Them Post-Millennial Heebie-Jeebies

Peeking under the veil for more contemporary manifestations and bugaboos.

Tentacle Tuesday: Your Basic Contemporary Tentacle

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Today’s Tentacle Tuesday veers away from more traditional tentacles and such, straying into more current territory where normal octopuses fear to tread. In a battle between a member of the Octopoda and a Lovecraftian horror, the latter would indubitably win…

Exhibit no. 1: a painting by Julián Totino Tedesco that uses the classic combination of sexy and frightening. It was used as the cover of Creepy no. 21 (Dark Horse Comics, August, 2015)…

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And here’s the actual cover:

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I think adding « NEXT STOP: TERROR » was a tad unnecessary, not to mention cheesy. Isn’t a girl with a tentacle coming out of her face terrifying enough? Dark Horse pompously describes this issue as « featuring spooky sequential storytelling from graphic greats », promising we’ll be « sweating with sickening satisfaction », proving that there *is* such a thing as too much alliteration.

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Next up is a charming bibliophile, who looks mournful rather than scary.

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« Stop interrupting while I’m trying to write! » Providence no. 11 (December 2016). Century Variant art by Raulo Caceres, a Spanish comic artist.

No-one will be surprised to find out that Providence (12 issues published from 2015 to 2017), written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Jacen Burrows, is meant to be considered as belonging to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. In his 2013 interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid, Moore had pointed out that Providence required a staggering amount of research on his part, and that he had been « living and breathing » Lovecraft while writing it. The following exchange illustrates this research-focused approach:

AM: I’m even trying to check out what the weather was like, which is difficult to establish other than in broad generalities, but I can at least sort out what the sky looked like, and what the phases of the moon were – which is something that Lovecraft used to take pains to do, so I feel that I should as well.

PÓM: Find out if the moon was gibbous, or something like that?

AM: Yes, that was it, he used to – yeah, gibbous, the gibbous moon, which is nearly, what, three-quarters full, waxing or waning?

PÓM: Yeah, three-quarters full. It’s a wonderfully Lovecraftian word.

AM: In one of his stories he changed all the dates in it because he found out that a gibbous moon hadn’t happened on the day that he said it had. He said, ‘this is a lesson for all aspiring writers of fiction.’ And I’ve taken that to heart.

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Finally, we have another Dark Horse entry:

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Hellboy: Seed of Destruction no. 2 (1994).

The sketch for the cover (1993):

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Now we know what’s behind the hand-and-sword symbol!

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, the first Hellboy mini-series (4 issues, March-June 1994), was plotted/illustrated by Mike Mignola and scripted by John Byrne. (It was also the basis for 2004’s Hellboy movie, which you can safely ignore, IMHO.) You can read the whole thing here. The individual issues were collected in a paperback in 1994, which also contains a couple of bonus stories from various sources.

The insides have sufficient tentacles to please even the pickiest, most tentacle-crazed reader:

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~ ds

 

Hallowe’en Countdown, Day 8

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« But the Ancient Evil remains… waiting to rise and prey on an unsuspecting humanity »

Adapting Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s sinister literature to other media has always been as tempting as it is daunting. It absolutely requires the discernment to know when to hold back and when to go all out, and therein lies the difficulty: it’s a rare gift.

Eureka Productions’ Graphic Classics series of anthologies wisely chose, for the cover of its HPL entry (from 2002), a detail from Todd Schorr’s wry 1993 painting, H.P. Lovecraft’s Fried Seafood Cart.

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Schorr, born in 1954 in New York City, first became aware of HPL in high school and « became totally consumed in his writings. » « When read now », continues Todd, « Lovecraft’s work still retains the same spine-shivering thrills I first experienced. »

More Schorr: http://www.toddschorr.com/

And a view of the full painting (taken in a gallery, pardon the reflections):

– RG

Hallowe’en Countdown, Day 1

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« I’m being haunted by all the meat I’ve eaten* »

Welcome to our daily rending of calendar leaves ’til All Hallows’ Eve 2017 is upon us, all flailing fangs and claws…

We open with a salute to our kindred evil spirits, the ticklish rogues who bring us The Simpsons. Their Halloween Special / Treehouse of Horror episodes, by now numbering thirty entries, have done much to keep the torch of seasonal eeriness ablaze over the years.

The comic book spinoff series is none too shabby, either: launched in 1995, it also appears once a year, when noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay**. It shares its parent show’s penchant for references to comic books and magazines, toys and films and tv shows, some recent, some rather ancient, some known to all and some surprisingly (and wonderfully) obscure.

To meekly invoke but a few: Ba(r)t Out of Hell, The Thing With Two Heads, Famous Monsters of Filmland (down to the logo), War of the Colossal Beast, shock rockers Gene Simmons, Alice Cooper, Rob Zombie and Pat Boone (shudder), EC’s Tales From the Crypt, Mars Attacks, the Bride of Frankenstein, Gremlins, Ghostbusters… and these are just the covers.

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This is The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror no. 14 (Bongo Comics, Sept. 2008). Cover by Bill Morrison. Check out a gallery of the issues here!

*and pastries and snacks, et cetera. A quotation from Godley and Creme’s 1981 art-rap, Snack Attack.

**Ray Bradbury’s The October Country

– RG