I know it's not quite a week of comics. I think I have six for each theme, leaving myself the option of doing something completely random between themes. But I want to jump into my Cthuliana Week right away.
I'm calling it that, rather than "Lovecraftian" week because I'm wrestling of late with the figure of Lovecraft himself. It's no secret that Lovecraft was a horrendously racist individual. His stories revolve around old and revered white families mixing with foreign blood and literally turning into monsters. And don't even get me started on his poetry, which features a disgusting piece called "The Creation of N******s." It's awful.
So how do we go about reconciling ourselves with this if we love his stories. When I submitted an article to The Lovecraft Annual, it was accepted with the note that the editor, S.T. Joshi, wanted a section where I pondered this question removed from the paper. There are those who study or read Lovecraft who prefer to not quite ignore, but glance past, the racist overtones of the stories. I'm not sure, if we're to keep him as a canonically significant writer in the horror and American traditions, that we can do that. His work grows from a place of racism, couched in a fairly intense xenophobia. So how do we, or I, reconcile with this?
I started out thinking about Shakespeare. He's another writer whose name has become an adjective (Shakespearean; Lovecraftian), an adjective that we use with impunity. But Shakespeare doesn't exactly have a clean track record when it comes to inclusion and diversity. Shylock is not treated particularly well in The Merchant of Venice, and Catherine is little more than a prize in The Taming of the Shrew. While these two plays smack of sexism and antisemitism, Shakespeare is still lauded as one of the greatest writers in the language. The trouble is that we have few examples from Shakespeare's life to tell us if these were attitudes he held or simply things he decided to write about. Lovecraft has left us a much fuller archive.
I'm going to ponder these questions over the next few days as I read some "Cthuliana," some adapted from Lovecraft's work, some original. Today's issue is excellent, a series of strung-together narratives that tell the tale of an unfortunate researcher into the Cthulhu cult and the Old Ones. I assume that the first two issues of the series are very similar, and are part of the same story, as this definitely reads as the climax to a longer tale. The structure of the series nicely picks up on the creation of the Cthulhu Mythos through a series of smaller tales, ones woven together over the years by fans. There's also little actual dialogue in the comic, with the exception of the framing sequence, leaving the narration as text boxes, a technique that also nicely links the comic with the original prose source material. As usual, for an Avatar Press comic, it's gory and horrific, maybe a little too much to quite qualify as Lovecraftian, a word that more often means that we don't see the scary stuff, we just have to imagine it.
"He voiced terrible words, impossible sounds that I could not bear, nor shut out, no matter how I tried."
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