Lovecraft Sketch MWF: Cthulhu #2
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!!
Thank you! Finally someone other than myself is using that sketch for the Cthulhu spawn’s form. Or at least one of their forms as Lovecraft spoke of in “At The Mountains of Madness.”