Today’s Tentacle Tuesday is going to be succinct, as I have traded tentacles for mushrooms this week! Keep an eye on Friday 😉
See you in a few days!
~ ds
Tentacle Tuesday: Waiting for Fungi
Cthulhu
Tentacle Tuesday: What Lurks Within the Grab Bag?
Since the previous instalments of Tentacle Tuesday had specific, unified themes, the time has come for another anything-goes grab bag of goodies. That being said, I am in the mood for bright colours, as the lawns and plants around these parts have acquired that drab, dusty shade of brownish green that’s characteristic of August and its dry spells…
This epic Cthulhu-vs-Godzilla scene was drawn by Chaz Folgar for a 2010 online illustration competition – the exact wording of the challenge was “Cthulhu and Godzilla with the fate of Japan in the balance“. I’m definitely betting on Cthulhu (see Tentacle Tuesday: Ho ho ho, Mr. Lovecraft if you need a refresher!), ancient and powerful and eternal being that he is. Godzilla, in the meantime? Just a prehistoric, overgrown lizard (with apologies to all Kaiju film buffs).
In a somewhat different vein, here is a postcard/cartoon/illustration by British artist Ann Edwards (visit her website!) She has a bouncy, colourful style that’s really fun… especially if there are tentacles involved.
In a similar format, and perhaps even more colourful, is this cartoon that I found in an article about My Octopus Teacher, a movie about the filmmaker Craig Foster and the octopus he makes friends with. Amazingly (and not in a good way), the article did not specifically credit this image to anybody in particular. Did Foster document his octopus shenanigans with cartoons? Is this the work of some completely unrelated artist that was included because it was on topic?
Peter Bagge’s Other Stuff (Fantagraphics, May 2013) is a collection of Bagge’s shorter stories from the 90s and 2000s. I’m not really a Bagge fan (his sense of humour is too based on making audiences cringe), but I enjoyed reading this one, though my inclination to revisit it is very low.
~ ds
Into the Inky Shadows With Jerry Grandenetti
« Jerry Grandenetti started out ghosting The Spirit, and nobody… NOBODY… captured the spirit of The Spirit better. Not content to stay in Will Eisner’s shadow forever, he forged his own unique style leading to a highly successful comics career lasting decades. » — Michael T. Gilbert
Since my very first encounter with his work, Jerry Grandenetti (1926-2010; born ninety-five years ago today, another Thursday April 15th) has endured as one of my true artistic heroes. But he’s not celebrated much at all.
Though he’s worked extensively on The Spirit, he’s treated as a bit of a footnote in the Eisner hagiography. His DC war work is well-regarded, but he’s inevitably overshadowed by the Joe Kubert – Russ Heath – John Severin trinity. Besides, by and large, the war comics audience doesn’t overlap much with the spandex long johns crowd. Grandenetti has only very occasionally and timidly dipped a toe into the super-heroics fray, and he was far too unusual for overwhelming mainstream acclaim.
In fact, aside from the couple of converts I’ve made over the years, I can only think of three fellow torch-bearing aficionados: Michael T. Gilbert (who digs best the early, Eisner-employed Jerry); Stephen R. Bissette (who favours the spooky 60s and 70s work); and Don Mangus, who’s most into the DC war stuff. I daresay I enjoy it all, but my taste is most closely aligned with Mr. Bissette’s on this particular point. Let’s sample a bit of everything, insofar as it’s feasible to sum up a career spread out over five decades… in a dozen-or-so images.
In 1954, the powers-that-be at National Periodical Publications (you know, DC) gave Grandenetti some latitude to experiment with their War covers. Grandenetti produced an arresting hybrid of painted and line art. The process involved a grey wash painting that was photostatted, with flat colour laid over the resulting image. The first few attempts yielded striking, but nearly monochromatic results. A bit farther down the pike, the production department got more assured in its technical exploration.
DC was generally hesitant to entrust its more established properties to the more “out there” artists. In the cases of Grandenetti and Carmine Infantino, the solution was to match them with the weirdness-dampening inks of straight-arrow artist Murphy Anderson. And you know what? It did wonders for both pencillers and inker.
This is The Spectre no. 6, October, 1968. A tale told by Gardner Fox (and likely heavily revised by hands-on editor Julius Schwartz, a man who loved alliterative titling) and superbly illustrated by the Grandenetti-Anderson team. Steve Ditko aside, Jerry Grandenetti had no peer in the obscure art of depicting eldritch dimensions (you’ll see!)
So there you are. Just the tiniest tip of the iceberg. Happy birthday, Mr. Grandenetti!
-RG
Tentacle Tuesday: Ho ho ho, Mr. Lovecraft
Christmas is approaching fast, so naturally it occurred to me that I have never really done a proper H.P. Lovecraft Tentacle Tuesday. What, does the idea of a festive Cthulhu sound strange to you? But he’s the one who brings nameless horror… err, gifts to little children!
I’d like to put us all in the proper chipper mindset, especially since cheer (festive or otherwise) is so hard to come by this horrendous year. For starters, I can make a few decorating suggestions. How about some Christmas ornaments with tentacles? Or perhaps a Cthulhumas wreath? You say your partner would most certainly object… Well, how about an ugly Cthulhu sweater to impress people at your next Zoom meeting? No, not your cup of tea, either? Some people are so hard to please! Well… in that case, let’s just check out some comics.
I actually think that there’s not much point in attempting to adapt Lovecraft stories into comics – it’s just too hard to do properly, and few (if any) people have managed it. How can you transform a description like « the words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself* » into images on paper? Yet I can sympathize with artists who tried to do just that – the grandeur of Lovecraft’s visions is a compelling force. At the same time, he has become a bit of a ridiculous figure by now, his legacy awkwardly stuck between reports of his racism and misogyny and the current ubiquity of the characters he created. Oh yes, it’s tentacles all the way down for this father of our (nearly) collective tentacular obsession… down into memes and light-hearted pokes that abound online, spanning the range between ‘amusing’ and ‘blatantly stupid’. It is possible to buy a cuddly baby Cthulhu toy, for instance (and I would have purchased it, if it hadn’t gone out of stock).
*quote from At the Mountains of Madness. I recommend reading H.P. Lovecraft, the pioneer of being unable to describe the indescribable, for a clever discussion of « the collapse of language in the face of an emotionally unhinging reality », how Lovecraft handled it, and how a clever reader could employ his technique in the modern world.
First we’ll take a look at a few serious attempts to adapt HPL stories into comics… ones with tentacles, of course, as this is Tentacle Tuesday, after all. Let’s face it, there have been many, many comics series (and I do mean many) based on, vaguely or directly, on Lovecraft material… and the bulk of this has horrible (in my humble assessment) art, and stories to match. I’m really not interested in reading about how Lovecraft teamed up with Houdini to save Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, but it may be the coolest thing somebody has ever heard. Your own mileage may vary – for every Lovecraft fan who shudders at bad adaptations of his oeuvre, there’s one (or two) who just want to “get to the good stuff, not be derailed by a rambling description of the bloody countryside” (actual quote).
For a detailed look at comics adapting Lovecraft, head over to this Cthulhu Mythos Comics list.
I’ll begin with Tom Sutton visuals – after all, he’s one of our esteemed Tentacle Masters.
On the other hand, Richard Corben opted to for clearly defined monsters when he illustrated Dagon:
I don’t actually like Svensson’s art that much, with the exception of this comic, but I dig his animation work, for which he builds monsters out of clay! Watch Out of the Old Land, his latest from September, 2020.
I mentioned earlier how the Great Old Ones have been repurposed as butts of jokes and tropes for memes. Well, I’m not here to share memes (other than very occasionally), but I do have a few nice illustrations-cum-cartoons to share.
Readers, do you have any favourite comics adaptations of Lovecraft?
~ ds
Hallowe’en Countdown, Day 8
« 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.
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
Who's Out There? 