Lovecraftian Sketches

52 comics.

Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Great G’tsubyä

by on March 14, 2012 at 9:25 am
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Happy Wednesday morning! I just got a phone call from the delivery company and I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of a few pallets of The Dream-Quest Graphic Novel sometime today or tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’m starting a new feature on this blog: Monday-Wednesday-Friday Lovecraftian sketches! Some of these are sketches done for Kickstarter supporters, others are original. This particular one — one of the less explicitly Cthulhuvian sketches — was drawn for one of my good friends and shows Gatsby, his pet rabbit. Since I’ve seen said rabbit in person (I made my SAN roll), I hope I have properly captured its non-Euclidian visage. The writhing of its horrible ears! THE TWITCHING OF THAT UNSPEAKABLE PROBOSCIS!

Also, I’ve got a new strip of King of RPGs, my other webcomic, going up today! Stay tuned for more news about the delivery of the books ASAP, and more Lovecraftian sketches (the next one will be more canon) on Friday.

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: Cthulhu

by on March 16, 2012 at 7:11 am
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The nice thing about drawing Cthulhu is you can never draw him the same way twice. Lovecraft’s description is specific enough to give you something to work with (octopus, dragon, bipedal, scaly wings) and yet vague enough to leave lots of imagination space. I recently found this gallery page with 101 great Cthulhu images.

If I had one complaint about drawing Cthulhu, though, it’s that he’s so humanoid (in most interpretations). It’s hard to get away from the basic skeletal structure/body shape of a human being, with the legs this way, the shoulders this way, the hands this way… but since he’s an alien from another planet, and not just a demon or something, technically all his joints and limbs should be arranged in a totally different fashion that just happens to resemble a human being, if at all. But this kind of intricate musculo-skeletal rearrangement (assuming that Cthulhu has a skeleton) is hard to do, and even when artists do come up with really alien body-shapes (like some of the designs in Avatar), often these new shapes distract from the creature’s effect rather than adding to it… leaving me thinking “gosh! that monster moves like a metronome!” or “gosh! that has the body shape of a paper clip!” rather than the more appropriate “OMG~!! THAT MONSTER IS CHASING THE PROTAGONIST!” In short, it’s challenging to draw him so that he doesn’t look like a guy in a Toho rubber monster suit. This drawing doesn’t entirely get away from that, but I liked it.

It’s Friday, so that means another King of RPGs webcomic! And, if there’s a monster or deity you want me to draw, feel free to commission a sketch!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Dunwich Horror

by on March 19, 2012 at 6:19 am
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“The Dunwich Horror” was one of the first Lovecraft stories I read, along with “The Rats in the Walls”, in the 1940s-era anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. It’s still one of my favorite Lovecraft stories, for the sheer craziness and awfulness of the monsters.

Like Cthulhu, the Dunwich Horror is great to draw. “That haff face on top” — that demonic, incongruous human element makes it so much grosser than if it were just an indistinct shoggoth-like blob of protoplasm. (Not that shoggoths aren’t great. Show me a person who doesn’t like shoggoths and I’ll show you a sad, lonely human being.) Another wonderful thing about the story is that it actually interacts with the ‘normal’ world around it — quite graphically — unlike many of Lovecraft’s stories where the creatures, however horrific they may look, are a DISTANT threat, secluded off in another space, another time, another dimension, or stuck in some underground city where they never quite emerge to wreck destruction. Anti-Derlethians may scoff at the good-vs-evil plotline, but it’s so satisfying to read a Lovecraft story where the monster (I say monster, because it literally is one in the teratological sense) wrecks stuff and knocks over fences and kills people!

For this drawing, I was inspired by the shapes of fungus, and by the sticky arms of sundews. The entity here is really a wobbly mass of jelly; the face is superficial, like a birthmark, and even the humanoid eyes on top are, perhaps, not really functional eyes, but just eye-like mouth orifices. It probably has no need for human eyes, the whole thing being really one giant sensory organism, touching everything and feeding on everything, held in a flattish ovoid shape only by Earth’s gravity.

Something I’ve often wondered is, Wilbur Whateley’s twin was born like he was, and maybe it looked more human when it was born, so did it have a name? What about Joe Bob?

Unfortunately, the left edge of this drawing got cut off when I scanned it, and I don’t have the original anymore. But you can see a camera photo of the whole thing, before the pencils were erased, on my commission a sketch page. Also, it’s Monday, so that means a new strip over at King of RPGs!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Dunwich Horror #2

by on March 21, 2012 at 5:44 am
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Here’s my attempt at drawing Wilbur Whateley, the more anthropomorphic of the two title character(s) in HP Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror.” I love, love this story, and I’d like to try drawing him some more. In this version I gave him “goatish” eyes.

One of the interesting things about “The Dunwich Horror” is it shows a new direction in Lovecraft’s monster-descriptions, towards scientific precision. Wilbur Whateley’s inhuman appearance (“Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began…”) is described in clinical detail, almost as if he’s one of the creatures on the dissection table in “At the Mountains of Madness,” another story from the same period. When he was younger, Lovecraft had tended to describe monsters in vague terms or with a few well-chosen metaphors and images (“They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings…”); even Cthulhu is basically an octopus-dragon-man, like Trogdor + an octopus. But now, with “The Dunwich Horror”, rather than describing Wilbut Whateley as “neither a satyr, nor a vampire, nor a leech, nor a dinosaur”, Lovecraft goes obsessive-compulsive with details of in EXACTLY what way he’s an alien entity. It’s like he’s saying “You mock me for using the term ‘indescribable’, eh? Well, TAKE THIS!” I think it works really well, and it’s the beginning of the science-fiction phase that marks the second half of his writing career. Plus, in “The Dunwich Horror”, there’s still a welcome feeling of wrongness and creepiness to it all, unlike the more level-headed “it had x tentacles that were x feet long” descriptions in “The Shadow out of Time” or “At the Mountains of Madness.”

Is there a Lovecraftian creature you’d like me to draw? Feel free to commission one! Also, check out Wednesday’s strip over at King of RPGs!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: Horror on the Orient Express

by on March 23, 2012 at 5:44 am
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The Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game was one of the first RPGs I ever played, way back in the ’80s when I was 12 years old. Previously, I had only ever played elementary school Monty Haul D&D games, but for love of Lovecraft I got into Call of Cthulhu and discovered a new, somewhat more realistic type of roleplaying, as well as a more cavalier attitude towards character death that has persisted to this day. (For this reason alone, I think every gamer should play a little Call of Cthulhu.)

Like most wannabe-DMs, I bought and read a lot more adventures than I ever got to play, and though I ran some Call of Cthulhu games in college, they often degenerated into player-characters covering their eyes and shouting “I’m not looking at it! I’m not looking at it!” while unloading machine guns into monsters at full auto, and/or shooting every NPC on sight for suspicion they’re a cultist, and reading all the evil tomes they could find to get spells. This, of course, was extremely fun, but we almost never managed to play all the way through one of Chaosium’s epic campaigns, even playing marathon 8-10 hour sessions once a week.

One of the games we did manage to finish, however, was Horror on the Orient Express, which is why I was so thrilled to discover that Yog-Sothoth.com, the huge Call of Cthulhu/Lovecraft fan site, has done a series of audio recordings of Horror on the Orient Express and other Call of Cthulhu campaigns! It’s a brilliant idea, and they’ve given me new faith in gaming podcasts, after some bad experiences a few years ago listening to some particularly boring ones. The Yog-Sothoth folks have run most of the famous Call of Cthulhu campaigns, including Masks of Nyarlathotep, Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, Beyond the Mountains of Madness (their current project) and, one of the best, “Horror on the Orient Express. Frankly, I thought Horror on the Orient Express was too linear as a game — I prefer the more freeform campaigns — but as an audio story, it’s perfect. Paul MacLean does an excellent job as GM (and he does a much better job keeping things on track than I did when I ran it), RPG Music Composer Alex Otterlei has made an entire musical score based on the adventure, and one of the players from the campaign is even doing a novelization. Yog-Sothoth’s gaming podcasts, together with HP Podcraft, is my chosen audio accompaniment while I’m drawing. A couple cups of coffee, my drawing table, and listening to people roleplay 1920s occult investigators (with classy British accents, no less!) — that’s perfection.

This drawing shows the Horror on the Orient Express player-characters midway through the adventure, just before everyone starts dying. Technically, Professor Alphone Moretti (the crouching guy on the left) was actually already dead by the time the doctor (the tall guy in the back) had shown up, but I blurred the timeline a bit. The women from left to right are Grace Murphy (the maid, Appearance 4), her matronly mistress Betty Sunderland and carefree Violet Davenport. On the right is Colonel Neville Goodenough, who, in retrospect, I should have drawn looking tougher. Everyone looks happy, but shortly after this drawing was made, several of the PCs died or were horribly mutilated, and a before-and-after shot would be rather gruesome…

Anyway, it’s a really fun audio recording, and I think the group actually improved on the original campaign. (Though I’m sorry they didn’t play the Thomas Ligotti interlude.) More gaming podcasts! They’re so good!

In other news: there’s a new strip up at King of RPGs! You can commission a sketch! And, the Dream-Quest graphic novel and poster map are now available together for a discounted price. If you’re interested, please check it out!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The King in Yellow

by on March 26, 2012 at 10:50 am
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The King in Yellow is a mystery wrapped in an enigma around a series of very obscure literary borrowings. Robert W. Chambers took a few names from an Ambrose Bierce story, H.P. Lovecraft took a few names and ideas from Robert W. Chambers, and then August Derleth came along and took Lovecraft’s ideas and grafted his own ideas onto them… It’s such a tenuous thread, and it results in a challenge for artists and authors trying to build from the material. It’s hard to create a unifying theme around a creature/entity/thing which is connected to (A) a giant tentacled alien lake monster on a distant planet, (B) a sinister cult which can resurrect corpses, and (C) a decadent, Yellow 1890s literary work which drives people insane.

But connecting such distant connections is what Cthulhu Mythos fans do, and when a Dream-Quest Kickstarter supporter asked me to draw the cast of the play The King in Yellow, based on a very detailed description, I was happy to give it a shot. The supporter’s synopsis version of The King in Yellow (which is one step away from being turned into actual play, and he really should consider finishing it) is filled with backstabbing and tragedy. Everyone’s hands are bloody, everyone glares at everyone else with barely concealed hatred. (Although their core character designs are pretty cute and manga-ish, but…) I went with an insectoid theme for the clothes of the Royal Family, in keeping with the theme of decay. Behind them, tied to the rack, is the Phantom of Truth, and behind that, towering above them all, is the King itself.

The King’s chest bears the infamous Yellow Sign, or at least my version of it, loosely inspired by certain Japanese kanji characters (although technically, this is a cheat since if it’s an alien symbol, it shouldn’t bear any similarity to any earthly language. But perhaps the kanji themselves are derived from the Yellow Sign, instead of the other way ’round). Since the King (whose face cannot be shown) is sort of an expanded and distorted version of its messenger the Phantom, perhaps even this is not the true King, but merely the messenger of an even greater and more inhuman entity, and so on and so forth, in the beginning of an infinite chain… a Kafkaesque series of gates, a wheat and chessboard puzzle in which the first King is merely slightly off-looking but each successive one becomes more and more monstrous, until the viewer/reader begs you to stop, to not turn one more page, to not open one more gate, to go one step farther on the infinite corridor of rotten-pawed monsters that form the endless succession of Carcosa’s Kings….

Over the weekend I participated in the Steampunk Design Challenge at Dead End Press, an art space in Ballard in Seattle, and won 2nd place for my drawing of a steampunk Ada Lovelace. It was a great show in a great space, and I hope they do more events! They’re looking for renters for studio space in case anyone is interested.

Other Monday news: there’s a new strip up at King of RPGs! And, if you want to see me draw something else, commission a sketch!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: Deep Ones

by on March 27, 2012 at 10:49 pm
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The Deep Ones are among my favorite Lovecraft creations — aren’t they everybody’s? Their greenish-gray, scaly, slippery bodies, their simple-but-oh-so-catchy admixture of amphibian and man, their terrible relation to humanity, these “blasphemous fish-frogs” are some of his simplest, best creations. And “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is such a good story. The HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast did a great job with it. “Shadow”, up there with “Rats in the Walls”, may be Lovecraft’s best story period: he distilled all his fears of race and poverty and sexuality and decay into a great tale that even the most Lovecraft-averse reader can enjoy.

The Deep Ones are among the more frisky of Lovecraft’s creations, so I ended up drawing three of them helping another one out of its clothes, although I’m sure that’s all they’re doing. As with Wilbur Whateley, their half-human (or formerly human) nature makes them scarier than a purely alien life form with no relation or similarity to humanity. And as with any zombie story or body-snatcher story, the possibility of CONVERSION makes them scarier still. “Their croaking, baying voices… held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.” Drawing this also reminded me that I ought to read Alan Moore and Jacen Burrow’s Neonomicon, although I may end up regretting it. (I do love both creators, but ah… Alan Moore… it’s true what they said about you in Mythomania!)

Other news: there’s a new strip up at King of RPGs! If you have a favorite Lovecraftian or general-horror monster you’d like me to draw, commission a sketch! And lastly, I’ll be at booth P-18 at Seattle’s big comic convention this weekend, Emerald City Comic Con!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Festival

by on March 30, 2012 at 5:50 am
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“They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall.” August Derleth later named them the Byakhee, and the name stuck for the roleplaying game, but what exactly are these monstrous steeds of undead wizards that appear in the story The Festival? It’s hard to picture a creature which both burrows and flies. Bats are flying creatures that live in caves, and surely there must be deep, deep spaces in the underworld where they can flap their wings; but I assume they must also know how to crawl.

The description of these creatures is so rich and yet vague (like that of the lizards in “The Nameless City”) that I love drawing them. As usual when I draw winged things, I felt a little like I’d taken the easy way out when I gave them bat wings coming from their shoulders, instead of maintaining some kind of terrestrial vertebrate four-limbed body plan. But they are described as being like ants, too, so maybe their six-limbed structure is part of that. At any rate, they have something of the human corpse about them, so perhaps they are artificial creatures made from elements of other beings, and abnormality and irregularity is just part of their Frankensteinian nature. The fact that they might be part human, or formerly human, gives the mind much more leeway to imagine them, and the horrible process by which they are made, or (should they be natural) by which their species itself was formed, like Dream-Quest’s “web-footed wamps which are spawned in dead cities.”

I like the story “The Festival,” although I can’t think of it the same way since realizing that the unspeakable entities are all basically gathered to celebrate around an evil Christmas tree.

I’m working on my next Lovecraft comic, “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”, but I’m also still taking sketch commissions! Plus, it’s Friday, so that means a new King of RPGs! And lastly, if you’re coming to Emerald City Comic-Con in Seattle this weekend, I’ll be at booth P-18, so please stop by and say hello!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Flying Polyps

by on April 2, 2012 at 10:43 am
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The Flying Polyps (from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time”) are some of Lovecraft’s harder-to-visualize monsters. They never show up onscreen (so to speak) and the description doesn’t give that much to work with; they can fly without wings, they need no eyes, they’re really hard to kill, they can turn invisible, they leave weird footprints… as if they’re creatures in a RPG, we read a lot about how tough they are, but not so much of what they look like or how they behave. How do they interact with other life forms? What do they do with their prey? I didn’t show it in this drawing, but perhaps their digestive system involves the manipulation of wind and air currents… They lack the hostile fury and semi-anthropomorphism of the lizards from “The Nameless City,” another buried race, and perhaps they’re at their creepiest when they’re down there unseen in the darkness. My drawing here is possibly too literally based on a coral polyp (a coincidental resemblance, surely, since they are related to no Earthly life), but maybe I’ll try drawing another version of these many-footed creatures later.

I spent almost the entire weekend at Emerald City Comic Con, and it was one of the best times I’ve ever had at a convention. I got to meet lots of people and sign lots of copies of Dream-Quest, which had its last pre-release appearance at the con (it comes out in comic stores this week). I also got to talk to lots of cool comic folks I don’t see often enough — Chloe Chan, Jake Myler, Nina Matsumoto, Amber Lamb, Cari Corene, Miriam Libicki, Jim Zubkavich and many others. To everyone who came by and said hello, thank you so much!

I’m working on The Doom That Came to Sarnath but the first page will probable go up next week instead of this week, since I have guests coming into town for Sakuracon. If you missed me at Emerald City, here’s another chance to see me at a convention, in Seattle on April 6-8! Plus, I’ll be running some roleplaying games!

Today’s King of RPGs strip just went up, and I’m also taking sketch commissions as usual! If there’s something you’d like to see me draw, let me know!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: Ithaqua

by on April 4, 2012 at 12:33 pm
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I’ve never thought Ithaqua was a very impressive name for a monstrous entity of the northern wastes since it always makes me think of a town in New York. But, Algernon Blackwood’s short story The Wendigo is one of the greatest horror stories ever , and if August Derleth wanted to add the Wendigo to the Cthulhu Mythos under another name, I’m all for it. IMHO, there’s nothing other authors have written after Blackwood that adds anything to the creepiness of that story. As far as role playing game supplements go, frankly, I know a lot of people liked it, but I was disappointed by John H. Crowe III’s The Walker in the Wastes because it has too much Brian Lumley and not enough Algernon Blackwood. Although I loved Glenn Rahman’s Call of Cthulhu solo adventure, Alone Against the Wendigo…

It’s Wednesday, so I hope you’ve checked out today’s King of RPGs! And of course, I’m always available if you want to commission sketches!

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