Lovecraft Sketch MWF: At the Mountains of Madness
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!
I want it on my wall
Charming notion, mint juleps for the “masters”. Anthropomorphization?
Anthromorphization, of course! “Whatever they were… they were MEN!” ;)
I really want those two glasses to be Corona with lime. Best. Commercial. Ever.
Ah, yes the Old Ones or as I use the written form of their piping over a wide range form of communication. Or their dot group writing, I use derivative of five as their name a.k.a. “Qn’Qnx” (Redacted of repetitive vocals sometimes repeated as much as a hundred times is under a minute.) I found drawing them with their wings sometimes got in the way. Each of five fan like wings, serrated edge, out of grooves in the barrel body.
Also the Old Ones were the swiftest in the sea, on the land and in the air. Some may even still survive in remote parts of the world. Hopefully remote enough to keep the persistently inquisitive away.
A lot of papers could be written about this age’s irrational obsession with ‘racism’ and ‘classism’. But we will probably have to wait 50-100 years, until the soft censorship and quasi-religious beliefs of today go out of fashion.
I think racism and classism are fascinating topics… I don’t like it when people use them as an excuse for censorship, though. (Especially censorship of older works.)