Lovecraftian Sketches

52 comics.

Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Mound

by on April 6, 2012 at 5:26 am
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As the hosts of HP Podcraft pointed out, “The Mound” is a VERY scary and mysterious story at the beginning, but then it takes a complete left turn into lost-world science-fiction-fantasy. For my two cents, I think it could have been a much better story if, frankly, H.P. Lovecraft hadn’t written it. The concept is great, but late-period Lovecraft’s dry style, and the many layers of narrative distance, dry out and flatten out the potential of this story about a Conquistador out-Conquistadored by decadent future-savages… by people who combine what in Lovecraft’s mind were surely the worst aspects of the mechanized present and the barbaric past.

I love underground worlds and I incorporated the K’nyanian mythology into a Call of Cthulhu campaign I was writing in college but never finished. This story is so weird that it’s extremely hard to fit into the normal ‘Cthulhu Mythos’… so Cthulhu brought *people* with him from the stars? Rilly? Or, more likely, K’nyanites, like surface humans, will just let themselves believe anything. In drawing the hybrid riding-creatures, I wanted to focus on their human elements, so I deemphasized the horns, leaving something like “fleshy protuberance” said to be one of the physical attributes of the Buddha, perhaps an engorged pineal gland or some other organ which facilitates the K’nyanites’ psychic powers.

There’s a lot going on this weekend; I’m going to spend Friday through Monday at Sakuracon in Seattle, at table 732 in the small press area, so come on by! I’m mostly exhibiting for King of RPGs, so in the evenings and afternoons I’ll be running roleplaying games!

Friday, 6-8 PM
Maid RPG

Saturday, 6-8 PM
Yuuyake Koyake/Golden Sky Stories (a playtest of a not-yet-released JRPG!)

Sunday, 12-4 PM
Mangaka! The RPG (a playtest of my own new self-designed unspeakable game!)

For more information about these games, please check out the longer descriptions on the King of RPGs website! Hope I can see you at Sakuracon! I’d love to roll some dice with you!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath

by on April 9, 2012 at 8:44 am
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Robert Bloch’s story “Notebook Found in a Deserted House” is one of the all-time great Cthulhu Mythos stories. It’s so creepy, and Bloch’s sparse style is so much better suited for a ‘found manuscript’ style tale than Lovecraft’s excessively florid tales in the same style like “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” (although, now that I think of it, nearly all of Lovecraft’s tales are presented as first-person written manuscripts). Also, I grew up in a house in the woods, and I remember being scared when my parents went away, or exploring the creeks and gulleys alone until sometimes, all of a sudden, I’d grow nervous and prick up my ears, as if listening for… something… coming closer, just beyond the next tree. This story captures that feeling perfectly.

In gaming terms, it’s also notable for being the first story to feature what would become the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath (since Sandy Petersen named them that for the Call of Cthulhu RPG). Actually, in the story, it seems clear that the monster with thousands of hooves and slime-dripping mouthes is supposed to be a shoggoth (maybe a woodsy, Northern Deciduous Forest shoggoth), but it does mutter prayers to Shub-Niggurath, so it works for me. Somewhere during the development of the RPG, though, the body shape of the shoggoth/Dark Young became somewhat formalized and it was decided that they only have three big hoofed feet and a generally tree-like shape… but in the story they don’t say how many hooves it has, so I’ve always pictured it as more like a big horrible rolling blob of no distinct form. And yet, there’s a definite vegetal nature to it all, somehow… the tentacles sprouting out of one another like branches… the mouthes opening like boles in tree trunks…

I had a great time at Sakuracon last weekend and ran a bunch of roleplaying games and met lots of folks, including some readers who’d collected Dream-Quest since it first came out in the ’90s! Over at King of RPGs, a new storyline just started, so go read it! And if you like, check out my commissioned sketches!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Tree

by on April 11, 2012 at 5:14 am
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H.P. Lovecraft’s The Tree is not one of my favorites among his stories. It’s so short it goes by in a breeze, so it seems unfair to pick on it, though. The main problem with it, to me, is that — like many readers it seems — I simply couldn’t figure out the incredibly dry irony of the whole piece, in which it seems that the sculptor is (SPOILER) but actually really he’s (SPOILER). For years I didn’t have a clue what the story was about. And yet when I finally did figure it out, thanks to S.T. Joshi I think, the story simply changed from head-scratching and inscrutable to simple & obvious. Maybe the final word of the story should not have been not “Oiao” but “PSYCH!!!”

I do like Ancient Greece, though, so that’s in its favor. The whole Greco-Roman era is fascinating to me — it’s a shame Lovecraft never expanded his very promising and creepy Ancient Roman horror dream, “The Very Old Folk,” into a full story. (Though Frank Belknap Long did his own Derlethian ‘posthumous collaboration’ with it and used the dream as a small part of his novel The Horror from the Hills.) I also appreciate the minor detail that Lovecraft is a materialist to the last and, even in this very straightforward revenge-from-beyond-the-grave story, the tree which grows from the sculptor’s grave grows from the *head* of the sarcophagus. Only from the brain, the seat of intelligence, can such seeds grow…

Over at the King of RPGs site, I’ve just started a new long storyline, so it’s a good time to jump onboard! And if you’d like me to illustrate an even more obscure story than “The Tree,” commission a sketch and I’ll do it! I may draw the line at “The Street,” though.

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Old Ones

by on April 13, 2012 at 5:01 am
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One of the first illustrations of a Lovecraftian creature I ever saw, sometime in the ’80s, was the drawing of an Old One in Wayne Barlowe’s Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials. The Old Ones stuck out by their total nonanthropomorphism, their radial/vegetable body shape, and their branching “I dare you to draw all 125 of them” limbs. Later, in Meade & Penny Frierson’s fanzine “HPL”, I saw tons more drawings of Old Ones, drawn with somewhat less naturalism and skill but a lot more vigor and character — these vegetable-starfish beings were jus’ folks, darnit! If Guillermo Del Toro ever manages to make “At the Mountains of Madness,” one of the real treats will surely be seeing the puppeteers/CG artists give human and emotional qualities to these extremely alien-looking creatures. And of course, they *do* have emotions — that’s the whole point of the story.

Visually, they’re so alien they’re not even scary; they’re like vastly enlarged radiates, like a highly-evolved, sentient version of a biological domain that only exists in primitive microscopic form here on the Earth. Since they created all life on Earth, I think any resemblances to Earthly life must be because we (de)volved from them. Even in my own limited knowledge of science, though, I do have to tsk-tsk Lovecraft for having the Old Ones remain unchanged in physical shape over the millions and millions of years in which they inhabited the planet. Did they have no form of evolution, natural or artificial? If they never changed, wouldn’t that mean they would gradually get out-competed by awesomer life forms? But it’s much cooler conceptually to imagine that there are creatures out there that are SO great, even billions of years of evolution couldn’t improve them. Of course, as a human with my limited perspective, I can barely even imagine how a recognizable culture could survive for 10,000 years, let alone a sentient species survive for 100,000. Deep time…

I think the inking turned out well in this one. I’ve been thinking of doing what they call “master studies” (i.e., to put it more bluntly, straight-up copying another artist) and trying to do duplicates of old Victorian newspaper prints, to see how difficult it is to get that lovely, fine-lined ink shading. The kind of art that used to be everywhere, the kind that Max Ernst used to form his cut-up novel Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness). Not that this has anything to do with the Mountains of Madness, the Elder Things or the Old Ones. But although it’s totally not suited for digital art, there’s something very satisfying about carving out images from hundreds of little lines.

If you liked this sketch, please check out my new King of RPGs webcomic storyline! It’s a good place to jump onto the story. Also, I do commissioned sketches!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Great Race of Yith

by on April 16, 2012 at 4:47 am
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Not that I’m any great shakes at designing aliens, but one small thing that bothers me, design-wise, about Lovecraft’s ‘civilized’ alien races (the Old Ones and the Great Race), is that they seem to lack any way to lift heavy objects. Sure, they have technology (and in the case of the Old Ones, slaves) but what did they do to take care of the place & carry groceries before they developed that technology? The Old Ones have little teeny-weeny weakish-looking tentacles (maybe they can exert a lot of pressure when you put them together, but still) and the Great Race have limbs growing out of the tops of cones — not the best way to get leverage. My solution to this was to decide that, perhaps, their ‘cone’ is really divided on the inside into four approximately equal segments, and the muscle or cellular tissue of the limb runs all the way down to the core of the cone at the bottom, instead of just sticking out of the top. Instead, like a snail’s eyestalk or a turtle’s head, we’re just seeing a small portion of it which is extended. The brain or core of the Great Race, then, would be located towards the bottom of the central cone, where all the powerful muscles of expansion and contraction are located.

For comparison, here’s my drawing of the Great Race’s enemies, the flying polyps. The flying polyps are free from the constraints of gravity, but (in my vision) they’re basically worm-shaped, or shaped like branching worms — a great twisting writhing floating branch. When I reread “The Shadow Out of Time”, I noticed the part where it’s said that the Great Race breed their young in tanks or vats, kind of like playpens, I assume. But I’m sure that now and then, one of them gets out of the tank and runs around and cause mischief.

It’s Monday, and over at King of RPGs, a new storyline with Theo and Shesh is brewing! And if you’re interested, I do commissioned sketches!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: Cats on the Moon

by on April 18, 2012 at 5:02 am
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This sketch, like many of my MWF Lovecraft sketches, was a request from a backer of Dream-Quest. What could be more Dream-Questy than cats on the moon! It seems to stick out to a lot of people, myself included. “The Lovecraft fantasy novel with talking cats” is a pretty accurate short description. I’ve never been entirely satisfied with my drawings of cats, but I’m trying to get better. Back when I drew Dream-Quest I could go over to my parents’ house and draw cats from life, but they haven’t had cats for years, so now I don’t have anyone to pose for me. But there’s always Google Imagesearch, of course.

While googling “cats” “moon” “dream-quest of unknown kadath” in search of memes I discovered the website of Corby James Waste, who has been doing elaborate & colorful drawings of Dream-Quest in a style a bit like 16-bit RPGs; it makes me wish that a Dream-Quest computer RPG actually existed. Technically, a Dream-Quest Game *does* exist — check out this 1988 graphical text adventure for the ZX Spectrum — but apparently it’s only available in Spanish. While I was in high school I tried to make a Dream-Quest game using Adventure Construction Set for the Commodore 64, and actually I still have the mostly complete files on my Commodore 64 emulator for Mac somewhere (it was Mac Classic OS, so now I would need an emulator to run the emulator). It was pretty fun to work on, but sadly, I never did make it fully playable; it kept crashing whenever I tried to edit the level where you/Carter has to get past the giant guardians of the Cold Waste.

And in case you’re interested, here’s where I write my usual plug for commissioned sketches!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: Horror on the Orient Express 2

by on April 20, 2012 at 9:30 am
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I’ve written on this blog already about the “Horror on the Orient Express” Call of Cthulhu campaign, and about the excellent campaign podcast GMed by Paul MacLean and available to subscribers at yog-sothoth.com. I also mentioned that I ran the game myself in college (although not as well as Paul did), and when one of my ex-roommates and players asked me to do a drawing from the campaign, of course I said yes.

My friend requested a drawing of a scene from the campaign, in which one of the other players — an Italian Futurist poet who had joined the party at an art gallery in London where he performed a rousing in-character slam-poem on the theme of ‘trains’ — was making his way through customs using a mind-control amulet he had picked up from the Lloigor earlier in the story. By this point, his character was almost totally insane as a result of his experiences. The tentacled shape in the back doorway is not literal, rather symbolic of pursuing evils. He’s crazy anyways, so maybe he’s hallucinating.

I try to get reference material for these sketches, so I emailed Aaron, the actual player of the character, who described him: “The character was a Futurist, loosely modeled in attitude after Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, though occupying a less prominent role in the movement. I don’t recall the characters name, but it was something “Italian-sounding” (the character was definitely Italian), I believe starting with an “M”. Prior to becoming a Futurist, I believe he was a train conductor (fitting the futurist obsession with trains, mechanism, and fast movement). He also must have been a soldier during WWI, thus making him probably in his late 20s. Over the course of the adventure, he had (as is the wont of CoC characters) grown progressively more insane–I think I recall half of the party capturing a cultist, trying to force him to talk, and having the skin of his face ripped off and being sucked into his mouth to silence him.” For what it’s worth, I always envisioned the character as being clean-shaven with long hair, like Aaron himself, but when the pen hit the paper I ended up giving him only slightly longish hair and a mustache like the original Marinetti. Over-reliance on reference material? Or just period realism? Either way, let no one say that our games didn’t have lots of research, darnit!

Speaking of the Orient Express, Nick Marsh, one the players in the excellent Yog-Sothoth.com campaign, is actually writing a novelization of the original campaign. Since most of my own story ideas came from roleplaying games (including my currently-on-hold 2003-2007 webcomic The Stiff), I heartily endorse the idea, and I’m looking forward to reading it when it comes out!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Dark Eidolon

by on April 23, 2012 at 9:23 am
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I call it the *Lovecraft* sketch MWF, but today is Clark Ashton Smith week here on mockman.com — ’cause I just love his work so much! Smith’s writing is so imaginative and dark and full of monsters and horrible fates, and yet unlike Lovecraft, his stories also have plenty of action and pulpy adventure. I think of him as the perfect blend of Robert A. Howard and Lovecraft. Also, we both grew up in the hill country of Northern California, where the summers are dry and the oaks grow wild and twisted, so I feel an imaginary kinship with him because of that. Back in 2004 I did a comic adaptation of his short story The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, which was a lot of fun, and an interesting exercise in comicking, since I sort of switched styles midway through.

This drawing depicts a scene from “The Dark Eidolon,” one of my favorite Smith stories. I gave it my best, but looking at it now I have to sadly admit, I’m not even 5% close to capturing the brutality and insanity of this image. Argggh! If you want context you’ll have to read the story yourself. Incidentally, when I was drawing the giant-corpse-dancers, I couldn’t help thinking of dancing pirates from Eiichiro Oda’s “One Piece.” That’s the kind of influences that fight with each other inside me.

If anyone’s interested in seeing more Smith-esque art, I’m always willing to do a commissioned sketch!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: Morthylla

by on April 25, 2012 at 10:21 am
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Another Clark Ashton Smith drawing, this one from his romance “Morthylla,” about a man who meets a lamia in a cemetery. It’s one of his Zothique stories, set in the decadent and dying far, far future. This was a sketch for a Kickstarter patron (thank you!). When I first read “Morthylla” when I was about 12, I didn’t really get the point, but when I recently reread it at the age of 37, it made a lot more sense.

I’ve got lots of drawing to do today, so I better roll up my sleeves and get going. After I’m done with my current project, though, I’m totally up for sketch commissions! Also, I’m going to be at the Stumptown Comics Fest this weekend. If you’re in Portland, Oregon, please stop by — I’ll be sharing a table with my friends in the “Couscous Collective” so keep a lookout for that name (or for the big map of the Dreamlands I’ll be displaying).

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: Abhoth

by on April 27, 2012 at 5:00 am
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If I had to choose one favorite Clark Ashton Smith story (apart from “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”, of course) it’d probably be “The Seven Geases.” The story is just so imaginative and dark and full of memorable monsters, and the structure, in which the whole thing is essentially a big shaggy-dog story escalating joke (and yet is completely serious within the world of the story), is so audaciously ridiculous.

Here is my attempt to draw the final monster of “The Seven Geases”: Abhoth, the Source of Uncleanness, perpetually spawning and reabsorbing verminous life in the depths of the underworld. Sadly, only after I drew this, giving it my all, did I realize that my drawing was but a pale shadow (or perhaps a floppy, crawling spawn) of Erol Otus’ illustration of the same thing in the first edition 1980s “Deities & Demigods” D&D sourcebook, which was one of my first exposures to the Cthulhu Mythos back when I was a kid. They renamed it “Shub-Niggurath,” but you know it’s Abhoth. I love Erol Otus’ work with a passion, and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather imitate (unless perhaps… Erol Otus x Hirohiko Araki? Or Erol Otus/Hirohiko Araki/Kazuo Umezu? Is this possible??!?), but next time I draw Abhoth, I PROMISE I WILL SURPASS YOU, EROL OTUS!!

It’s a good time to be a Clark Ashton Smith fan: some folks have just started The Double Shadow, a Clark Ashton Smith readings-and-discussion podcast modeled openly on the original Weird Tales horror-writer podcast, the awesome HP Podcraft. It sounds like a cool group of people, the music & Foley effects are good, and I am thrilled to see Smith starting to get some of the attention he deserves! I can’t wait to just listen to the podcasters’ reactions to the sheer eldritch weirdness, exotic cruelty and nihilism, or to put it another way, the sheer f*cked-uppedness, of Smith’s fiction! I’ve only listened to their first podcast and already I want to read Smith’s letters & poetry, which I’ve never gotten around to. Check out this podcast NOW!! (And of course, you should be listening to HP Podcraft as well, if you aren’t already!)

As usual on Fridays, there’s a new King of RPGs strip over on the King of RPGs website! And if you’re going to Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland, Oregon this weekend, please come by and say hello! I’ll be splitting a table with my friends at the Couscous Collective, and I’d love to draw a sketch in your book, talk about Lovecraft, maybe play a RPG, or generally engage in artistic discussion and debauchery.

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