Os Mitos de Lovecraft (2020) is a crowdfunded Brazilian black-and-white graphic anthology edited by Douglas P. Freitas and published by Skript, probably best known for the deluxe hardcover edition which has a cover modeled on the bound-in-human-skin Necronomicon ex Mortis from Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. Like its fellow Brazilian Lovecraftian anthology O despertar de Cthulhu em Quadrinhos (2016), while there is a common theme in terms of subject, the style and tone of the individual works inside varies considerably. Every style of comic art and horror can be represented under the broad remit of Lovecraftian comics, from straight adaptations of Lovecraft in exquisite realistic depiction to splatterpunk-esque gore fests with plenty of airbrush-style gore streaks to lighter works with more cartoonish tentacled Cthulhu-esque characters.
The anthology begins with an absolute masterpiece in two pages, by Argintenean artist Salvador Sanz, which originally appeared in the Spanish-language graphic horror anthology Cthulhu 23; for this anthology, it was translated into Brazilian Portuguese by Aline Cardoso and re-lettered by Johnny C. Vargas. This is a distillation of “Out of the Æons” (1935) by Hazel Heald & H. P. Lovecraft, subtracting all the human characters, the drama, and the fantastic history deciphered from the scroll in exchange for focusing on a masterful rendering of the mummy who caught a glimpse of Ghatanothoa—and paid the price.
In a cinematic journey, the reader is taken closer and closer to the ancient petrified horror. The panels zoom in on the one eye that peeks out between gnarled fingers. To the dark image that is still captured there, on the retina. The detail on the art, the pacing, and the execution of the concept, which boils down the essence of the Lovecraft/Heald horror story into two pages, is exquisite.
※
Freitas’ own contribution to Os Mitos de Lovecraft is “Sob As Trevas” (“Beneath the Darkness”), in collaboration with illustrator and comic creator Chairim Arrais. This is a tongue-in-cheek 8-page sword & sorcery story involving a nameless Cimmerian warrior and their female partner Ruivas (“Red”/”Red-hair”). Freitas & Arrais are clearly referencing Robert E. Howard’s most famous creation, Conan the Cimmerian, and aren’t coy about it:
Em algum lugar às margens do rio Estígio, sul da Aquilônia, ‘entre os anos em que os oceanos beberam a Atlântida e as cidades reluzentes, e os anos da ascensão dos filhos de Aryas’. Dois guerreiros buscam conforto após uma fuga.
Somewhere on the banks of the River Styx, south of Aquilonia, ‘between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas’. Two warriors seek comfort after an escape.
“KNOW, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas […]” —Robert E. Howard, “The Phoenix on the Sword”
The character Ruivas is depicted similarly to the eponymous character in Arrais’ standalone comic “Red+18”; whether this is intended as an unofficial crossover, an Easter egg for fans of Arrais’ work, or just a coincidence—the character could as easily be a play on Red Sonja for the Marvel Comics, albeit sans the trademark mail bikini—is unclear, and maybe unimportant.
The story itself is fairly slight and straightforward: after successfully stealing a jewel, the pair of thieves hide out in a convenient cavern…which ends up being occupied by some nameless eldritch horror.
The story really wanted more pages; there’s little opportunity to really develop any atmosphere before the tentacles emerge from the darkness, and the action sequences are correspondingly cramped and staccato-like, crammed into increasingly more panels per page. With the in media res debut, the titillation, and the swift conclusion, this is strongly reminiscent of the kind of back-up feature that sometimes ran in Savage Sword of Conan, more of a sketch of an interlude than a full-fledged story.
Yet what there is there is fun. The writing is light-hearted, the chemistry between legally-not-Conan and Ruivas is alternately playful and rocky, and Arrais’ artwork does everything the script calls for. The brief sword & sorcery interlude sets a different tone than the other stories in the anthology, featuring more sex and action than horror or outright comedy. While I would have liked for it to delve more into the Howardian vibe of horror that permeated tales like “Xuthal of the Dusk” or “Red Nails,” limitations of space have to be acknowledged. Still, it would be nice if Freitas & Arrais had the opportunity to revisit the idea at a longer length more suitable to develop the characters and story at some point.
Duane W. Rimel (1915-1996) was still in high school when he came into correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft in 1933. Rimel came from a working-class background and the Great Depression hit his family hard, but Lovecraft’s letters and science fiction fandom gave him a creative outlet that he might not otherwise have found. With Lovecraft’s encouragement (and sometimes a bit of Lovecraft’s help), Rimel published stories like “The Sorcery of Alphar” and “The Disinterment” in fan magazines and even in Weird Tales; “The Tree on the Hill” is often counted among Lovecraft’s revision stories.
Yet there is a gap in the published letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Duane W. Rimel; and a gap too in his published fiction. In the October 1936 issue of the Fantasy Fiction Telegram, Rimel’s short story “The Green Book” was published, with little fanfare. While there is no mention of the story in Lovecraft’s letters, Lovecraft did write that he received a copy of the fanzines:
The other day I received a copy of The Fantasy Fiction Telegram (hectographed), published in Philadelphia, which I had never seen before.
The Fantasy Fiction Telegramwas the organ of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. Fanzines of the period were often produced by amateur printers, who could not afford traditional letterpress printing and made use of cheap printing methods such as spirit duplication, hectograph, and mimeograph. All of these printing methods had their advantages (typically, low cost for set up) and drawbacks:
My first issue is hectographed, not mimeographed. Letters on the typewriter clog because the ink on the ribbon is very thick and such letters as “a”, “e”, “o”, “d”, “b”, “s”, “n” and etc. clog very easily. The letters “a” and “e” clog very much. An example of such a thing is found in the Fantasy Fiction Telegram.
Weir was himself a fan-printer whose publications would include Fantasmagoria, which published “An Heir to the Mesozoic” (1938) by Hazel Heald. His description of “clogging” letters is accurate, but this is frankly the very least of problems, at least in terms of durability and legibility.
The problem with hectographing is that the ink is impressed on the page very lightly, and worse, fades very swiftly under ultraviolet light. Combined with the often cheap and acidic paper that such ‘zines were printed on, and the text on the fragile pages is often illegible, or fades to almost transparency. Even scanning such paper can be troublesome and insufficient to read the text.
In March 2024, my friend Matthew Carpenter asked if I had a copy of Rimel’s “The Green Room”; the story had never been reprinted since its first appearance in 1936, and the only scan online was particularly poor on some of those pages. I did not have a copy of the Fantasy Fiction Telegram #1 then, but soon acquired one that was fortuitously on sale on eBay. Unfortunately, I soon ran into the exact same problem: parts of the story were almost completely illegible.
The header illustration is by John V. Baltadonis (JVB), and was probably produced by mimeograph; mixed printing methods were not uncommon in ‘zines during the 1930s. Nevertheless, between the two versions it is just possible to make out a more-or-less full transcription of this very obscure story…with a few caveats.
Any text in [parentheses] is largely illegible, but there is enough of the word to make a reasonable guess at what it is. Any text in [bold] inside parentheses represents words that are completely or almost completely illegible and are filled in based on context, length, and the few letter shapes that can be discerned. With the understanding that these may not be 100% accurate, but are as best as can be read under the circumstances.
※
The Green Book by Duane W. Rimel
“It is a curious book,” Arnold was saying, as he fingered the green-covered tome on the table, “I picked it up at a book store down town for a nominal sum.”
“And the title?” I inquired, eyeing the object with growing relish, since I had already recognized signs of great age upon it. One glance was enough to arouse my interest.
“Apparently the thing has none—though the subjects it covers might give a hint as to a name. So far I have read only two chapters, and both of these are about a sort of mystic symbol. In a sense it is a physical study—and in places not altogether pleasant.”
“Is the book dated?” I took my eyes from it and looked about the large room which served Arnold as a combination study and library.
“No,” he replied, “and that makes it all the more puzzling—though the value is greatly reduced in spite of its apparent age. It might have been written anywhere between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, and the English is very crude and ponderous.”
“I would like to read it some time,” I said quite truthfully, “but surely you can tell me more after reading the chapters—”
“Well, it dwells at length upon an unseen God of vague description, and it even gives crazy formulae for communicating with it . . .”
“Very interesting,” I said, though inwardly I decided that I would not, after all, care to peruse the volume. I had heard of such nonsense before.
I left some time later, learning nothing more about the book, but making Arnold promise to call us immediately if he found any points of real interest, for though I still feigned a longing for it, I was, in reality, quite suspicious of the thing. Knowing Arnold’s sensitive temperament; his obsession for obscure mental experiments and kindred twaddle, I could not comfortably associate him with an unknown work on the subject. Despite my own disbelief in the practice, I nevertheless held a half-hearted respect for certain branches of the study. His reluctance to discuss the book’s contents was not a good sign either.
With these thoughts in mind, I proceeded homeward, and as it was already late evening, I secluded myself in the library to read. But I could not keep my attention on the novel and soon cast it aside. It was near midnight, I think, when the phone rang. As I expected, Arnold was on the wire, and in a considerable state of excitement which he tried unpretentiously to hide.
“I’ve been experimenting with those formulae,” he said.
“Cut it out,” I replied sternly, “and leave the book alone”.
“But [listen]”, he went on, “I am getting [results!] The symbol—in the form of a [tangled] cord about a heart—has resolved out [into the air!]”
“Good God,” I cried, “stop it or—.”
“And,” he continued, disregarding my frantic plea, “there seemed to be something [behind] the symbol, but I couldn’t make out make out [sic] what it was . . . I think I’ll try again. . . .”
My protests were out shone his by his act of hanging up. In some heat I dashed from the room and made my way to his house, several blocks down the street. Perhaps I [could] tell little more of that fateful [evening] for when I finally reached Arnold’s study he was dead, with the strange green book open [on] the table before him. On his forehead [was] the mark of a pale red heart, and about [his] neck were dark welts like a [twisted] cord might have left. There had been little [struggle].
My first act upon recovering from the shock of reality was to secret the green book in my clothing. Then [retreating] from his house, I went home once more, for I [did] not want to be discovered near the place [where] Arnold met his death. I met no one along the way.
I placed the book in a secluded [corner] of my library, where it will not be readily noticed. Since Arnold’s passing I have often wondered just how far he had read in that green-covered volume, and some day I shall take it from the shelf and find out. Perhaps I may be able to discover the real cause of my friend’s death. . . .
※
Even though some of the most interesting parts of the story are the least legible, Rimel’s nearly-forgotten story does have a bit of a Lovecraftian flavor to it, with the eponymous Green Book suitable for shelving next to the Necronomicon, Book of Eibon, or Unaussprechlichen Kulten. It is hard to imagine that Rimel wouldn’t have shown it to Lovecraft in some form, but unfortunately any letter commenting on the matter seems to have been lost with the passage of years.
The entire scan of Fantasy Fiction Telegram #1 can be downloaded as a zip file at this link. In practice, it’s better to work with the actual pages, since different angles of light on the paper sometimes highlight the shapes of faded and nigh-illegible letters better, but in the absence of the real thing, a scan is often the only thing to work with.
The first regular movie screenings in Gold Coast colony took place in Accra shortly after 1900 when traveling showmen from other parts of West Africa began screening their wares in various coastal cities on tours that took place over a period of months. The Gold Coast’s first purpose-built movie theatre, constructed by the British businessman John Bartholomew on Station Road in Accra, dates from 1914, just seven years after the first purpose-built theatre appeared in the United Kingdom, illustrating the very rapid spread of cinema technology and film entertainment across the empire although the logistical and financial challenges of operating in a colonial location limited further expansion at that time.
The British Empire claimed the Gold Coast in Western Africa as a colony from 1821-1957, and for many years it was white British businessmen who dominated the modest cinema industry and controlled what kinds of films were shown and when—and sometimes to whom, as Batholomew’s theater sometimes staged “Europeans Only” showings (McFeely 142). The modest little industry expanded slowly through the period of silent films and into the era of sound, marketing primarily English-language British and American films to an increasingly English-speaking and English-literate audience. Films were subject to the approval of the Cinematograph Exhibition Censorship Board of Control and other British laws and regulations.
Even as neighborhood theaters continued to expand to meet the needs of a growing urban population, beginning in the 1940s, the colonial government’s Gold Coast Film Unit also used buses to distribute documentary films, newsreels, and government information films to rural areas, including propaganda films produced by the Colonial Film Unit. In 1957, Ghana achieved independence and operated as a commonwealth realm; the new government took over the colonial-era government’s production and showing of films, and this continued when Ghana became a republic in 1960, with the government-owned Ghana Film Industry Corporation established in 1964 and the state-owned West African Pictures Co. Ltd., which ran a chain of movie theaters. Foreign entities like AMPECA (American Motion Picture Export Company) had to deal not just with government regulations and censorship, but sometimes direct competition with private theater owners in Ghana.
Political unrest and economic hardship rocked Ghana for much of the later 20th century, notably the military coups of 1966, 1972, 1979, and 1981; the government finally transitioned back to civilian democratic rule in 1993. During this period of turmoil, film censorship in the country slackened:
Films such as Blacula and The Exorcist underline the mild nature of censorship in the mid 1970s: a decade earlier the censor banned almost all horror films, never mind ones that contained dramatic scenes of bodies rising from the dead or adolescent girls possessed by evil spirits.
Economic hardship still continued, with inflation, widespread unemployment, and sometimes radical shifts in government policies all making it more costly to import films and keep up ticket receipts. Worse, after the 1981 coup the government enacted a nighttime curfew that lasted for two years, effectively destroying the old business model of nighttime cinema screenings.
In the early 1980s, the first independent films were produced in Ghana, many taking advantage of the Video Home System (VHS) technology to film direct-to-video. Videocassette recorders (VCRs) first became commercially available in the mid-1950s, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that home systems became commercially viable, with VHS emerging as the dominant format. The increasing availability and lowering costs of VHS VCRs spurred the home video market; films that were previously only available in traditional movie theaters could now be rented or purchased to view at home for relatively little cost, and the smaller, more portable, and cheaper VHS cameras lowered costs for independent filmmakers. Video rental stores proliferated in countries like the United States of America and the United Kingdom, and some filmmakers and distributors increasingly skipped traditional theater releases, releasing their films directly to video.
In many ways, the VCR changed how people all over the world watched and interacted with movies. Video cassettes were now marketed directly to the public, with the art on the paper sleeve taking the place of the traditional cinema poster. The lowering cost and increasing availability of video cassette technology allowed it to penetrate new global markets. You no longer needed to build a special building just to show films, and entrepreneurs were no longer restricted to government-made entertainment or officially licensed imports. In the 1980s, as the first independent Ghanaian filmmakers were shooting direct-to-video, small VCR-based theaters and video clubs began to pop up in urban areas of Ghana like the capital Accra, often with pirated video tapes:
With the widespread introduction of foreign videocassettes into Ghana in the mid-1980s, a group of entrepreneurs created small-scale mobile film distribution empires, sending their agents out on the road with videocassettes, television monitors, VCRs, portable gas-powered generators and rolled-up canvas movie posters. This mobile cinema phenomenon quickly became a part of the cultural domain of even the smallest villages and hamlets in the Ghanaian countryside. In the early years a big city distributor or his aide would roll into town—often by bus—possibly for three or four days, and begin the local version of a movie marathon. By day this would generally occur within the confines of a family home or possibly some small communal meeting center, such as a social club; by night, weather permitting, in the open air. By the early 1990s, these mobile cinema operations had peaked and local businessmen at the village level had largely replaced their traveling predecessors, purchasing their own TV sets, generators and VCRs. In order to assist with marketing, the big city distributors continued to provide a hand-painted-on-canvas movie poster with each cassette they rented or sold.
Ernie Wolfe III, “Adventures in African Cinema, 1975-1998” in Extreme Canvas (2000) 25-26
The timeline for when exactly hand-painted posters emerged in Ghana is unclear; through the 1970s Ghanaian theaters would use standard industry posters:
The main methods of advertising to this varied clientele were posters outside the theatres and the projection of trailers for coming attractions. Until the 1970s, American and British film distribution companies supplied posters and other advertising materials at the same time as the reels of film, while locally hand-painted canvas posters, similar to the vivid panels used to publicize concert party performance, were also used at times.
Using pirated VHS tapes would mean no official marketing materials, however; to advertise these films, local Ghanaian artists were commissioned to hand paint posters, often on cheaply available materials like flour sacks (and later, locally milled linen canvases, Wolfe 26). These were typically local commercial artists—sign painters and the like—who watched the film or used existing video cassette box art for inspiration. Many of these were foreign films, produced in Hong Kong, India, Nigeria, and the United States; as a consequence, the artistic sensibilities and commercial priorities for these handmade signs were very different from Hollywood or Bollywood counterparts. Few actor names appear, and the posters may feature nudity, graphic violence, gore, and spoilers that didn’t appear in the original advertising materials.
By the late 1990s cheap preprinted publicity materials had crowded local advertising traditions out, while the video club boom had also peaked, reducing the demand for eye-catching advertising materials in a market where profit margins were razor-thin.
Pure economics ultimately brought about the demise of this once-thriving and extremely localized contemporary African painting phenomenon. By 1996, with the Ghanaian economic boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s nearing its end, mobile cinemas were all but gone and video clubs had reached their peak. Business interested outside of Ghana, often from Europe, had begun providing many more video titles to the local marketplace, and with them for the first time came a large inventory of free offset-printed posters.
Ernie Wolfe III, “Adventures in African Cinema, 1975-1998” in Extreme Canvas (2000) 26, 28
By the 2000s, the hand-painted movie poster tradition was in serious decline; the spread of television in Ghana, the advent of digital video discs, and mobile video streaming increasingly made home viewing more accessible and affordable to local audiences. The Ghanaian movie posters began to receive international recognition with the publication of works like Extreme Canvas (2000) and art gallery exhibitions. As local demand declined, the market for such art shifted. Original posters became collectibles to be displayed in art galleries and sold on eBay; new posters might be commissioned and prints sold through marketers like the Deadly Prey Gallery for a Western audience who appreciated the aesthetic, or produced for exhibitions of contemporary African art—but the original theaters and context in which these artworks first emerged is essentially gone.
Of all the films to receive the Ghanaian treatment, very few are examples of Lovecraftian cinema. While potentially any video cassette could make its way to Ghana, there were a few practical limitations when considering such works that have come to light: the film had to be released on video cassette between c. 1985-1999, a relatively available mainstream or direct-to-video release, and would need to be sufficiently lurid or gory to appeal to Ghanaian audiences—or at least, to produce a poster sufficiently striking or memorable to be subsequently noticed and reproduced for Western audiences. By no means has every handpainted movie poster from Ghana been preserved; these posters are the quintessence of ephemeral commercial art, aging quickly and destined to be eventually discarded once their purpose was served.
In practice, this rules out the early Lovecraftian films of the 1960s like The Haunted Palace (1963), Die, Monster, Die! (1965), or The Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), and more obscure or international independent efforts like Cthulhu Mansion (1990) or Cthulhu (2000), leaving a handful of adaptations and more loosely Lovecraftian films.
The Dunwich Horror (1970)
A loose update and adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror,” set in the contemporary late 1960s. While there are few gory scenes in the film, the psychedelic visuals, Rosemary’s Baby-esque plot, and a brief scene of Wilbur Whateley’s twin brother might all appeal to horror aficionados in Ghana.
Official poster for The Dunwich Horror for reference.
These posters all follow the official marketing for The Dunwich Horror (1970) fairly closely, and given when the film was released—before the “Golden Age” of hand-painted posters, when official posters were in circulation—some of the earlier artists may well have seen versions of that poster and consciously modeled their images on that. It’s notable that the poster signed A. Michael Art, which is probably the most recent, differs much more markedly in the design (even depicting actress Sandra Dee as Black!), and with several uncharacteristic elements not in the film (the grasping hands, the rope around her neck). What’s really striking is how all of the artists chose to depict the tentacles as snake-like hair, turning Wilbur Whateley’s twin into a gorgon-like figure.
Re-Animator (1985), Bride of Re-Animator (1990), and Beyond Re-Animator (2003)
The first Lovecraftian film by director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna was an update and adaptation of “Herbert West–Reanimator,” followed by sequels Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator. Unlike the rather sedate Lovecraft adaptations of the 60s, this was a horror comedy with outstanding practical gore effects, black humor, vivid action, and intense visuals. It is little surprise that it attracted the attention of Ghanaian audiences.
Official Spanish Re-Animator poster for reference.
The gore and nudity in Re-Animator, Bride of Re-Animator (labeled as Re-Animator 2 above), and Beyond Re-Animator gave Ghanaian artists plenty of opportunity to use their own imaginations, with the decapitation of Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale) given the spotlight. Two of the posters closely follow international marketing materials, albeit with their own Ghanaian spin (the reanimating reagent is replaced with blood in the first poster featuring Jeffrey Combs as Dr. Herbert West, and Barbara Crampton appears to have gotten a breast augmentation and is no longer censored by the blood drop in the lovingly rendered head-giving-head scene). While not explicitly labeled as Beyond Re-Animator, the final poster is easy to identify as that film because of the distinct depiction of the scene where a rat fights a reanimated penis (although in the film, the testicles are not attached).
Very noticeable about these posters is the skill and attention given to the lettering; while some of the artists may have closely copied other posters or appear to have been told the plot of the movie instead of watching it, the lettering on the titles is terrific.
As a related piece of work, consider this poster for Dr. Giggles (1992). Jeffrey Combs doesn’t appear in this movie—the eponymous doctor was played by Larry Drake—but Dr. Herbert West obviously resonated with at least one Ghanaian artist.
From Beyond (1986)
The second Lovecraftian film by director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna is an update and adaptation of Lovecraft’s “From Beyond.” This film doubles down on suggestions of sex and the visual effects, with inhuman monsters and grotesque transformations. Fewer posters of this work have been preserved.
The first poster for From Beyond is a not-entirely-inaccurate rendition of Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) in his makeup; although the enlarged, external pineal gland has been rendered as a snake (shades of The Dunwich Horror posters). By contrast, the second post is completely unrecognizable as any imagery from the film, and indicates that the artist probably painted it based on a description or straight from the imagination.
Evil Dead II (1987) & Army of Darkness (1992)
Director Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II and its sequel Army of Darkness defined the look of the Necronomicon for moviegoing audiences for a generation, and the image of the book as roughly bound in human skin with an actual face visible on the cover continues to influence depictions of Lovecraft’s fictional tome today. Ghanaian artists seem less interested in depicting the Necronomicon ex Mortis, however, than they were with the character of Ash (played by Bruce Campbell) with his iconic chainsaw-prosthetic.
Between the two Sam Raimi films, there are a lot of great images and scenes for Ghanaian artists. Which is why it is surprising that the artists sometimes recombine the Evil Dead imagery with that drawn from other films, such as Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Deadseries, John Carpenter’s The Thing, and what might be Pumpkinhead. Which might be false advertising, but the important thing was to get butts in seats, and the more exotic imagery of some of the posters shows how syncrenistic these posters could be, borrowing horrific images from other films to fill in the space and spice up the post.
Hellboy (2004)
This adaptation of Mike Mignola’s comic book character to the silver screen by director Guillermo del Toro falls outside the “Golden Age” of Ghanaian movie posters, and posters for it may have been produced later for Western audiences. The final Lovecraftian villain for the film gets less attention than Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and Karl Ruprecht Kroenen (Ladislav Beran).
It’s interesting to note that the first two posters both mention Ron Perlman by name, which was rare during the Golden Age unless the lead was an international superstar like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Bizarrely, David Hyde Pierce is also mentioned; Pierce had provided the voice for Abe Sapien (played by Doug Jones), but went uncredited in the film.
Some readers might be disappointed that these hand-painted Ghanaian posters aren’t more “Lovecraftian” in the sense of emphasizing imagery familiar to Western audiences—there are scarcely any tentacles, nary a Necronomicon, no signs pointing to Dunwich or Arkham or Miskatonic University—but that is part of the point and the charm of these posters. They were being created outside the wider Western cultural milieu; they were at several removes from the original fiction H. P. Lovecraft wrote, and were working within their own cultural context, with images that stood out to them or made sense for their purpose.
This is Lovecraftian cinema as Ghanaians would have seen it in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. When school kids might wait for the sun to go down, praying it wouldn’t rain, and then crowding into an open-air theater, like a drive-in without cars, all eyes glued on the screen. There were people in Ghana that could chant “Klaatu barada nikto!” as loudly as anyone else anywhere else in the world, who would hold their breath as Dr. Pretorius’ head was lowered between a nubile pair of legs, or cringe as Ken Forey was eaten alive by things just beyond the edge of perception. It was their part of a shared experience, and these posters are the remnants of that, as surely as any Mythos tome ever stood as a record and monument of a lost age.
Marvels and Prodigies is a game of contemporary Lovecraftian horror. It is intended for players who want the classic experience of investigation and horror, but who also want the possibility of exploring deeper into the Mythos—the possibility of themselves becoming dread sorcerers, ecstatic cultists, blessed avatars.
Marvels and Prodigies (2024) is an independent tabletop roleplaying game written and published by S.J.S. Hancox-Li, whose initial publication was the result of a successful crowdfunding campaign. The core books are the Seeker’s Handbook (which contains basic character creation and system rules; player characters are called Seekers) and Gardener’s Manual (advanced rules, rules for magic, Mythos lore, artifacts, adventure seeds, etc., people running the game are called Gardeners); there is also a separate character sheet and quick rules, and a starting adventure/scenario The Thing That Comes In Autumn. All are available through DriveThruRPG.
Ever since the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game was first published by Chaosium in 1981, it has been the de facto tabletop roleplaying game experience for the Cthulhu Mythos. It has never been the sole roleplaying game to utilize the Mythos or attempt to capture the atmosphere of cosmic horror on the tabletop experience, but the widespread and long-lasting success of the game—seven editions over 40+ years, plus translations into many non-English languages—along with Chaosium’s efforts at publishing (and republishing) Mythos fiction have effectively made it the default for Mythos roleplaying in the same way Dungeons & Dragons is often considered a default for fantasy tabletop roleplaying in general.
Even if someone wants to make their own original Mythos game post-1981, it is often designed in the shadow of Call of Cthulhu, and the choices that the designers make are typically an express development from or response to something in the mother game. So, for example, the essential play space of Call of Cthulhu is that the player characters are investigators who investigate some phenomena. The details are vague because it’s a very broad and adaptable idea; the player characters might be a private detective agency in 1920s Harlem hired to look into something, or G-men trying to figure out why professors at Miskatonic University keep dying, or maybe one of the player character’s rich uncles died and left them a haunted house. Dungeons & Dragons features adventurers who go adventuring, Call of Cthulhu features investigators who go investigating.
In 2002, Ron Edwards coined the term fantasy heartbreakers in an article of the same name. While the term has come to be dismissive—a way to put down games that try to be “Dungeons & Dragons but better”—but, in a broader sense, the term effectively captures a certain segment of independent games that develop out of one game but which attempt to address some genuine issue (in terms of system, setting, or concept) that the original game lacks or does badly. Call of Cthulhu has generated any number of heartbreakers by this definition, from The Necronomicon Roleplaying Game to Yellow Dawn,Haunted West, and Space Madness!.
Marvels and Prodigies is a Mythos heartbreaker, in the best sense of the word. While obviously drawing thematic inspiration from Call of Cthulhu‘s play space, this aggressively independent roleplaying game takes a very different tack in terms of system (instead of the percentile roll-under skill system of Call of Cthulhu it uses a dice pool and hits system reminiscent of Shadowrun 4th edition or Vampire: the Masquerade) and ideology. Player characters are Seekers who want to investigate the occult, and are given access to abilities that reflect their interests, and clear ways to develop those abilities…and this is very different from the standard Call of Cthulhu scenario.
Call of Cthulhu has had magic in every edition. Characters (player characters and non-player characters alike) have the ability to learn and cast spells. However, the mechanics of the game make learning and casting spells relatively difficult, dangerous, and likely to fail, and almost always come with real drawbacks for the player character that makes the attempt. There are relatively few spells that provide some genuine benefit with minimal cost, and none of them are available at the start of play; they may never be available, since placement of tomes with spells is basically up to the gamemaster. Player characters generally can’t start out as wizards like in Dungeons and Dragons, and might never be able to be spellcasters unless the gamemaster specifically encourages that.
That is explicitly part of the design space of the game: Call of Cthulhu encourages a very different style of roleplaying to D&D. Every investigation may be an adventure, but that doesn’t mean the designers of Call of Cthulhu want you killing every non-player character and looting their corpse, like player characters adventurers might expect to do in a dungeon in D&D. Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons & Dragons both focus on excitement, but CoC leans more into horror, and one aspect of horror is helplessness. In D&D, if you run into a monster you can’t defeat because your characters aren’t at a high enough level, you might argue the encounter was poorly planned or unfair because there was no way to win; in CoC if you run in a monster you can’t kill, that’s just something you have to live with. The atmosphere of the game thrives on some situations never being winnable.
It’s not that casting a fireball at the shoggoth might take some players out of the 1920s setting, the designers of the game generally appear to not want players to have fun the wrong way.
As far as discouraging player characters wizards goes, this approach to magic could be called broadly successful; the fact that the magic “system” is essentially a grab-bag of random effects with little rhyme or reason and often very little thought to organization doesn’t help. While various products and heartbreaker RPGs would tweak the system mechanics to further encourage or discourage player characters using magic, it’s broadly accurate to point out that magic rules in Call of Cthulhu and its heartbreakers are generally pretty hodgepodge and discouraging compared to games where player characters might actually want to be occultists.
What’s different about Marvels and Prodigies is that it’s not just a roleplaying game about Lovecraftian horror, but also about Lovecraftian wonder:
In Marvels and Pridigies, there is not just horror in those alien vistas, but wonder and glory too. A major inspiration for the themes of Marvels and Prodigies is Ruthanna Emrys and Anne Pillsworth’s The Lovecraft Reread. On their reading, the power of Lovecraft’s best stories comes from a tension between xenophobia and xenophilia. Alien fungi remove human brains, but enable us to travel the stars and distant worlds. An ancient race of telepaths steals souls and exterminates entire species, but does so while maintaining the greatest library in history and a convocation of our timeline’s greatest geniuses. You are descended from inhuman monsters, but their blood enables you to live forever in wonder and glory.
S. J. S. Hancox-Li, Seeker’s Handbook 2
Emrys’ and Pillsworth’s Lovecraft Reread is particularly focused on re-reading weird fiction (not just Lovecraft’s) with a fresh perspective, and without fannish reverence that might get in the way of genuine criticism. As they put it in their Introduction: “Welcome to the H. P. Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s original stories.” If a reader feels wound up by reference to “girl cooties” and Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s fiction, then they should probably go clutch their pearls somewhere else. Lovecraft is dead, his corpse isn’t going to spin in its grave, no matter what people say or feel about him.
Which is rather the point: Mysteries and Prodigies is not a game system to replace the d100s for Call of Cthulhu, it’s a game where the focus of the investigation is not just to be horrified, but perhaps to be enthralled. To find the beauty and meaning in the universe as much as the cosmic horror. A perspective that has been explored by many writers over the years, such as in the anthology Wonder and Glory Forever: Awe-Inspiring Lovecraftian Fiction(2020). The focus on occult-minded Seekers and the focus on improvement often adds a spiritual component to the game: it’s not about becoming the most powerful wizard per se, it’s about how your player character’s deepening knowledge of the Mythos and dedication to their path changes you. The journey, more than the destination.
But is it any good? As indie RPGs go, it’s fine. The system is fairly quick to learn and certainly a step up from Call of Cthulhu‘s normal resolution system; like a lot of heartbreakers, it’s got a lot of quirky little tables, lists, and the like. Some of the quirkiness is endearing, some it is just the rough edges of a product that hasn’t had several editions worth of proofreading, editing, and further development. Mythos games generally don’t have a robust system of metaphysics, and Marvels and Prodigies is no exception, so some of the abilities are still very much a grab bag of effects with gaps and potential for abuse—but powergaming is an emergent element of all roleplaying systems regardless of mechanics.
If there’s a criticism to be laid against the book’s writing, it’s that there’s not much actual sense of the setting. The game is implicitly in a contemporary real-world setting with smartphones and firearms, but the impact of things like the Internet or someone uploading the Necronomicon onto the Internet Archive isn’t really addressed, and any would-be Gardner is going to have to put in a bit of work fleshing out when and where the action takes place before introducing their Seekers.
Use of AI
Cover images and certain chapter headers were generated using Stable Diffusion XL. These images are openly licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0. […] The Stable Diffusion XL model constitutes transformative use of existing images.
Marvels and Prodigies uses AI-generated images to illustrate the book. The use of generative AI has been very contentious, given that the dataset used to train the AI was derived from human artists without credit or permission, and that the use of AI-generated images threatens the job market of human artists. In this particular case, the use of AI-generated images merits some discussion.
Independent roleplaying game books with a single creator generally have zero art budget; no human jobs were lost because no humans were going to be paid to create images for these books. Either the creator does their best to create their own art, or grabs public domain images and uses those.
The standards for fair use of copyrighted materials vary by country, but in the United States one important aspect is whether the use is transformative: simply copying an existing work is a violation of copyright, but if the work is transformed in some way—such as being part of a collage, or the addition of speech balloons to make it a kind of cartoon, etc.—it may be considered fair use.
In this respect, Stable Diffusion is being used as a fairly sophisticated spirograph (or, less charitably, a plagiarism engine where the results are so chopped up the original source(s) cannot be identified), and the resulting output is released under a Creative Commons license. While folks may still dislike that the work of various artists was used to train the AI and would have preferred blank covers to AI-generated images, from a practical standpoint this is basically little different from any creator grabbing images off the internet and tweaking them in Photoshop just enough to avoid a copyright claim, only the fiddling has been automated.
While folks should continue to push against the use of generative AI in commercial products, the availability of the technology is already making substantial inroads in non-commercial and ultra-low-budget productions like independent roleplaying games where art budgets are effectively non-existent. Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing in the future, unless legal and technical restrictions on generative AI make the availability of such applications inaccessible.
I wasn’t afraid of the storms or earthquakes that visited the bay. I wasn’t afraid of the depths of the sea or the dark things that swam there. The shadows in our house made me anxious. They came out of the corners when my mother sang and knit, and flew across her face and hands. She sang about shepherds and Hastur and the sweet smell of lemon trees at night.
One of my favorite early pieces of Lovecraft criticism is the very brief essay “Cosmic Horror” (1945) by Dorothy Tilden Spoerl, who discovered that knitting was a cure to the eldritch horrors of H. P. Lovecraft. Amelia Gorman has taken that idea and inverted it: instead of exorcism, an invocation.
As a story, there is a vast amount that remains unsaid. The core is as perfectly beautiful and simple as Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1952), but it is framed through women’s history. Knitting was often relegated to women’s work. So was computing. As Margot Lee Shetterly wrote about in Hidden Figures (2016), it was women at NASA who checked and double-checked the calculations and code for the early space missions. You the reader don’t need to know that to understand the story, but it may deepen their appreciation to know that this isn’t some random programmer; this is a story implicitly set in that point of history where women’s work was transitioning outside the home or the factory and into government offices and research labs. Education was becoming more available, and while glass ceilings and discrimination still existed, the women were in the workforce to stay after World War II, as old trades died away and new careers in computing were just beginning to take shape.
The Mythos elements in this piece are few. Hastur’s appearance is an old, old call back to an often-forgotten aspect of his artificial mythology. Before August Derleth made him a counterpart to Cthulhu; before Robert W. Chamber’s borrowed some names for The King in Yellow(1895), Hastur was a god of shepherds in Ambrose Bierce’s “Haïta the Shepherd” (1891). Shepherds have sheep, sheep make wool. It is the kind of idea so obvious you might wonder why nobody thought to put the pieces together before.
Drawing down the moon is a Wiccan practice. Witchcraft was often seen as the domain of women as well…and while the unnamed protagonist and her mother are not skinning down to dance around outside, or making candles of unbaptized baby fat, there is a current of witchy thought to the whole story. The way that women of two different generations finally learn to communicate, despite the disconnect between their lives; the passing on of secret knowledge, the suggestion of how this knowledge and power can be used against those who discriminate against them because of their gender, all partake of the idea of witchcraft without breaking out a broomstick or pointy hat or Book of Shadows.
It’s a story that works on so many different levels, but perhaps most surprisingly, it’s a story that only really works because it’s told from a woman’s perspective. A young man working as a programmer at NASA talking to his father about weaving fishing nets isn’t facing the same prejudices, the same societal expectations; “the context wouldn’t work nearly so well.
“Bring the Moon to Me” by Amelia Gorman was published in She Walks in Shadows(2015) and its paperback reprints; it was adapted as an audiobook on PseudoPod #538 in 2016.
In the years before Seduction of the Innocent and the rise of the Comics Code Authority (1954), there was an age undreamed of… Garish four-color comics of crime, horror, science fiction, the occult, and the weird filled the newsstands. The comic book had emerged as a definitive form in 1934, at first reprinting newspaper comic strips, but soon comic magazines emerged featuring original material. While the Golden Age of Comic Books is usually said to have begun with the advent of Superman in Action Comics #1 (18 April 1938), the lucrative field swiftly diversified into many different genres, not just superheroes. In the 1940s and 50s, one of the most notable and notorious genres was the horror comic.
Early comic books shared a great deal of crossover with the pulp magazines, including artists, writers, editors, and even publishers. Harry Donenfeld was the entrepreneur behind the Spicy pulp magazines that published Robert E. Howard and E. Hoffman Price—and the same magazines also published comic strips such as Olga Mesmer, The Girl with the X-Ray Eyes; Sally the Sleuth; and Polly of the Plains. Donenfeld would later expand his enterprises into the burgeoning field of comics in the mid-30s with Detective Comics, Inc.—known better today as DC Comics.
Around the same time, future Marvel Comics publisher Martin Goodman edited horror pulps. Julius Schwartz, the science fiction fan who acted as Lovecraft’s agent for At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time, became an editor for DC; Weird Tales writers Frank Belknap Long, Jr., Otto Binder, and Manly Wade Wellman, among others, all wrote comic book scripts. Weird Tales artist Virgil Finlay, Matt Fox, and Frank Kelly Freas worked in comics too. So when it came time to bring their skills to comics, many of the people involved with horror comics turned to horror pulps for inspiration.
Sometimes more than inspiration:
The one instance I remember was a very awkward one. It’s curious that I remember the name of the author who complained. It was August Derleth, a well-known horror writer. It was a story in one of our magazines, called “The Ornalean Clock,” and it involved the other staff writer. Mr. Derleth wrote in (it surprised me that he was reading these comic books) and sent us the story that he wrote which was about an Ornalean clock It was clear that it had been plagiarized.
It was very awkward. Richard [Hughes] confronted the writer, who did what plagiarists always do—that is, claimed he must have dipped into his unconscious, he wasn’t aware of it, and so forth. And perhaps the only defense he had was that it was so blatant!
Derleth’s story was “The Ormolu Clock” in Weird Tales January 1950. Derleth’s friend Frank Belknap Long, Jr. had written the first issue of Adventures into the Unknown, the first ongoing horror comic, published by the American Comics Group. Derleth was well-known for his love of comic strips, and no doubt spotted the plagiarism because he followed the horror comics after Long had brought them to his attention. Ironically, it was Derleth who would write a letter to editor Richard Hughes encouraging them to continue to publish horror comics instead of canceling the series (Forbidden Adventures 110-111).
If ongoing horror comics began in 1948 with Adventures into the Unknown, the horror comics craze was kicked off by Crypt of Terror #17 (April/May 1950) from EC Comics—better known today under its later title, Tales from the Crypt. EC’s comic stories were, for the time, often well-written and well-illustrated; they often had a moral, but they could also feature darker twist endings, and a bit of grue. The many imitators of EC were not often as conscientious in their writing or art; much like the pulp magazines, the newcomers often leaned into gore, mutilations, eye gouging, drug abuse, and nasty ends where criminals get away with their crimes.
While individual comic book publishers had their own internal codes of censorship, there was no industry-wide limitation on content except for general statutes on obscenity. So while explicit sex and nudity were largely the province of Tijuana bibles, comic books on the stand could easily present gore, mutilations, dark and mature storylines, mouldering skeletons, vampires, voodoo, cannibalism, and all the rest. Plagiarism, either of published stories or swipes from other artists, was rife. Yet the period ended swiftly.
In 1954, a moral panic swept the United States (and was echoed in the United Kingdom and other countries around the world), spurred on by Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, his many articles in newspapers and magazines, and his testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Other pearl-clutchers and parents groups added their voices, and federal oversight seemed a real possibility—so the major comic publishers came together and formed the Comics Code Authority, whose Seal of Approval would mark approved comics. Not approved? Horror.
The formation of the CCA effectively ended most horror comics publishing in the United States for a generation, and had a chilling effect on comics intended for mature audiences. They would come back—the underground comix of the 1960s and 70s especially paid tribute to EC’s horror comics, and raised a general middle finger to the censorship of the CCA, while major publishers like Marvel and DC would push back little by little with their own horror comics in the 1960s, sometimes sidestepping the CCA by publishing full-sized comic magazines. This would lead to a great flowering of horror comics magazines from publishers like Warren and Skywald in the 1970s and 80s, and lay the groundwork for comics like Heavy Metal Magazine (originally a translation of the French magazine Metal Hurlant).
Ironically, in 1954 Weird Tales also ceased publication, one of the last of the old-time pulp magazines to give up the ghost, unable to compete either against science-fiction digests or the coming men’s adventure pulps that flourished in the postwar era. An entire sub-industry was gutted almost overnight. Former pulp writers and artists who had known, talked, and corresponded to H. P. Lovecraft, who might have adapted his work to a new medium, never got that chance…well, except during the period before 1954.
While there are thousands of pre-Code comic books, there are only a handful of comics that can be positively said to be “Lovecraftian horror,” either because they directly adapt a Lovecraft story or explicitly make reference to Lovecraft’s Mythos. If one were to include other early Mythos writers like Robert E. Howard, the list would be a little longer—“Skull of Doom” in Voodoo Comics #12 (1953), for example, seems to be an adaptation of Howard’s “Old Garfield’s Heart.” But for the sake of keeping this list manageable, here are some positively identified pre-Code Lovecraftian horror comics, many of which are in the public domain and can be read for free.
A Note: Many of these early comics were completed in small studios by teams of writers and artists, working for low rates, and often without credit. As such it is not always clear who exactly worked on many of these comics, but as far as it can be determined, the names of the writers, artists, letterers, etc. will be included below.
“Captain Marvel Battles the Vampire” (March 1941)
Published in Captain Marvel Adventures #1 (Fawcett Publications), this 16-page story of Captain Marvel (now often known as Shazam) was penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Dick Briefer. The mystic hero finds himself up against one of the undead, and to better understand his foe and their weaknesses, a librarian hands him The Vampire Legend by H. P. Lovecraft. An unlikely title, but a neat homage to Lovecraft!
“Dr. Styx” (August 1945)
Published in Treasure Comics #2 (American Boys Comics Inc.), this uncredited 8-page comic presents an occult thriller whose eponymous hero is an unsung prototype to Doctor Fate, Doctor Strange, The Phantom Stranger, and John Constantine. Whoever the writer was, they must have read more than a little of the Mythos to cite Ludvig Prinn (created by Robert Bloch), Cthulhu, Abdul Alhazred, and the Necronomicon (however misspelled).
Red Dragon (Feb-Mar-Apr 1946)
Red Dragon was a mystic superhero character whose adventures ran as a back-up feature in Super-Magician Comics published by Street & Smith, better known for their pulp magazines. Whereas most of Super-Magician Comics featured stories with the fantastic adventures of real magicians like Houdini, Red Dragon could perform acts of genuine magic by reciting the mystic words of power “Po She Lo” and a bit of doggerel rhyme. Red Dragon was accompanied on his adventures by a Chinese companion, Ching Foo, and a komodo dragon.
In a three-act adventure (“The Kingdom of Evil!” v.4 #10 Feb 1946, 8 pages; “Where Time Is Not” v.4 #11 Mar 1946, 8 pages; and “End of Evil!” v.4 #12 Apr 1946, 8 pages), Red Dragon and his companions run afoul of a cult of fish-men who worship Dagon and “Chthtlu”—an entity who dwells outside of normal space and time and is a giant green malevolent interdimensional worm with a humanoid face, a bit reminiscent of Mister Mind, and possibly inspired by him. The Lovecraftian influence is scant but noticeable. Sadly, no writer or artist is credited. No writer or artist is credited.
“The Thing At Chugamung Cove!” (May 1949)
Marvel Comics’ first foray into horror was Amazing Mysteries #32 (May 1949), which continued on the numbering from Sub-Mariner Comics #31, and the first story in that issue was “The Thing at Chugamung Cove!” (11 pages)—which is, in effect, a highly abridged and transformed version of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” where a writer goes to the legendary deserted town and uncovers some frightful family history. No artist or writer is credited for this adaptation.
“Experiment … In Death” (May-June 1950)
Published in Weird Science #12 (EC Comics), this 6-page story co-scripted by Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein, and illustrated by Jack Kamen with letters by Jim Wroten, is clearly strongly inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator”; but the lengthy six-part narrative has been largely scrapped to get at the core idea of a reagent that reanimates the dead, two doctors performing experiments to do just that, and how the degradation of the brain renders them violent. In ditching the plot, so too is ditched most of the gore, making this more of an intellectual horror.
“The Black Arts” (July-August 1950)
Published in Weird Fantasy #14 (EC Comics), this 7-page story by written and inked Harry Harrison, penciled by Wally Wood, and lettered by Jim Wroten is a fairly generic tale of a young man that uses a recipe for a love potion from the Necronomicon to get a young woman to fall in love with him. Nice guys don’t use the black arts to date-rape young women, so the hint of a grisly comeuppance looks like karmic justice. The standout character here is the Necronomicon itself; which features prominently in the story.
“Fitting Punishment” (December-January 1951)
Published in The Vault of Horror #16 (EC Comics), this 7-page uncredited adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s “In the Vault” was written by Al Feldstein, penciled and inked by Graham Ingels, and lettered by Jim Wroten. While stripped of much of Lovecraft’s prose and compressed to its bare essentials, Feldstein and Ingels manage to capture the essence of this very Poe-esque tale, whose climactic ending offers a vivid visual little less gruesome than Lovecraft’s original.
“Baby…It’s Cold Inside” (February-March 1951)
Published in The Vault of Horror #17 (EC Comics), this 7-page uncredited adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” was co-written by Al Feldstein and Bill Gaines, penciled and inked by Graham Ingels, and lettered by Jim Wroten. As with “Fitting Punishment,” this isn’t a Mythos story and is very much in the Edgar Allan Poe vein, but even stripped bare to the essentials it gets the message across. “Cool Air” has been one of the more popular of Lovecraft’s stories to adapt to comics, having been adapted at least five times over the decades, perhaps because of its rather straightforward plot—and the gruesome climax.
“Prisoner on Charon’s Ferry” (March 1952)
Published in Whiz Comics #143 (Fawcett Comics), this 6-page comic of Ibis the Invicible briefly features a grimoire called the Necromicon as a prop during a lecture, which an unscrupulous attendee uses to summon Charon (and later, a vulture). No artist or writer is credited, though the Grand Comic Book Database credits Bill Woolfolk with the script.
Published in Weird Terror #1 (Comic Media), this 7-page uncredited adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” was illustrated by Rudy Palais. As an adaptation, it’s interesting to compare “Portrait of Death” to “Fitting Punishment” and “Baby…It’s Cold Inside!” The line work and anatomy is a little cruder, the coloring a bit sloppier, and the writing takes many more liberties with the source material. Yet it is very much in the same spirit as the EC Comics adaptations.
Published in The Thing #11 (Charlton Comics) this brief 4-page original story illustrated by Lou Morales is a definite homage to Lovecraft and the Necronomicon, albeit slightly garbled. The story had an odd afterlife, as newspapers—and then Frederic Wertham himself—mixed up the plot and thought that the Necronomicon a blood-drinking monster, not a tome of eldritch lore!
“Invitation to Your Wake” (December 1953)
Published in The Hand of Fate #21 (Ace Magazines), this 7-page original story has no credits, although the Grand Comics Database suggests it was penciled and inked by Sy Grudko, probably because of similarities of style. Like EC’s Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, the stories in The Hand of Fate are narrated by a mysterious cloaked figure—by the stories tend to be more serious and less darkly humorous. Once again, the major Lovecraftian element is the appearance of the Necronomicon, as the rest of the monsters in this story are typical vampires, werewolves, etc.
There are no doubt many more pre-Code Lovecraftian horror comics out there—for example in “The Fish-Men of Nyarl-Amen” in More Fun Comics #65 (DC, March 1941) by Gardner Fox (writer) and Hal Sherman (art), mystic hero Doctor Fate defeats an army of prehistoric fish-men from beneath the sea. Chris Murray in Kevin Corstorphine in “Co(s)mic Horror” in New Critical Essays on Lovecraft argue this is a definite Lovecraftian influence:
The similarity to stories such as “The Call of Cthulhu,” with the sunken city of R’lyeth [sic], and also the Deep Ones who appear in “Dagon” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931) is obvious. Indeed, the name Nyarl-Amen seems reminiscent of Y’Ha-nthlei, the name of the undersea cyclopean city referred to in “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” and is certainly related to Nyarlathotep. However, the potential for horror in the tale is undercut, as is so often the case in comics of the time, by some rather clunky dialogue.
Is it really? Hard to say. Gardner Fox in particular was well-known for riffing off of material from Weird Tales, both in prose and comics. Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian was a definite influence on Fox’s character Crom the Barbarian who debuted in Out of this World #1(Avon, June 1950), and Fox’s Kothar the Barbarian Swordsman novels (some of which were later adapted into Conan comics by Marvel!) So it wouldn’t be surprising if Fox was riffing off of Lovecraft in the 1940s. Yet, at the same time, Lovecraft didn’t hold a monopoly on fish-people either.
Another edge case is “The Last of Mr. Mordeaux,” penciled and inked by Joe Sinnott, which ran in Astonishing #11(Atlas, Spring 1952). The 5-page story definitely seems to have taken inspiration from Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”: to prove his aristocratic lineage, the American Mr. Mordeaux travels to his ancestral castle in Hungary, and finds the remains of his family—driven underground centuries ago and degenerated into reptilian creatures, yet still bearing the hallmark bulging eyes and lack of eyebrows that Mr. Mordeaux still bears. Is this any looser of an adaptation than the other pre-Code horrors listed above? Where does the line fall between inspired-by and loose adaptation? In part, “Mordeaux” seems inspired-by because the premise is so broadly evocative of Lovecraft’s stories, but not directly evocative of any particular story. “The Lurking Fear” comes closest, but even that is a loose fit.
We get into the perennial question of: “What does Lovecraftian even mean, anyway?” Defined broadly enough, any terrible entity with tentacles or dark cult might look like stepped-on Lovecraft. In some cases, that’s probably true. With the publication of Lovecraft’s stories in hardback starting in 1939 by Arkham House, and the paperback editions that followed—including an Armed Services edition during World War II—Lovecraft’s fiction was more available than many of his contemporary pulp writers. Still, the Necronomicon didn’t appear in hundreds or even dozens of comics during these decades. It was an in-joke for dedicated fans—and perhaps that is how pre-Code Lovecraftian horror should best be understood. Something for the weird connoisseurs of the horror comic book and weird fiction.
The influence of Weird Tales and its circle of writers and artists on the early comic book industry could be a book in itself, ranging from Manly Wade Wellman’s work on Will Eisner’s The Spirit to the absolute sensation that was (and is) Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian. Yet there was a certain magic to that Wild West period before the Code came down like a heavy lid, shutting down entire comic lines. While the Lovecraftian comics above aren’t particularly gruesome even by today’s standards, certainly not among the most notorious offenders of the 1940s and 50s, they were lost to time…and while the EC Comics have been collected and reprinted, many of the others remain virtually unknown.
With the arrival of the Comics Code Authority, comic books in the United States shifted ever more toward a younger audience, and toward superheroes. Unable to publish explicit horror comics, it may be unsurprising that the next Lovecraftian comics published were superhero comics like Justice League of America #10 (DC, March 1962), where the Necronomicon makes an appearance—but that would change. Underground comix creators, Marvel’s 1960s horror comics adaptations and the success of Conan the Barbarian (1970), Warren’s horror comics magazines, and Metal Hurlant’s Lovecraft special issue in 1979—the world of Lovecraftian horror comics was only growing to grow bigger and weirder.
Yet it started here, with a handful of pre-Code horror comics, many of which have never been reprinted. While these might not be the roots from which later Lovecraftian comics would grow, they were definitely precursors, part of that flood of sometimes dark, gory, and trashy four-color horror that scared parents and publishers into censorship. The first faltering steps to bring Lovecraft and Lovecraftian horror into a new medium.
The novel The Cthulhu Helix (2023) by Umehara Katsufumi (梅原克文) was originally published in Japanese in 1993 as 二重螺旋の悪魔 (“Double Helix Devil”); it has been translated into English by Jim Hubbert and published by Kurodahan Press, whose other publications include the Lairs of the Hidden Gods series of Japanese Cthulhu Mythos short fiction translated into English and West of Innsmouth: A Cthulhu Western (2021) by Kikuchi Hideyuki (菊地 秀行).
When H. P. Lovecraft wrote weird fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, the walls between science fiction and fantasy were practically non-existent. While a few arch-fans like Forrest J. Ackermann argued the point, in practice the supernatural and super-science were, from a narrative perspective, utterly interchangeable and compatible. C. L. Moore’s Northwest Smith fought alien gods on Mars; Robert E. Howard’s Conan wandered through ancient cities lit by radium-lamps; and H. P. Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth raised their buzzing voices in worship to Shub-Niggurath and the Black Goat of the Woods. There is no hard delineation between Lovecraft’s fantasy and science fiction stories.
If viewed through the lens of pulp fiction of his day, the science fiction elements in Lovecraft’s stories are exactly in tune with the kinds of pulp sci fi that showed up in Weird Tales. “From Beyond” is ultimately a gadget story and a gland story, brain-stealing crustacean aliens featured in Edmond Hamilton’s “The Shot from Saturn” (WT October 1931) not long after Lovecraft’s own “The Whisperer in Darkness” (WT August 1931) introduced the Mi-Go and their brain canisters. What differed with Lovecraft was his approach—Hamilton leaned into the adventurous interpretation of an alien invasion from another planet, but Lovecraft’s extraterrestrials were profoundly weirder, less explicable, not exactly less hostile but less prone to the even-then hackneyed tropes which H. G. Wells had covered so well with The War of the Worlds (1898).
Post-Lovecraft, science fiction and fantasy continued to grow and diversify, sometimes locking themselves into genre cages and sometimes breaking out. The early ideas of science fiction as gadget stories and space opera—The Gernsback Continuum as William Gibson put it—gave way over time to different ideas. Science-fantasies like the Star Wars and Star Trek novels and the Man-Kzin Wars anthologies played with psychic powers in far futures and galaxies far away where space travel was the norm and multiple intelligent species and cultures interacted in an intergalactic community; others focused on sociological changes, dystopic futures, future wars. The science may have been hard or soft, but the emphasis generally shifted from bright shiny new tech and worn old plots to more human stories on the effects of technology on people, the social impact and implications of new ways to communicate and interact, the question of what it was to be human.
Which, in the late 80s, gelled into Cyberpunk—the ultimate forebear of all the dizzying array of “-punk” suffixes which would be affixed to many speculative fictions to come. Broadly, cyberpunk was high tech and low life, continuing many of the same fundamental speculative technologies and advancements that came out of previous science fiction, but seen through the lens of contemporary societal issues—megacorporations, pollution, the alienation that came with technology and greater bureaucratic control of life, global computer networks, personal augmentation with cyberware raising the question of what it meant to be human, etc.
H. P. Lovecraft had written about what might, in hindsight, be called a megacorp in “In the Walls of Eryx” with Kenneth Sterling, but there was no down-and-out protagonist, no career criminals, no street to find its own uses for things. The Mi-Go perfected putting a brain in a canister, but there was no global Matrix to plug those brains into, to play out the games of the Matrix films. The ingredients for cyberpunk fiction using elements of the Mythos were there from the start—but it took a while for Cthulhupunk to manifest itself.
The Cthulhu Helix is one of the first Cthulhu Mythos biopunk novels (The Queen of K’n-yan (2008) by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健) was published around the same time in Japan, but made it into English translation first). It is very much a 90s product: fast-paced, set in a near future where corporate greed overcomes moral considerations, with a strong militaristic sci-fi undercurrent, and media-savvy some otaku-grade Easter eggs in reference to popular culture:
Things got weird. The monkey started ripping the cage apart. There was s ound of metal tearing. The Star of the show uttered a strange cry. His hairy body was channeling the spirit of Hercules.
“What the hell did you do to him?”
“That lead in the back of his skull is an on/off switch. The main players are micro-robots implanted in his hypothalamus. NCS-131 microbots.” She pointed to the macaque. “His name is Son Goku.”
Umehara Katsufumi (梅原克文), trans. Jim Hubbard, The Cthulhu Helix (2023) 125
The media-savviness is at the heart of the novel. While the aesthetic is something like Resident Evil (1996) or anime like Lily C.A.T. (1987), the Lovecraftian flavor is consciously a metaphor for the horror that’s been uncovered lurking in human DNA. There are no Necronomicons for these territories, just an awareness of the tropes as they are being applied:
Until now we’d been using C—for Cthulhu—as a basket term for all of these monsters. But we’d been getting flak about the single letter, so they’d decided to switch to what everyone else was using: Great Old Ones. GO1 for short. Bureau C was still Bureau C. C for clean, as we told people who didn’t have clearance.
There was another new term for the Cthulhu mythos, for a new entity: the Elder God. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods have been the lords of the Great Old Ones. They had imprisoned the Great Old Ones in this and other dimensions after they rebelled against their masters.
Lovecraft’s characters were not what we were facing. The Cthulhu Mythos was fiction, and any resemblance between it and the creatures we were battling was coincidence. No one knew anything about DNA or the intron regions in Lovecraft’s day. Still, he would’ve been astonished if he had known how close to reality his stories had come.
Umehara Katsufumi (梅原克文), trans. Jim Hubbard, The Cthulhu Helix (2023) 112-113
Using Lovecraft’s terminology and ideas without making his stories canon opened up a world of possibilities to reimagine and rework Lovecraft’s ideas into a contemporary syntax. In his day, Lovecraft had government agents raid Innsmouth, but 70+ years later the government response needed to shift to meet the needs and expectations of a new generation. Bureau C parallels the development of Delta Green for the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, the Laundry from Charles Stross’ The Laundry Files, and the Agency in Agents of Dreamland (2017) by Caitlín R. Kiernan and the rest of her Tinfoil Dossier series.
Which is why The Cthulhu Helix works as a Lovecraftian novel. The characters are all conscious of Lovecraft’s legacy, but for them it’s all shorthand and metaphor, a way to frame and discuss these complex ideas and relationships without getting bogged down in Elder Signs and other minutiae. The particular approach Umehara took is fairly Derlethian, but that’s not surprising considering when and where it was published.
A word on the translation: Jim Hubbert has done great service here in rendering very smoothly-flowing prose. It’s not always easy to keep a narrative comprehensible and moving in translation, but this reads very well, especially considering the occasional breaks in format and the potential for alphabet soup. Kudos on a job well done.
The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague spectres behind the common phenomena of life; but he was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake.
Lovecraftian literature is often transgressive by literary standards. Many works are not stories or plot-driven narratives in any conventional sense, and individual works have sometimes been called prose poems or mood pieces. This is fitting when you think of Lovecraft’s assertion that the weird phenomenon was the center of the story, rather than any central character—something that can be seen in “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Call of Cthulhu.”
“One Morning in August” (2023) by Cassandra Daucus is little more than a single scene, like the prelude to a post-apocalyptic film. Like many Lovecraftian tales, there isn’t much to the plot, characterization is limited, and the focus is on the weird phenomenon more than anything else. Yet there is also something Lynchian in its construction, the establishment of that “American weirdness” that Lovecraft noted in Poe, the buried emotions and resignations that underlay everyday life.
August was always hot as sin, and Bea had been disappointed to discover that the heat would redden her skin on the Nebraskan prairie even more than it did back in Boston
Cassandra Daucus, “One Morning in August”
There is that sense of loss and regret in Bea, who if not our main character is at least our prime witness for what is about to happen. The establishing shot of Bea is reminiscent of Christina’s World (1948) by Andrew Wyeth, with its vast open sky and unspoken longings. The setting, a sod house on the Nebraskan prairie, is as much part of the story as Dunwich is for “The Dunwich Horror.”
“Get in the cellar! It’s a tornado!”
James dragged her towards the house. Bea kept her eyes on the sky and allowed her gaze to drift, just in time to see the cloud over town extend a long, dark finger towards the ground. When it touched, a puff of dust exploded into the air.
Cassandra Daucus, “One Morning in August”
While the characters in the story grope toward rational explanations, like the characters in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” it doesn’t really work when what’s going on is inherently irrational. The reactions of characters in a horror movie only occur because they do not know they are in a horror movie; it is the audience who knows going in that the situation is not normal, who has seen films and read books like this before and is familiar with the tropes.
In other hands, “One Night in August” could have been extended in any number of ways. Like a low-budget film that quickly corrals all of its characters into a single room, an entire long drama could have been played out in the cellar as Bea and her family wait for things to pass and the sun to shine again. Tensions could rise, long-buried emotions could come to the surface, the seedy underbelly of the family could have been exposed and brought to light like a vivisected frog, its limbs pinned, guts on display for curious children to poke at. Instead, Daucus opts for a swifter ending, a more overt horror, a swifter destruction. Nothing wrong with that, it’s an artistic choice.
If there’s a criticism to be made about the story, it’s that some of the tropes are a little too familiar. For much of the story, Bea is framing things through her own perspective, but near the end of the tale things shift into a kind of gear normally only seen in Italian horror movies in the 1970s and 80s. While it is weird to think of it this way, we as a culture have developed a thematic language for cosmic sin. The idea that something from outside wants or needs a sacrifice, that it requires a priest or cult to serve those wants and needs…it would have been been more horrific in many ways if it had the raging, uncaring, impersonal destruction of a tornado. Something that couldn’t be bargained with, or fought, too alien to be cruel.
But all she could do was feel it happen.
Cassandra Daucus, “One Morning in August”
What works about this story is that it is a cut gem. While it may tie in thematically to a whole corpus of Lovecraftian literature, it stands on its own quite well as an effort to define a single mood in a single scene. Complete unto itself.
“One Morning in August” (2023) by Cassandra Daucus was published by Psychotoxin Press, and can be purchased here.
Possibilities hinted from under the jaded metropolitan certainties in his mind; old and eldritch ancestral memories, back when beautiful virgins were wrapped in glorious robes and set out on a rock in the sunlight to be cheered by the people—and to await the dragon. The beastling was no dragon, he knew. He was a brief scrawl of hideous calligraphy write on the world, a blunt and blasphemous word.
Erin Brown, “A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” in FIYAH #22 (2022), 27
Today, Cthulhu can be quaint. Even snuggly. The majesty and fantasy of the vast, alien horror has been worn away by decades of merchandising, diluted by endless pastiches, a multitude of jokes. Hundreds of artists have tried their hands at depicting the supposedly undepictable, and the general consensus is “giant squid guy.” Often with a crotch as smooth and featureless as a Ken doll. After all, a vast, ancient entity may be one thing, but a penis? Utterly unacceptable. There may be children present. You can’t put that on a plushy.
(You absolutely can. Some people have. I digress.)
Cthulhu doesn’t have to be neutered. Like every mode and genre of horror, there are folks who say Lovecraftian horror isn’t scary anymore, if it ever was. It is ridiculous, it isn’t real, doesn’t raise a bead of cold sweat, no feces exits the rectum without permission, etc. etc. Most of these reactions are to the sanitized, Ken doll version of Cthulhu; the safe version they’ve seen a thousand times in comics and on stickers and t-shirts. Scratch that surface, and in truth, the shudders were largely always metaphorical. Few folks had nightmares about Cthulhu when the ink was still fresh on the pulp paper of Weird Tales, just as few folks died of fright when they read Dracula in the 1890s, or saw it i movie theaters in the 1930s. The idea that horror is supposed to scare the reader is essentially misguided.
At its best, weird fiction gives the reader’s imagination the tools so they can scare themselves. The realization of something, either from a dry but technically accurate description or an elaborate and expensive computer-generated image, can never approach the power of suggestion. In the case of Lovecraftian literature in particular, the suggestion is that there is something unknown and perhaps unknowable, that is so much weirder and worse than whatever familiar horrors we’re used to dealing with.
In one age, the epitome of horror may have been the vampire or werewolf; a few movies and dozens of shorts stories and novels later, and folks can confidently talk about silver bullets and crucifixes, blessed swords and fire, lasers and giant mirrors. The fun may still be there, but familiarity robs these creatures of the element of surprise. Of course, there are always exotic horrors—from other cultures, other subgenres. Crossing mythologies, crossing genres, is an old trick. How does a European exorcist deal with a penanggalan or yōkai? Oooh, what happens if a Sumerian vampire invades medieval Japan?
This is the philosophical underpinning of Erin Brown’s “A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” in FIYAH #22 (2022). On the surface, an urban fantasy predator stumbles into a different genre, and it takes them a while to figure that out. The beastling’s ignorance is almost self-destructive, but for the audience, it’s instructive. Readers equate “eldritch” with “scary thing with tentacles” all too often; they snicker and make jokes about Japanese anime, hentai, and naughty schoolgirls. Silver bullets are to werewolves what naughty schoolgirls are to Cthulhu; albatrosses around their necks. Ideas that serve to lessen and diminish the original horror by making their limits and habits more defined, more rational…more knowable.
Brown gets it. What’s better, Brown can write it. While Lovecraftian horror started out in a rather prudish period, and Lovecraft himself asserted that “The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones,” etc., more recent generations tend to remember that bloody bones can serve a purpose. There is nothing wrong with gore, or a little body horror, especially if they serve the needs of the story and are carried off with sufficient skill. There is a certain grounding that comes with the very frank reminder that people may piss themselves when they’re scared, that murders are very rarely clean events that leave a neat and bloodless corpse.
Ultimately, the beastling’s idea of himself as “a brief and hideous scrawl” is more accurate than he knew. Like most creatures, the beastling sees itself as the center of its own narrative; a singular horror in a big world. It cannot conceive of a greater horror than itself…and that lack of imagination is, at heart, what the story is about. To look out into the darkness, see the shadows play, and not wonder at what strange shapes may cast them isn’t just dull…in some cases, it’s damn near fatal.
“A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” by Erin Brown was published in FIYAH #22 (2022).
What he truly wanted to do was to find a way to express the feelings and images that had begun to creep into his head when he dreamt – a vast cosmos, something swirling and dancing in the void beyond, a body dancing to a distant beat and tendrils reaching out to take his hand.
Madness is a key theme of cosmic horror, an aspect of both attraction and repulsion. Weird fiction rarely accurately depicts mental health issues, but it has often sought to capture something of the mystique of the distorted sensorium, the disordered mind, the transition from “normal” and prosaic consciousness to one that has moved beyond rationality and into an increasingly different world view and mode of thinking. In traditional horror fiction, that state of altered consciousness is unreal—in weird fiction, that state is the true reality, a glimpse behind the veil, a realization of previously hidden truths.
Artists are a common lightning rod for such eldritch revelations, as exemplified by Lovecraft’s horror in clay:
Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself “psychically hypersensitive”, but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely “queer”. Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of aesthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.
Other writers picked up on the idea; “Something in Wood” (1948), “The Tulu Jar” (2000) by Ann K. Schwader, “The Summoned” (2015) by Clint Collins, a macabre gallery could be filled with Mythos-inflected objets d’art. Yet few stories focus on the headspace of the artist, the experience of creation, the relationship or insight or period of possession which shapes ordinary materials into an effort to capture in some form the extraordinary.
Which is ultimately what Zoe Burgess-Forman’s “Writhing Mind” is. As a story, it is almost a snapshot; there is little build-up and the denouement is cursory. These are the boring parts of the story anyway, the background and exposition. By the time the story starts, the events have already begun; the reader is only carried along for the ride, like a voyeur, watching the artist struggle to create, their descent and transcendence. The bloody climax rolls out like the first few minutes of a horror film, normal people too stuck in rational thinking to recognize the signs or heed the warnings, leaving behind only blood, bodies, and a particularly tenacious and circular idea.
They had slightly moist quality to them, not unpleasant but just enough to make them glide over his skn and make his body tingle with anticipation. They reminded him, now he collected his thoughts, of the tentacles of an octopus as rounded mouths sucked on his flesh like hungry kisses.
The artist is queer for tentacled things from beyond. This is entirely appropriate: the same open mind that fuels their eldritch artwork goes pseudopod-in-hand with their sexuality. In the context of the story, there is no introspection that goes into this. The artist is already too far along in the process to question their sexual shift, or to comment on it rationally. No passing reference to Hokusai’s erotic print Tako no Ama, no anatomical studies of octopus or squid, or anything that could serve as a foreshadowing of a growing paraphilia that comes to consume them.
In hindsight, that feels like a mistake, because the artist is the only queer character in the story. Their queerness becomes inextricable from their madness, and lacking the boring build-up of a background, a deeper understanding of the character’s mindset and sexuality, the combination of sensuality, violence, and mental illness can be mistaken as causal rather than correlation. It feels like the story would have benefited from giving the artist a queer friend, someone that understood them and could relate to them but was unaffected. This was a device that Lovecraft used in stories like “The Thing on the Doorstep,” where a more straitlaced friend tells the story of a weirder associate.
Ultimately, “Writhing Mind” feels like a literary exercise with many familiar building blocks. It is not explicitly a part of the Cthulhu Mythos, there are no references to the Necronomicon, and the eldritch entity that fills the artist’s dreams and body is called by no familiar barbarous name. Yet it is clearly working in the same mode as works like Prnomicon and Strange Bedfellows, even if it mixes the ingredients a little differently…and not without a degree of skill.
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 