Mock Man Press

I could draw Cthulhu over and over and over. This particular drawing is based on HP Lovecraft’s own sketch of Cthulhu, which he included in a letter to his young fan and future literary executor, R.H. Barlow. What a fascinating friendship they had — one of several literary friendships between Lovecraft and much younger writers that he met towards the end of his life, including Robert Bloch, Willis Conover, and C.L. Moore (who, unlike the others I mentioned, talked to Lovecraft on more of a fellow-professional capacity, and less as a starstruck young nerd. Also, Lovecraft was always much more formal and distant with the ladies).

The original sketch is also notable for the fact that Lovecraft draws Cthulhu with six eyes (at least, he has three eyes on the side we can see — presumably they aren’t asymmetrical. We can say that Cthulhu has AT MINIMUM three eyes). I wonder if this was part of Lovecraft’s original concept of Cthulhu back in 1926, or something that he developed later on? Lovecraft’s later monsters do seem to have a tendency towards specific, strange numbers of appendages (the three-eyed Great Race, the five-everythinged Elder Things), so maybe he figured that Cthulhu needed another little dash of alienness so he wasn’t simply a big octopus-head. And man, those CLAWS are huge!

In other news, I’m putting up something new (or at least new to the Internet) at the King of RPGs site: a comic I drew with Patrick Macias more than ten years ago, The Deadliest P.R. Guy in the World! This one was based on our time in the video game industry. Today’s strip is the title page, and it will update Monday-Wednesday-Friday till it’s completed. BELIEVE IT!!

“The Terrible Old Man” is so totally a Dunsany pastiche: although it’s set in the real world (or Kingsport at least), it’s exactly in the style of Lord Dunsany’s “bad fates that befall thieves” stories, including “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men,” “The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweler,” and “The Bird of the Difficult Eye.” Gary Myers would go on to write several more stories in this style. I sometimes wonder what inspired Dunsany to start the formula, and whether he himself was pastiching some earlier, fairy-tale plot.

Also, there’s a new page of The Deadliest P.R. Guy in the World over at King of RPGs!

Antarctica, 200 million BC: the setting of “At the Mountains of Madness.” This was a lot of fun to draw, and very festive and colorful (palm trees! Lots of greenery! Note that in my mind I think of it as ‘greenery’, even though I drew in black & white). A confession: although I haven’t looked at them in years, my drawings of Elder Things and Shoggoths are unavoidably influenced by Tim Kirk’s drawings of the same creatures in Meade & Penny Frierson’s fanzine “HPL,” which I read when I was 12, thus fixing the images in my mind pretty much forever. Perhaps I could have made an effort to break away and draw something totally different… but, not this time. It’s clearly a time of abundance, a time of happiness (for the Elder Things), a jubilee.

The shoggoths, on the other hand, are not so happy, particularly the one in the foreground giving the Elder Thing a mint julep. Perhaps a paper could be written on HP Lovecraft’s use of the word “surly” and the whole definition of “surliness” from the perspective of white people in the 19th and early 20th century, and the attendant racism (and of course, at the root of it, classism). I imagine the shoggoths really talked a lot of trash about the Elder Things when they were off duty. Here’s your damn coffee!

No new Doom That Came to Sarnath this week, sorry; I’ll return to my regular Sarnath update schedule on Tuesday, June 19. Meanwhile, over at King of RPGs, I’ve got a new page of The Deadliest P.R. Guy in the World! Go read it!

“The Nameless City” is a Lovecraft story that’s grown on me. It has two Poe-esque elements of his often uneven early work that are, IMHO, sadly lacking in his later stories: (1) a first-person in-the-moment narrative (rather than an after-the-fact, relatively sedate, journalistic recounting of the facts) and (2) a lot of grab-you-by-the-shoulders emotion and screaming and fainting. Actually, not so much of the latter, but it does have the first. The dreamlike, but very conscious, account of the narrator’s journey into the underground city… the Arabian Desert setting, the only time Lovecraft set a story in the Middle East, except for the disappointing “Under the Pyramids”… and the strange, lizardlike inhabitants. Their description is very evocative, although I wonder how quadrupeds which didn’t stand upright were able to use their arms for fine manipulation. I guess their forelegs were really versatile. Or perhaps I should’ve drawn them in such a way that they crawled entirely using their hind legs, leaving their forelegs free, perhaps propelling themselves with a contraction of the trunk, like snakes.

Meanwhile, I’ve put up a new page of my collaboration with Patrick Macias, The Deadliest P.R. Guy in the World!

The Temple of the Elder Ones in Ulthar, from “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.” For this commissioned drawing I went with the temple as I had depicted it in the graphic novel, which perhaps was a mistake, as I drew it as simply a plain ivy-grown stone tower (hey, Lovecraft describes it as “modest”), and not as anything really elaborately beautiful like the jasper terraces of Kiran. But even beneath such a humble roof, the Gods of Earth make their presence felt; They dwell here just as They dwell in the fields of wheat, and the gentle river, and the forms that the wind paints in the clouds…

On a different note, I put up a new page of The Deadliest P.R. Guy in the World!