ABSTRACT
The works of H.P. Lovecraft had been a boon to the worlds of horror comics since the genre’s emergence and popularity in the 1950s. Stories such as “Cold Air” and “Pickman’s Model” became the inspiration for dozens of adaptations in anthology titles such The Vault of Horror and Weird Terror. These tales often focused on visceral depictions, upping the monstrous and macabre while downplaying the more subtle elements of cosmic horror. While the stories and characters Lovecraft created continued to be recycled for graphic presentation throughout the following decades, with varying degrees of success and fidelity, things took a fascinating turn in the twenty-first century: Now it is not just the works but also the man himself that became adaptable. Lovecraft has become the protagonist in a series of horror-tinged comic-book tales, that position him as anything from an action-hero (Herald: Lovecraft & Tesla, 2015), to a cosmic plaything (Necronatus, 2001), to the herald of the apocalypse (Providence, 2017). Sometimes the man appears as nothing but a famous name bolted into a fully fictionalized account, divorced almost entirely from his real-life history (Atomic Robo & the Shadow from Beyond Time, 2016) while others attempt to keep close to verified accounts (H. P. Lovecraft: He Who Wrote in the Darkness, 2018). However, in all these cases there is an attempt to tie his existence in one form or another to various monsters he imagined – as either physical manifestations or mental projections. The man becomes the fiction becomes the man. Regular adaptations into word of the comics often encounter the problem of translating indescribable and sense-shattering beings into a wholly visual medium, but this new wave of works adds a second hindrance by tying the personal, psychological, horror of the self to the universal horror Cthulhu. The purpose of this chapter is to explore these new adaptations, and through them to explore the changing nature of reaction to H.P. Lovecraft as both a person and foundational part of horror fiction. These different visions of the same man, so varied as to be nearly incomparable, all point for a need to incorporate the personal into the creative. In order to understand the long-lasting appeal of Lovecraft to medium of comics we must explore these different accounts; and through them we shall find a new angle on the man and his works.
