Steven Philip Jones

I feel it fell into cycling through a mixture of fetisizing and emphasis upon the African people more and more. I'm well aware Lovecraft is a racist, but there was a malic in Jermyn's story that was stronger than usual. I fell it regressed to some of his prior works or lost its touch along the way. Wasn't up to snuff for him.

The covers are also often a problem. Depending on them, we find out he is hideous and this is the drive of the story, but some covers(the one featured here) are too handsome for how hideous he is explained to be.… (lisätietoja)

Transfuzion Publishing offers another compilation of Lovecraftian comics from the 1990s. This attractive graphic novel style book has the contents of five issues produced by Caliber Comics. You get for $18.99 for 164 pages, pretty good value as such things go. The production is quite handsome; the size 10 x 7" assures panels big enough to enjoy the artwork and also read the balloons. I liked seeing all the original covers on the back. The stories are adaptations rather than exact retellings of HPL's stories, as explained in a very useful afterward by series writer Steven Phillip Jones. He sets the stories in the modern era for the most part, and adds a role for Nyarlathotep, whose machinations provide a linking framework for the whole. It all works very well. Mr. Jones communicated with ST Joshi to find out which Lovecraft stories were then commonly known to be in the public domain; as a result, only some of HPL's lesser works were available. The format was it had to fill a 24 page comic, with three chapters of eight pages, with six panels per page. The artists were as follows:

The Music of Erich Zann - Aldin Baroza
Dagon - Sergio Cariello
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family - Wayne Reid
The Statement of Randolph Carter - Christopher Jones
The Picture in the House - Wayne Reid

By and large I enjoyed all the artwork, very serviceable for comics, although it was not as good as most of that for Yuggoth Creatures or for what Jacen Burrows accomplished for Alan Moore's The Courtyard. For me, Rob Davis gets top honors here.

Like a movie does not recreate the book exactly, these comics do not exactly retell the stories, so HPL purists might be mildly annoyed. For example, Erich Zann is showed how to essentially channel the music of Azathoth to wreak a terrible vengeance on a German concentration camp, as he communicates to a young SETI scientist some 50 years later. And anyway, who would want to retell The Statement of Randolph Carter exactly? For me the story was pretty lame, and this version is stuck with the same silly punch line. I liked all of these, with The Picture in the House being the standout (although I could see where some might like Dagon or Erich Zann best). Not intended as a replacement for reading HPL's originals, this book reproduced some not otherwise available comics that gave me a few hours of grand entertainment. I don't know if there is any other material out there for us, but perhaps Transfuzion will be persuaded to gather Jones' version of the Herbert West stories?… (lisätietoja)

The Worlds of HP Lovecraft, Volume One, is a graphic novel compilation of some comics originally from the early 1990s, and reprinted back in 1997. I was finally able to track down original publication dates on the author's website (http://fuziondigital.com/SPJ/creditscomics.htm).

Here are the contents, with the original site:
The Lurking Fear (Lovecraft in Full Color 1991)
The Tomb (Lovecraft in Full Color 1992)
The Alchemist (Lovecraft in Full Color 1992)
Beyond the Wall of Sleep (Lovecraft in Full Color 1992)

Tranfuzion gives us their usual handsome production. It costs $15.99 with no discounts, and has 112 pages. Octavio Cariello was the artist for all of these issues. For the most part I liked his work without being blown away. I would have liked Mr. Jones to take on some of HPL's more major works, but at the time these were created there were
still major copyright concerns with the stories with Arkham House. Mr. Jones solicited help from renowned HPL scholar ST Joshi in selecting stories with no such limitations, so I guess we have to be grateful for what was available. I liked the the tip of the hat to Mr. Joshi on the first page of The Lurking Fear. As far as the stories go, I found the adaptations to be faithful to the originals. My favorite was easily The Alchemist, a not so hot story by HPL but
brought vividly to life here. I also thought the team did a good job with The Lurking Fear, particularly the image of the fate of Arthur Munroe, a scene which I found very scary when I first read HPL's story > 30 years ago. I was less impressed by Beyond the Wall of Sleep but maybe the source material has something to do with that.

For these particular stories there is no real competition for comic book style adaptations. Even if there were, I think The Worlds of HP Lovecraft would hold up pretty well. These are by no means substitutes for the original texts but I certainly enjoyed them. Maybe some day Mr. Jones will persuade an artist to take on his unpublished adaptation of The Doom That Came to Sarnath.… (lisätietoja)