economy will improve. The problem is what to do about those human sacrifices these evil gods like so much. Well, we can handle this flexibly.”

Even the sailors knew the stories about the monsters, and they were not pleased to get close to such things, but for the sake of money, they shut their eyes to it.

(6) There is a reef off the coast of Innsmouth. And on this reef a weird disturbance occurred. On the eve before the May Festival and on the All Souls’ festival, Obed and his men conducted a strange festival. It was the festival held by the Kanakys. By the way, only on these evenings young women vanished without a trace. However, in the town, fish could be caught in extraordinary quantities. It was around this time that the monsters who had come to the land in the year of the Kanakys appeared in Innsmouth. And they demanded from the townspeople what they had also demanded from the Kanakys. Thus, by the time of the Civil War the children who had been born were beginning to come of age. They were half frog, half fishmen.

(7) But, riots and a plague brought in from China†† turned Innsmouth into a town of death, concluded old man Zadok, laughing like a drooling lunatic†††.

This evening, there was not one single guest in the Gilman House. In my room, which stank of mould, and under the dim, gloomy glow of an electric bulb, I read a book. Due to being beset by an eerie feeling, I couldn’t sleep at all. I couldn’t keep from staring at the door latch, and just in case anything might happen, I slept in my clothes and shoes so that I could easily escape from the room. In the darkness, I heard a strange noise. It was without a doubt the sound of someone opening carefully and with great caution the lock of my room’s front door with a key. Because I had already felt a vague sense of uneasiness beforehand, even while I realized that a terrible danger was approaching, I managed not to be frightened. (Still, I had to get into safety.) Using a quickly made improvised rope, I climbed down from my room in the Gilman House into the inner yard. The moonlight radiated eerily. Then the entry of the house opened, and from the inside appeared gradually strange forms in the darkness, holding up lanterns, speaking in frightening, rattling voices, uttering words that were clearly not English.

Seeing these forms, my whole body shivered. Their staggering gait was so repulsive that it turned my stomach.

The most disgusting one among them was the form of a monster that wore a crown. And then I saw them clearly: The half-frog, half-fishmen! The shadow of Innsmouth! I fled along the decayed railway tracks, bathed in yellow phantom moonlight. When I returned to Arkham I rested at a count’s house. There I saw an eerie pattern. I learned that, seemingly, my grandmother and others had died in Innsmouth. Did this mean that I had half frog, half fishmen blood in my veins? One morning, I looked in the mirror and the face that I saw there was unmistakably the creepy face of an Innsmouth half-frog, half-fishman.

† The original Japanese translator uses doujin, which is an outdated and offensive term for indigenous people.

†† The original translator uses a very derogatory term for China. The text was translated in an era before Japan and China took up diplomatic relations, so the term for China may still have been common in Japan in 1959.

††† The original translator used an extremely offensive term for “mad person” that is nowadays regarded as insulting and dehumanizing.

※

Without attempting to directly translate any of Lovecraft’s prose, the uncredited Japanese translator still tried to present something of Lovecraft’s style in a Japanese context—while waxing eloquent on the young Polynesian women that Lovecraft essentially glossed over in the original. The abridged text is an artifact of both when and where it was published; other stories in the same feature include “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs, “The Upper Berth” by F. Marion Crawford, and “The Strange Adventure of a Private Secretary” by Algernon Blackwood, so Lovecraft and Innsmouth were in good company, especially considering that neither would be commonly known in Japan.

The illustrations by Shōgo Matsumiya also deserve mention: these are actually very good, equal to or better than most of the pulp illustrations that Lovecraft received in English-language periodicals in the United States, United Kingdom, or Canada during this period. While some are clearly there mainly for titillation, the figure-work is solid for the limited space, and those island ruins are especially evocative.

It is interesting to contrast “The Fishmen of Innsmouth” with another Lovecraft story that appeared in a risque men’s magazine at this time, “The Rats in the Walls” (1956). At a time when English-language periodicals were trying to gently censor Lovecraft, the Japanese periodical that aimed for shock and sensationalism leaned the other way.

Thanks again to Dierk Guenther for the translation and notes.

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.

Shadows of Innsmouth (2014) by Gonzo

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.

In 1992, author William Gibson and artist Dennis Ashbaugh published Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), consisting of a book with a 3.5″ floppy disk. It was an art project as much as anything else: the book was treated with photosensitive chemicals so that the words would begin to fade as they were exposed to light; the disk would run once and then encrypt itself. Buyers were purchasing a not so much a physical product as an experience and a challenge: how did they want to experience this, knowing that it would be rendered unreadable by the act of reading? How would they preserve it?

It was a very cyberpunk stunt, and clever programmers eventually cracked the encryption; even before that, copies of the text were available on the web, shared through networks of pirates and fans. The text survives today, even though it was designed to be forgotten, and now on a near-obsolete physical media format, because of determined interest and repeated, if often shadowy, lines of transmission. If you download the text of Agrippa now, you will probably get an accurate copy of the original text—but how would you know? What would you compare it to? The digital archivist finds themselves in a position not unlike a scholar of ancient manuscripts, comparing different and fragmented versions of texts to discern clues as to the route of transmission.

Early digital works, more than most, tend to illustrate the difficulties of preservation. The lack of physical substrate means the technological end of things—what’s the file format? Do we have a program that can open that? What operating system does it use? Do we have a computer that can run that?—means that trying to experience these works as they were originally is increasingly difficult. In many cases, the original project files and source code of a digital work, the programs used to create it, may be long gone. All we have is the end product, which may have been compressed, reformatted, or translated in various ways across its route of transmission.

Which is to say that you’re probably never going to read Shatter (1985) on a Macintosh Plus in MacPaint, or see the magic of how Batman: Digital Justice (1990) was put together on a Macintosh II that boasted a whopping 8MB of RAM. However, you can still buy print collections of those comics—which is more than most digital works can say.

The internet provides a direct market for creators to sell their works, in many cases bypassing middlemen and brick-and-mortar stories; for artists in particular, having a website meant they could sell directly to their customers through various paradigms—memberships, purchasable files, mail order—and the product didn’t have to be physical. Potential buyers who wanted a digital comic could go to the website, fork over a credit card number, and access the gallery of images or download a .zip or .PDF with the images. There was piracy, and various attempts at anti-piracy measures, because nothing was perfect, but they were generally good enough, especially for honest merchants and customers. Systems like this still exist today, although many creators have, for ease and because of issues with payment processors, opted to use middleman websites like Itch.io or DriveThruComics.

There are a lot of benefits to this kind of digital ecosystem: niche artists who would struggle to find a publisher can self-publish and still find an audience for their works; customers interested in such niche works have a better chance of finding such materials, which tends to foster the creation of more of it. This is especially true for works of parody and erotica, which often struggle with traditional print distribution channels.

Digital artist Gonzo began (as near as I can tell) with his own website, Taboo Studios, circa 2008. Gonzo created erotic comics using 3D rendering software, which has become increasingly available as a in the early 2000s thanks to the release of graphic processing cards for home use and improvements in software, often with horror settings and narratives, and frequently focused on monster sex as the kink of choice. In 2014, Gonzo published the first part of one of the first of his erotic monster sex comics based on the work of H. P. Lovecraft, “Shadows over Innsmouth.”

Shadows of Innsmouth is an almost faithful retelling of the H P Lovecraft classic, ‘Shadow over Innsmouth’. I say ‘almost’ faithful as all of the core events in the original book happens in the comic, but this time with more sex, a female lead character and its set in 2014 not 1914 – But I’m sure you will consider these changes all good changes 🙂

The story starts with Jennifer the new assistant librarian at Miskatonic University who happens to be going through a rough patch in her life, she finds the Lovecraftian novel and quickly discovers that the Innsmouth of legend is based on a real town. Her curiosity intrigued she sets off to Innsmouth to discover which parts of the book are true and which existed only in Lovecrafts twisted imagination�

This 94 page storyline based comic is the first part and features, weird mysteries, kinky sex, stranger sex, the deep ones, amphibian creatures from the sea, tribal island girls, cheating, monster breeding, emotional turmoil, selling out the future of a town in a demonic pact� and much more.

A must for any Erotic Horror fan and the first in a series of re-imaginings of his work.
—Gonzo, read me.txt file that accompanies “Shadow over Innsmouth”

Foreword to “Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo

This is a work that should be seen in the same vein as “The Statement of Randolph Carter Twisted” (2024) by Lisa Shea or The Colour Out of Space (2024) by H. P. Lovecraft & Sara Barkat: artistic re-interpretations of the original work. “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is a likely suspect for an erotic adaptation in particular because the monster sex is already there—just off the page.

“Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo, page 13

Gonzo’s style in this is reminiscent of 1970s European erotic comics, with two large panels taking up the entire page providing room for detail and dialogue or exposition, although Gonzo could and did juggle up his formats occasionally. Like most 2000s-era render artwork, the figures are relatively stiff, and Gonzo wasn’t above borrowing artwork to use as skins for books or wall art—you might recognize the cover of Lovecraft Unbound (2009) on the cover of the books stacked on the table, for example, and there are other borrowings as well.

“Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo – page 71

Gonzo included sexually explicit artwork—it is a pornographic work, after all—but most of the action builds up to the explicit scenes. As is typical, the limitations of the software and modeling tend to show in difficulty rendering non-Caucasian features, and many of the skin textures on objects are distorted.

“Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo – page 83

Gonzo also clearly took inspiration where he found it; the transition from human to Deep One may be reminiscent of an Animorphs, but is a familiar conceit to show the progress of time and transformation. The Deep Ones themselves tend to look a bit like cave trolls from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings (2001), although Gonzo draws in the Gillman from the classic Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) in the second part—as well as another Lovecraftian critter, this one with tentacles.

“Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo – page 117

These erotic render artworks may seem a little strange and quaint today, because the state of the art has moved on. A decade of artists have worked creating custom textures, models, working with more advanced programs and faster hardware. Gonzo’s 2014 art reflects the time and tools with which they were made.

In their stated goal of creating an erotic adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” Gonzo was largely successful. It is certainly no worse than similar efforts like The Adult Version of Dracula (1970) or Evil Head (2012). Gonzo hits the beats of the story, with their own little twists for the sake of titillation.

Nor was Gonzo alone in creating Lovecraftian erotic works using rendering software and available through much the same way. Artist Iopriest created two Lexi Crane comics, and the artist known as Jag27/Otto Maddox worked Lovecraftian entities into their horror-themed erotic horror comics as well. This was a niche that obviously found at least some audience.

Besides “Shadows of Innsmouth,” Gonzo (now Gonzo Studios) completed adaptations of “From Beyond,” “Dagon,” “Azathoth,” and “Call of Cthulhu.” While Taboo Studios’ web page is defunct, Gonzo has moved their wares to Renderotica, where they are still available for purchase and download.

For the moment.

It has to be emphasized that there is no guarantee that “Shadows of Innsmouth” will be available in a decade, or a year, or even tomorrow. An issue with a payment processor, an untimely death, an accident with a server…and the files will be gone, less accessible than the text of Agrippa. Like “The Fluff at the Threshold” (1996) by Simon Leo Barber, there isn’t really a dedicated archive for these kind of digital creative works. You can buy them, for now, and pirates probably still circulate copies, but the continued existence of these comics remains tenuous. They might disappear at any time.

The world will be a little less weird when that happens.

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.

“A Loobelier Licking” (1998) by Maxi Dell

Lois Gresh writers her erotic fiction under the nom de plume Maxi Dell. […] She says about her story: “Perception marks the boundaries of reality. What seems strange to us, what we fight the most, may be the only thing that matters. In a world of cold darkness the heat of love ignites sex even if the lover is a so-called demon.”
—Demon Sex (1998), 45-46

Some writers of Cthulhu Mythos fiction approach the project with the care of a pasticheur working another episode into a series of canonical tales—like writing an unofficial sequel to a classic Sherlock Holmes story, they might write “what happened next” for Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Shadow over Innsmouth”; such is the case with “The Shuttered Room” by August Derleth. Other writers prefer to reinterpret the story, providing an alternate take on what really happened, this is what you see with “The Black Brat of Dunwich” (1997) by Stanley C. Sargent.

In her Mythos fiction career, Lois H. Gresh’s approach is closer to that of a DJ, remixing familiar songs and beats but putting her own spin on it. She doesn’t re-tell old stories, she doesn’t try to abide by anyone’s canon, and the result is something that at once has a lot of familiar elements, but is nothing like what you’ve heard before—and perhaps not what you would expect, either. None of which is a bad thing, unless you go into her stories expecting something else.

You’ll be twenty tomorrow, Emilie. It’s time for us to share The Gift.” Rolfe’s voice was hoarse, gravel grating against the fishdead air.

She said, “The Gift is something I definitely don’t want for my birthday. How about if we just say here in Innsmouth and never have sex?”
—Maxi Dell, “A Loobelier Licking” in Demon Sex 48

The story is set in Innsmouth, though not quite the same Innsmouth readers will find familiar. It deals with Yog-Sothoth and Eihort, the latter an eldritch entity that was created by Ramsey Campbell for his Mythos stories. Emilie and Rolfe are best friends, 19 years old, irrepressibly horny, outsiders among outsiders—and is stuck in a tricky situation. Emilie is the cosmic equivalent of an ugly duckling, physically unlovely and ostracized because she carries the genes of a Great Old One. The Innsmouthers want to kill her. The brood of Eihort, the Loobeliers, Yog-Sothoth, and most especially her friend Rolfe want to impregnate her.

Except if she gets pregnant, she dies and Cthulhu gets loose and ends the world.

If that sounds a little complicated—well, yes. It’s also sexually explicit, more than slightly surreal, and probably doesn’t make too much sense if you think about it too long. Emilie’s negative body image, search for love, and the apparent fact of her imminent demise or translation to another reality if she gives in to her teenage lust plays as very nearly a parody, a kind of cosmic teenage sex comedy. While it plays a little more serious than that (at least from Emilie’s point of view), in an era when “monsterfucker” is a tag for a vast swathe of fiction, I think audiences today might have more sympathy for Emilie.

It’s not just that she wants to get laid. She wants love, too.

Rolfe, on the other hand, is utterly inept. By his logic, he and Emilie are two of a kind, and he’s the only option for her to survive—his every effort to get laid, however, reinforces the problem. In the end, he’s been friendzoned so hard the reader would almost feel sorry for him, if he wasn’t so utterly without romance.

[“]Our only chance is to mate with each other before they get to you.”

He was being ridiculous. As if her only choices were sex with Rolfe or sex with a fish. What an absurd thought. Of course, if it came down to it, she’d choose Rolfe. He wasn’t a fish, after all, and he did have a certain raw masculinity that she found appealing. Plus, she’d known him since they were children, and he was her only friend. But still…

Maybe it was the way he put it: mating.
—Maxi Dell, “A Loobelier Licking” in Demon Sex 49

(Readers may, at this point, wonder what the heck a loobelier is. As near as I can tell, they appear only in this story and nowhere else, so it would be a terrible spoiler to reveal that. Trust me, knowing what they are does not significantly make much more sense in context.)

As an erotic horror story, if you don’t invest too much time in thinking about it, this is fun. Gresh has a knack for entertaining prose and slightly surreal situations (see “Showdown at Red Hook” (2011) by Lois H. Gresh), and this is no exception. While probably never going to appear in any list of canonical Innsmouth tales, I think the subversion of expectations, as much as the anticipation of Emilie’s final decision, is what makes this story work.

“A Loobelier Licking” as by Maxi Dell was published in Demon Sex (1998). It has not been reprinted.

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.

“Shadow over Darkcliff” (1993) by John Blackburn

Eldritch Fappenings
The following review of LGBTQ+ comic history includes images from selected works that depict cartoon nudity, sex, and violence. Reader discretion is advised.

Marriage and Sex

(1) Divorce shall not be treated humorously nor represented as desirable.
(2) Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable.
(3) Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable behavior shall be fostered. A sympathetic understanding of the problems of love is not a license for morbid distortion.
(4) The treatment of live-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.
(5) Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and baser emotions.
(6) Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested.
(7) Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.
—Comic Book Code of 1954

LGBTQ+ characters and themes received little coverage in the comic strips and comic books in the United States before 1954. When looking at the Pre-Code Lovecraftian Horror Comics, there are no characters or themes that jump out as explicitly gay or lesbian, transgender or genderqueer. After the Code was created in 1954, LGBTQ+ representation in commercial comics was implicitly forbidden.

Without access to mainstream publications, LGBTQ+ comics shifted to venues that were not controlled by the Comics Code Authority. Pornographic comics and underground comix formed a creative outlet for LGBTQ+ characters, stories, and creators—at the risk of being charged with obscenity. The late 60s and 70s in particular saw the birth of the underground comic scene, an outlet for readers and artists who wanted comics that were forbidden, transgressive, or mature—featuring themes of realism, sex, violence, drugs, politics, mysticism, and horror, often in some combination.

Tales from the Leather Nun (1973), for example, was an underground nunsploitation anthology comic. One of the episodes, “Tales of the Leather Nun’s Grandmother” by Spain Rodriguez, mixes Lovecraft’s Mythos with hardcore pornography, as Abdul Alhazred’s spells have accidentally turned the Leather Nun’s Grandmother’s vagina into a gateway to the realm of Cthulhu. Thus, one of the earliest appearances of Cthulhu in comics has the eldritch horror getting a face full of spunk.

*Tales from the Leather Nun* (1973); art by Spain Rodriguez

Cthulhu’s facial is a gag, not a homoerotic act. Tales from the Leather Nun isn’t the first LGBTQ+ Lovecraftian comic, just one of the first to begin to transgress in ways that combined sexual themes with Lovecraftian horror. It is difficult to say for sure what was the first LGBTQ+ Lovecraftian comic, if only because we have to look outside of the well-indexed mainstream.

“R. H. B.” (1978) by Andreas and Rivière is a likely candidate, because it focuses on R. H. Barlow, who was gay. However, Barlow’s homosexuality isn’t really the focus of comic, barely mentioned at the end. A later example is the Italian erotic comic Ramba #4 (1989), which features the bisexual Ramba facing down a demon named Azatoth summoned during a voodoo-esque ceremony:

*Ramba #6* (Eros Comix), Marco Bianchini (script) and Fabio Valdambrini (art)

Of course, most of Europe never had an equivalent to the Comics Code Authority, so they had a freer hand to explore such themes. In the United States, works like Ramba appeared in translation in the early 90s, after the CCA had been weakened or ignored by independent publishers. If we can’t quite answer the question of who came first (whether into Cthulhu’s visage or elsewhere), we can at least say there was another notable work that emerged in that period that combined Lovecraftian horror and explicit LGBTQ+ characters and themes.

In the 1970s, comic writer and artist John Blackburn created the character Coley Cochran, a 19-year-old uninhibited bisexual character with a penchant for sex, violence, and the occult and antipathy to prudes and authority figures. In the late 80s/early 90s Blackburn self-published four books of Coley’s sex-drenched adventures, a combination of erotica, character-driven drama, and graphic violence. In the first book, Coley on Voodoo Island (1989), Coley is kidnapped and transformed into a sex god in a voodoo ceremony; this supernatural element would re-emerge periodically throughout Coley’s adventures, such as Breathless (1991), which includes an adventure at a ruined temple titled “Flowers of Evil.”

In the 1990s Fantagraphics picked up the Coley adventures under their Eros Comix imprint, publishing a series of 2-3 issue miniseries, beginning with Return to Voodoo Island (1991). The problem with the Eros Comix series is that they never reprinted Coley’s earlier adventures (except when Blackburn summarized them for reprints), so that new readers come into a series that has already been going on for hundreds of pages.

John Blackburn’s “Shadow over Darkcliff” is the second part of the two-issue series Idol of Flesh (1993), and sees Coley and friends return to the temple ruins of “Flowers of Evil”—but this time featuring a strange cult, led by a man named Garth. While the 32-page episode involves a bit of drama and a good bit of sex, the core story is explicitly Lovecraftian:

*Idol of Flesh* (1992) #2, by John Blackburn

Garth, it turns out, isn’t exactly human and wants Coley for sex and sacrifice. This isn’t the first or the last time Coley would be in this sort of position, the magnetic sexual attraction to both men and women is one of his supernatural traits throughout all of Blackburn’s series, as are scenes of flagellation, bondage, and sexual violence—especially the threat of castration, which appears in Return to Voodoo Island and reappears here. As in “Flowers of Evil,” Coley’s escape from this particular peril is somewhat miraculous—not a great storytelling trick, and one which Blackburn overuses a bit. Not that readers would know that unless they hunted out some of the stories that Fantagraphics did not reprint.

Blackburn would return to Coley and the Cthulhu Mythos in a longer, more involved, and even weirder storyline titled Dagger of Blood (1997), which makes brief reference to Garth and the events of “Shadow over Darkcliff.” Yet it reading the stories in order gives a better sense of the ideas that Blackburn was developing. Coley is presented as this perfect bisexual heartthrob, while characters like Garth and the antagonist of Dagger of Blood are both attracted to and hate Coley because of their own deformed bodies. There is a strong element of body dysmorphia to those characters, really only implicit here and more fully developed (and exploited) in Dagger of Blood, which fixates on genital mutilation.

It feels like Blackburn was working through some things, if only in art and writing, and perhaps only for his own entertainment. Certainly Blackburn was aware of the main focus of his comics—Coley has no shortage of sexual partners on the page, in explicit detail, both men and women—and the mundane drama of trying to keep his lovers happy is a counterweight to the more fantastic elements of Lovecraftian horror, even as the action and horror plots provide some relief from the soap opera.

When you look back at the history of LGBTQ+ characters and themes in comics, Blackburn’s work arriving when and where it did—first in self-published underground comix, and then after the CCA waned in series from an independent press which stressed the erotic angle—makes sense. It took decades after the Stonewall Riots for LGBTQ+ folks to gain greater recognition, acceptance, and basic rights in the United States, and such works were slow to find a place in mainstream comic books and strips. The underground was more willing to accept these nonconforming works with LGBTQ+ characters and to have discussions about subjects like homosexuality, polyamory, bisexuality, kink—and, yes, how the occasional bit of Lovecraftian horror fit into the mix. At the time, homosexuality in the Mythos was limited to stories like Ramsey Campbell’s “Cold Print” (1969), and those were few and far between.

Reading all of John Blackburn’s Coley saga is damn near impossible these days. Fantagraphic’s individual issues and reprint collections are long out of print and command collectors’ prices; the Idol of Flesh comics are reprinted in Coley Running Wild Book One: The Blade and the Whip. Several other adventures by Coley were published or re-printed in the gay comics anthology Meatmen, though there is no complete index for that series as yet.

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.

Minky Woodcock: The Girl Called Cthulhu (2025) by Cynthia von Buhler

Eldritch Fappenings

The following review is of a work that contains cartoon nudity, and some images are reproduced.
Reader discretion is advised.

In 2017, writer-artist Cynthia von Buhler introduced the world to Minky Woodcock, private detective, in a 4-issue series The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini, published under the Hard Case Crime imprint of Titan Comics. The series was a clever mix of hardboiled detective themes with historical characters, with the bisexual and extraordinarily intelligent and adaptable Minky Woodcock often ending up in dangerous situations and/or sans her clothes—but also finding or fighting her way out again. The series was followed up with a sequel, The Girl Who Electrified Tesla (2021), and then The Girl Called Cthulhu (2024), which was lettered by Jim Campbell.

*Minky Woodcock: The Girl Called Cthulhu* (2025)

The plot is drawn from history, dealing with Lovecraft’s relationships with Harry Houdini and Aleister Crowley, slightly fictionalized for purposes of the plot, but in general faithful to the timeline—with careful reproductions of Weird Tales covers and effort made to reproduce real people, places, and events. There are a number of fun little Easter eggs for Weird Tales fans in the pages, captured in von Buhler’s own style, who favors a heavy line and stylized coloring that echoes noir and giallo films.

At its heart, Minky Woodcock: The Girl Called Cthulhu is a rather traditional detective/mystery story, tied up in a historical setting and with some added titillation thrown in. The depiction of H. P. Lovecraft and his wife Sonia are synthesized from various sources, notably The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis, but aren’t particularly cruel or inaccurate given the needs of the story. Buhler flaunts her artistic homages, such as Hokusai’s “Diver and Two Octopi,” and is one of the few artists not afraid to depict Howard’s penis. Whether that’s a warning or an enticement to read the book is something I leave up to the readers.

It is a fun book, and plays to both Lovecraft and Crowley’s particular legends. Cynthia von Buhler has obviously done a good bit of research, and she wears it on her sleeve, including a section at the rear of the collected edition (and in the individual issues) explaining some of the details:

The investigations portrayed in the Minky Woodcock series are grounded in fact, the result of my extensive research. I acknowledge that some of the details may seem peculiar leading to numerous questions. Here are my responses to them. – CvB

Is all the research correct? Well, there’s no evidence Sonia H. Greene heard Crowley at the Sunrise Club (though she did attend the club), and no evidence Crowley read Lovecraft. The comparison between Lovecraft’s fiction and Crowley’s magical writing is the stuff of wishful occultists, as shown in the opening of the Simon Necronomicon. But for fictional purposes, these are pedantic niggles, and certainly other authors that have posited Lovecraft/Crowley interactions have gone further and been more ahistorical. A more interesting tidbit is the question of Lovecraft’s prejudices:

Lovecraft was a racist and anti-Semite. Why would you honor him with the title of your book? I highly doubt he would have married a Jewish woman.

Lovecraft was married to Sonia H. (Haft), a successful Jewish milliner and amateur pulp fiction writer, from 1924 to 1937. She tried to educate him as best as she could, and by the end of his life, his views had changed somewhat, but he said some pretty awful things in his day. I make his outrageous beliefs absolutely clear in my book.
—Cynthia van Buhler, Minky Woodcock: The Girl Called Cthulhu

While von Buhler doesn’t answer the first question directly, I think the book itself makes the point clear: Lovecraft was weird, and is the connective tissue between Houdini and Crowley, the three together providing a bridge from rationality to occultism and weird fiction. Lovecraft comes across as a bit stiff and surreal, but that’s not unusual for fictional depictions of HPL, and if the effort is made not to hide Lovecraft’s prejudices, neither does she make the effort to depict him as a cartoon caricature of a bigot. Sonia gets less attention, unfortunately, but her part in the proceedings is a minor one.

Ultimately, this isn’t Lovecraft’s story, or Crowley’s, but Minky Woodcock’s. A dame detective who finds herself in strange company and dangerous situations, surviving largely by her ample wits. While not quite as bloody and fierce as Max Collins’ Ms. Tree, there is that same sense of a woman in a primarily male occupation dealing with society’s preconceptions and some quite ruthless characters—and, sometimes by the skin of her teeth, coming out alive if not always on top.

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.

“Uhluhtc’s Sacrifice” (2013) by Grace Vilmont

Eldritch Fappenings

This review concerns a work of erotica, and as such may involve text and images of an adult nature.
Reader discretion advised.

Yes, if you spell Uhluhtc backwards it becomes Cthulhu. It’s not terribly clever as an authorial tool, but it is a semi-smart homage to that fine animated filme Heavy Metal.
—Grace Vilmont, “Author’s Note,” “Uhluhtc’s Sacrifice”

Uhluhtc appears in the segment “Den” in the film Heavy Metal (1982); this was an adaptation of Richard Corben’s character and story of the same name in Heavy Metal Magazine and Métal Hurlant—there being a lot more Lovecraftian material in the pages of those magazines than just in the Métal Hurlant/Heavy Metal/Metal Extra Lovecraft Special. Corben had used “Uhluhtc” in one of his early Den episodes.

Corben was likely inspired by “Count Alucard” in Son of Dracula (1943), a transparent anadrome used as an alias by the vampire played by Lon Chaney, Jr. In both cases, the purpose of the reversal isn’t really to conceal the identity as much as to plant an Easter egg for fans to find. It’s a nod and wink, a signal to readers that the writer is a horror fan too.

What makes it an appropriate title for Grace Vilmont’s tentacle and cultist erotic novella, a light-hearted and sexually explicit horror-sex-comedy that leans heavier on the sex comedy than the horror, is the way Vilmont’s approach to the Lovecraftian tropes inverts traditional ways of casting sexuality as evil or depraved. The way it plays with the tropes is very explicitly tongue-in-cheek (and tentacle-in-cheek, and every other orifice), but there is a core of message there. It is good unclean fun that manages to be sex-drenched and irreverent without being nasty or raunchy in the way of some erotica titles that play more with violent or onerous taboos, but is also very expressly contrasting itself against negative depictions of sexuality.

It does get a little silly at parts:

“I probably should have told you more. But I never expected this. You’re carrying Uhluhtc’s spawn—”

“I know,” Cassie said proudly.

“Brenda continued as if Cassie hadn’t spoken. “—and your body needs a near constant supply of human semen. I don’t pretend to understand the reasons why or the logic behind it. But you need to get fucked and fertilized right now.”
—Grace Vilmont, “Uhluhtc’s Sacrifice”

Vilmont’s tale is one of a spate of tentacle-sex-with-optional-impregnation stories that have appeared, often in waves, in ebook format; a sister to Booty Call of Cthulhu (2012) by Dalia Daudelin and its sequels. While readers may or may not be titillated by the tentacle sex, it is the approach to the setting and characters that is often more interesting from the perspective of historical context.

This tale is centered on the completely consenting cultists; who, aside from their tendency toward orgies and summoning eldritch entities, have less malice per capita than the average book club. Their robes have zippers and while race is seldom explicitly mentioned, it’s clear that the majority of characters at least are coded as Caucasian; the racial dynamics of Lovecraft’s cult of Cthulhu were left at the door, no one is being violently sexually assaulted or hurt. If there is any shade thrown in this story, it is a swipe toward the sexual repression and bigotry associated with Evangelical Christianity:

“I was sick of the way Mom used Christianity as a hammer to control me and everything else around her.” […]

“Nothing we do here is illegal in any way.”

Cassie nodded. “But the evangelicals she fell in with would consider this an affront to God.” She nodded sagely then broke character and giggled. “I used Mom’s journal and her descriptions of the orgies and everything else when I masturbated for the first time. That’s why I’m here.”
—Grace Vilmont, “Uhluhtc’s Sacrifice”

There is an example of an important broader point in horror and erotic literature. Both horror and erotica are often fundamentally concerned with transgression, whether of social and moral norms or physical laws and reality. The corpse that rises from the grave is unnatural and violates our sensibilities of the distinction between life and death; incest violates sexual norms regarding appropriate partners (and often involves some complicated relationships and power dynamics, to boot). When they come together, this collision of transgressions can sometimes achieve a greater frisson than either could alone.

However, the narrative desire for sex positivity also means that the rhetoric of the story can easily get flipped.

Satanic and Lovecraftian cults are staples of horror fiction in large part because they are cast in contrast to Christianity, the dominant religious and moral framework for much of the intended audience. This emphasis on Christianity is useful because Christian dogmatic norms of sexual behavior means you can get that element of sexual transgression—the Black Mass with the body of a naked woman as an altar, the wild ritual orgies, the occasional sexual sacrifice to an eldritch entity—which really works in stories like “The Black Stone” by Robert E. Howard.

When those sexual antics are displayed as evil, corrupting, illegal, etc.; the cult itself and its members assume those attributes. When those same cults are aligned in a sex positive manner to contrast with the often reactionary and sexually repressive ideology of Christian sects, you get to an odd place where you are essentially confirming the biases of the majority in one regard (look at all the sex they’re having!) while at the same time casting the Christians as the real bad guys (look at those prejudiced, sexless bigots.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is very much a real-world issue translated onto the page and dressed up in horror clothes. Progressive and open attitudes towards sexual activity are nothing new, but they are very much still contentious and topical issues because the folks trying to repress that sexuality (whether or not they claim to be Christian) have never given up on the topic. The cult of Cthulhu (well, Uhluhtc in this case) becomes a stand-in for all of those who have suffered prejudice from those attempting to control or repress their sexuality.

Except they can summon some tentacles to really spice things up. It is a fantasy, after all.

This progressive framing of what would traditionally be “evil” cults, particularly in terms of their approach to sex, is in part driven by the real-world shift in attitudes regarding sex and religion, and ongoing cultural clashes between opposing ideologies and questioning of traditional narratives of sexual morality and religious dogma. The syntax of the era continues to find expression in the fiction of that era, even when it’s tentacle porn. While Lovecraft and Vilmont Grace may not have been consciously modelling their respective works to reflect ongoing societal issues, it is clear when reading them in historical context that the how and why of their cults’ approach to sex was in part shaped by the issues they faced at the time.

While I had initially first found this as an Amazon ebook, it seems to no longer be available from Amazon, but is still available on Goodreads.

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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