ABSTRACT

Lovecraft’s literary uncategorizability, reflected in the ever-shifting forms of his monsters and in the instability of their representation as either images or as characters’ verbal description, is an issue of narrative transmission in Comics Studies worthy of scholarly discussion. How does that medium, which has as its narrative basis combinations of words and images, adapt Lovecraft’s stories, mythos, and style, which rely on the inadequacy of speech and sight to generate horror? In this chapter, I explore the ways in which this conundrum is thoughtfully and entertainingly worked through in two Lovecraft-mythos comics titles by writer Alan Moore and artist Jacen Burrows: Neonomicon and Providence, which ran from 2004 to 2005 and 2015 to 2017, respectively.

Concerned not only with the Cthulhu mythos and its representation by a medium alternative to traditional literary genres, these titles also focus on representations of Lovecraft and his dubious racial-cultural politics. The Providence comics, set in 1919 at the outset of Lovecraft’s creative output, feature appearances of the writer himself, who enjoys and entertains a “fannish adulation” (Ringel, 2014, 276) from the series’ fictional protagonist, journalist-turned aspiring author Robert Black. This chapter analyzes how, through the comics medium, Moore and Burrows address issues of graphic and biographical reconstruction of the Lovecraftian and of Lovecraft, respectively. I argue that the creators’ manipulation of nested and repeated spaces within the comics frame illustrates the interdimensional and metafictional fragmentation central to Lovecraftian horror. I also explore how Cryptomimesis, another analytic tool of Comics Studies (Round 2014, 2019) is employed to reinterpret the rising star of Lovecraft’s cult of personality in light of his current fans and the contemporary ascendance of hitherto obscure cultural-political ideologies involving racism and xenophobia into wider recognition and power.