Mock Man Press

Surprise! I’m going to be putting up my adaptation of The Cats of Ulthar, originally drawn for the Couscous Collective Kitties anthology! The Cats of Ulthar was drawn for a smaller-scale book, and in limited time (in fact, I was CHALLENGED by my colleague Shaenon to finish a comic in time for the printing of the anthology), so it’s not as detailed as “The Doom that Came to Sarnath” and some of my other pieces. But, I hope you like it anyway, in all its cartooniness. This is an 8-page story, and I’ll be posting pages twice a week, so it’ll run through most of March, after which, I hope to have something else exciting to post up here. (Fingers crossed, with sweatdrops.)

In form and content this is a very Dunsanian tale, although Lord Dunsany would never have written a story about cats: that dude was such a dog person. (Dean Spanley isn’t an anomaly.) There’s a photo of him in his biography of him sitting with a huge hunting dog sprawled right across his lap. Meanwhile, Lovecraft was content to observe the neighborhood cats from afar… although he, too, would pet them and occasionally let them jump in his lap if the mood struck them. Considering that a frustrated Sonia Greene apparently once told Lovecraft “I do believe you’d take a cat to bed with you if you could!”, I can’t believe there’s no catgirl character in Haiyore! Nyaruko-san.

If you’re in Seattle this weekend come on by to Emerald City Comic-Con where I’m tabling! I’ll be bringing some original art and some new projects and I’m looking forward to the show!! I’m in Artist Alley table X-11, way in the back of the convention center (map behind link).

I’m also going to be on two panels at the convention, both on Sunday. At 4PM I’ll be part of a panel discussion, “Beyond Categories: Non-Binary Sexuality in Comics” in room 2AB, talking about some new comics I’ll be drawing. I’m going to be sharing the panel with Erika Moen, Zan Christiansen of Northwest Press, Leia Weathington and a bunch of other awesome people. Also, at 2PM (going backward in time a bit) in the gaming area, I’ll be showing off my forthcoming tabletop game, MANGAKA: The Fast & Furious Game of Drawing Comics!! (Map of the panel here.)
Please come check out both panels and say hello at the booth if you can! Whether your tastes run to Lovecraftiana, the amorphous nature of human sexuality, OR geeky tabletop/card-dealing & drawing games, this weekend, I’m ready to nerd out with you! See you soon!

It’s the latest page of my quick & dirty “The Cats of Ulthar” adaptation! The Dark Wanderers arrive in town. Reading Lovecraft’s story, it’s pretty clear the Dark Wanderers are intended to be Ancient Egyptians (an echo of the Medieval belief that the Gypsies were Egyptian, hence the name ‘Gypsies), but they’re also probably influenced by the Wanderers, that “weird, dark tribe” described in Lord Dunsany’s Idle Days on the Yann. The Wanderers tame snakes and wear turbans, though, so they seem more Indian/Arabesque.

Incidentally, Gary Myers’ short story “The Loot of Golthoth” (in his long OOP Dreamlands story collection The House of the Worm) is a semi-sequel to this story, in that it describes what happened to the Dark Wanderers after they left Ulthar. (And it isn’t nice.) In Myers’ story, Golthoth is the Dreamlands analogue of Egypt. When I was drawing my map of the Dreamlands, though, I forgot about that (and also, I felt sorry for the Wanderers), so I drew Khem, a direct Ancient Egypt analogue, to the south of Ulthar and Dylath-Leen. (Since, I figured, real places from history live on in the Dreamlands, my way of answering S.T. Joshi’s ‘these stories took place in the past, not the Dreamlands’ criticism. In the super-nerdy spirit of trying to reconcile every possible contradiction, maybe (1) The people who left Golthoth long ago FOUNDED Khem. (2) Or alternately, Khem came first, and exiles or colonists from Khem were the ones who founded Golthoth. Or maybe (3) it’s all a coincidence. Clearly this question is best resolved in a new “Dreamlands” RPG supplement.

Incidentally, I want to give a shout-out to Gary Myers, the only Arkham House writer who wrote stories set in HP Lovecraft’s Dreamlands (aside from Brian Lumley, but I’m not a fan of his Dreamlands stuff). I was lucky enough to have a copy of Myers’ book The House of the Worm as a kid, since my dad (who loved Arkham House and used to talk about the time he had called them on the phone and gotten to talk to August Derleth) ordered it from their catalog and got it for me as a Christmas present when I was in junior high. Looking back, the stories are very repetitive and the book is very short, but it creates a cumulative, ritualistic, creepy feeling, especially with the scratchy, detailed little pen-and-ink illustrations by Allan Servoss (which were an influence on my own art style at the time). I hope Myers eventually releases his follow-up/collection book, “The Country of the Worm.”

The book arrived in Christmas 1987, the same year my brother got “Metroid.” I sat down and read “The House of the Worm” that afternoon while my brother played Metroid, whose title music by Hirokazu Tanaka I have forever associated with Gary Myers. To me, it has the same mix of creepiness, and the sense that the whole thing sort of takes place in a dollhouse, a game with toys in a circumscribed, 8-bit space.

This was a fun page to draw; I’m a little surprised that this scene from Lovecraft hasn’t been drawn more often. I suppose if you want “Lovecraft doing Ancient Egypt”, it’s all about Under the Pyramids.

Incidentally (very incidentally since there aren’t any on this particular page), I’ve been drawing pigs in Ulthar too, since it seems appropriately European-Medieval to have them wallowing around the place looking all disgusting and tasty, and giving people helpful resistance/tolerance of gross diseases. But how do pigs and cats get along? Can they be agreeable barnmates in real life, joined by an uneasy truce of one not being small enough and the other not being slow enough to be eaten by one another? I have to confess now that my dream pet among the mammalia is not cats, or border collies, or — I feel like such a bastard saying this — even wire-haired dachshunds, but PIGS. I’ve always adored pigs from a distance, due to their combination of intelligence, cuteness, filthiness, disreputable savagery and the fact that they might try to eat your toes or fingers when you’re not looking. I guess that’s what happens when two of your favorite childhood books are “Lord of the Flies” and “Charlotte’s Web”. Also, I love all the weird-looking half-elephant tusked burrowing creatures they evoled from. “The Pigs of Ulthar” would be a very different story.

NEXT UPDATE: Tuesday!

I have mixed feelings about drawing cats, and thus about this story. On the one hand, it’s really fun. On the other hand, it’s a little tricky, and I feel I never quite get the right balance between making them little animals and making them little manga-faced people. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this page a lot. Plus, PIGS!

I mentioned it in the “Annotated Dream-Quest” already, but I want to give another shout-out to one of my favorite children’s books, Millions of Cats by Wanda Gag. My parents used to read it to me when I was a kid. It came out in 1929, so conceivably Lovecraft could have seen it on the shelves while he was browsing bookstores in Providence, unable to afford any new books, and in fact, looking longingly at his own old books he had recently had to pawn for money to eat. I wonder if Lovecraft’s mother ever bought him any normal kids’ books when she wasn’t buying him Goldfinch’s Mythology and The Arabian Nights. I guess the dime novels he used to read count as YA.

NEXT UPDATE: Tuesday!