Horror-larity Abounds... H.P. Seusscraft

The incredibly clever Cory Doctorow, whose novels are eagerly-awaited happies for me, posted on boingboing about this perfect-for-the-holiday mash-up from DeviantArt's DrFaustusAU that successfully captures the feel of both HPL's authorial voice + Dr. Seuss' zany art-chitecture... somehow.

Read the whole damn'd thing online at deviantart.com, starting here.

"The Dunwich Horror" by HPL and Alberto Breccia

"The Dunwich Horror" is one of H.P. Lovecraft's best-known short stories, one that highlights the horrific Whateley family tree with illuminating results. A film adaptation starring Dean Stockwell was released in 1969???, but doesn't quite live up to the source material.

Though you gotta love the nod to Aleister Crowley seen here:

"Yogggggg-Sothoth!!!"

Our page's Crowley pic features the same pose (can't see Dean's thumbs, though)! Victorian-era Dr. Venture + the gang shoulda never thrown him outta that Zeppelin...

That being said, though, it is still an entertaining flick, even though the other brother looks like one of those gas-cloud aliens filld with sparkly lights from the original Star Trek series... Visually representing Cthulhu or that other Whateley or Yog-Sothoth is gonna be tough, for sure. HPL certainly roadbumpt his future would-be artistic adaptors, as he tended to use some inventive maddened gibberish to allow the reader to create a mental picture from the rather vivid but bizarre descriptions given by the story's characters, thus ensuring that a concrete image will, by necessity, not live up to the horrors the human mind can craft:

"Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o'shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogsheads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stovepipes, an' all tossin' an' openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an' Gawd in Heaven - that haff face on top!..."
-"The Dunwich Horror" by HPL (The crazed babblings of poor ol' Curtis, upon first seeing the other Whateley brother)

But I think that Alberto Breccia nailed it... His adaptation relies heavily on the stark whites + blacks on the pages. Particularly, the white negative spaces that drape many pages create a bleak storyscape, shit-tons of fog, the horizon + much of the background undiscernable... And the characters, drawn in grayscale, suggesting their human complexities/frailties + highlighting their craggy features are incredible-looking. When we finally meet Wilbur's brother, we get a good look - and the change in panel size creates a 'bum-BUM' kinda moment - but even that panel seems slightly out of focus, maintaining a degree of unknowable otherworldiness. Ver' nice... 

So, without much further ado, here is Alberto Breccia's adaptation from 1974, scannd here from the October, 1979 (All HPL!!!) issue of H3-@VY M-3+@7 (just avoiding the sue-bots, y'all, not trying to be web-clever or nothin') of H.P. Lovecraft's incredible "The Dunwich Horror"... :

"Poe? Phooey!"

Another short piece (9 pages, in color) by the late, great Alberto Breccia:

And, if my scanner will hold up, I'll soon upload Breccia's adaptation of HPL's classic "The Dunwich Horror!"

So... enjoy til then + 'Yog Sothoth,' y'all!

Like a Chicken with Its Head Cut Off...

Everything seems to've been made soooo safe + sanitized for Halloween nowadays. There was a certain sense of danger back in the 1970s, what with LSD-laced temporary tattoos + razor-blade-filled apples... ringing the doorbell at the 'crazy old man' house (and, karmically, in my neighborhood, my house is the 'crazy old man' house + I am evidently the 'crazy old man'...)

So, straight from the crazy old man, here's some candy that'll lacerate the roof of your mouth + make your belly-sack weep red tears:

Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga's classic 1925 short story, 'La Gallina Degollada,' adapted in 1978 for the comics page by the classic Argentine writer + artist team of Carlos Trillo + Alberto Breccia... (published in English as "The Decapitated Chicken" or, as we find here, "The Slaughtered Chicken")...

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More to come if anybody shows any interest...



YEEEAARRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!

I greet thee with horror and torment and ghastliness and other stuff like that-there! Oblige me by peeing your pants in terror if you please!

Yeah, I know that's a shitty scan, but I'm not breakin' the spine on my $20 book for a blog I'm not sure a dozen people are followin', so deal! It's still a freakin' beautiful even if it's kinda blurry off to the right there.

It's October, which means Halloween. I had big plans to do something horror-related on this blog every day this month (inspired by what Patton Oswalt did last year - go through the archives and see where he reviewed a different horror story every day last October and join me in wishing for a sequel) but I'm not a dedicated enough blogger (and am instead a very dedicated lazybastard), the blog doesn't have a big enough audience to really make any kind of "event" out of it, and so I'll just settle for doing something horror-related every once in a while this month and we can just pretend that kicks all kindsa ass and is the neato-est thing ever!

First off, though, some sad business... comedian Greg Giraldo died of an accidental prescription drug overdose. That sucks majorly, it's almost a Bill Hicks-sized loss, because Greg was smart and hella-funny and just getting better as he went along. No Comedy Central roast will ever be half as good again without his input. Here's a treasure trove of clips with a couple of my faves embedded below.

This first one, man, I just remembered the part about "wheels" at work the other day and almost made an ass of myself for ten minutes, trying not to laugh, even while I was bummed about him being gone.

Jokes.com
Greg Giraldo - Our Fat Kids
comedians.comedycentral.com
Greg Giraldo Stand-Up Greg Giraldo Jokes Hasselhoff Roast Videos

Jokes.com
Greg Giraldo - All Religions are Insane
comedians.comedycentral.com
Greg Giraldo Stand-Up Greg Giraldo Jokes Hasselhoff Roast Videos

Jokes.com
Greg Giraldo - DVD Exclusive - Marsupial Sex
comedians.comedycentral.com
Greg Giraldo Stand-Up Greg Giraldo Jokes Hasselhoff Roast Videos

Never met the man and I'm still going to miss him.

Now, back to Halloween.

First, a TV alert. Turner Classic Movies is showing so much great stuff this month it's almost unbelievable. Every Friday night they're showing Hammer horror films, and those are all essential. Also tonight, 1:30 a.m. Central you have Psychomania, about a group of undead bikers. Lovably cheezy, that. And at 3 a.m., Daughters of Satan. Tom Selleck in a horror movie, 1972. I'm gonna record that one 'cuz the copy I have is lousy.

In future days, things you should set your DVR/TiVO/whatthafuck for:

Sunday, Oct 3
11 a.m. Wait Until Dark - very scary flick with Alan Arkin terrorizing a blind Audrey Hepburn.
1 p.m. Leave Her To Heaven - beautiful Gene Tierney as a crazed psychopath

Tuesday Oct 5
7 p.m. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde - the Frederic March version, which is so far ahead of its time you won't believe they got away with showing anything so sexually brutal in 1932

Thursday Oct 7
7 PM - Forbidden Planet
9 PM - Alien
11:15 PM - Countdown
1 AM - Marooned
3:15 AM - From The Earth to the Moon

Friday Oct 8
7PM - Plague of the Zombies - EXCELLENT Hammer horror, with one shot that'll definitely send chills up your spine
8:45 PM - Devil's Bride - Hammer horror based on Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out
10:30 PM - The Reptile - more Hammer goodness
12:15 PM - The Gorgon - yet more Hammer brilliance
1:45 AM - Let's Kill Uncle - William Castle obscurity
3:30 AM - 13 Frightened Girls - more William Castle


And that should hold you for a week.

Now, to the top... sleazy, skungy, nasty, vile comic books that will grow hair on your brain!



That's right... Eerie Publications (not to be confused with Warren Publishing's Eerie, which was a tamer horror comic magazine like Creepy), those sickfucks whose output was so far away from comics-code approved major-label comics like DC's House Of Mystery that it was like hardcore porn. They were black and white magazines and called themselves "picto-fictin" rather than comics, to get around the restrictions of the comics code. I used to find Eerie Publications titles like Weird and Terrors of Dracula on the magazine racks of decaying neighboring towns when I was about ten years old, and it was always an event when I'd find another one. Because, y'see, I was fairly certain that nobody was supposed to be selling such things, especially not in the Bible belt.

The stories were fairly stupid, the writing was clumsy first-draft rushjob, the art was often sub-par, the covers were ridiculous blacklight-poster-type art showing various monsters fighting each other (werewolves driving stakes into vampires seemed to happen a lot) but they were still royalty among my horror comics because they really were horror. There was nothing cute or clever about 'em. In fact, they were disturbing because they came across as the product of a diseased mind, like something snuck out of an asylum. The art is so childishly gruesome and excessive, the plots are so absurd, and the characters are so hysterical that you had to wonder what depravity led the artists and writers to pen these things, what horrific drugs they were rattled on or what demons they were trying to exorcise. The magazines usually didn't even have any ads in them, giving them even more of a "smut" feel, like no companies wanted anything to do with 'em. For years I was the only person I knew of who ever read these things, and I wondered if anyone else even knew that they existed. They were comic-book-ghetto slag and normal people seemed too proud to dirty their souls on 'em.

The titles had a blunt-object simplicity, too: The Dead Witch, The Blind Monsters, Satan's Dead Demons, The Cat Is Evil, Monster Town, From The Grave Below, The Devil's Zombie, A Head Full of Snakes, The Skin Crawlers, Satan's Cat, Demons And Skeletons, Fangs of Horror, The Flesheaters, The Vampire Plague, The Blood-Dripping Scarecrow, A Jury of Skeletons, The Weird Corpse, The Dead Demons, Bloody Ten Fingers, Beast In The Cellar, Monster in Cloth, Lighthouse of Horror, Swamp Creature, Ghoul's Mansion, Horror Without A Head, Jeb's Bloody Ghost, The Demon Is A Hag, The Witch's House is Haunted, Bagpipes From Hell, Monster Maker, The Coffin... simple, straightforward, unapologetic.

The link above will get you to a few stories (excellent website, by the way), but I suggest starting with this one just because of the beheading in the first panel. Yeah, that's so excessive it's pretty hilarious to us adults, with all that eyeball yo-yo action and tongue-wagglin', but at ten that was something we just knew we shouldn't be looking at. The idiot sadism of the whole thing made you feel like you were in unsafe hands... and that's what good horror should do. If you're reading horror and you're comfortable and having fun, somebody's doing it wrong.

Here's a page that made a big impression on me as a kid:



How excessive is that, eh? Note the ripped-out arteries dangling out of the rope-avulsed neck there, and the ever-popular popped-out eyeball. Hey, kids! Here's a little something for your formative years! Good luck!

Here's some typical back/inside cover art:



Stupid-looking spiders skeletonizing a vampire who - what the hell, why not! - has stitches in his head. And appears to still be alive even though he's been reduced to anatomically-incorrect skeletal material from the neck down. Love the scrap of skin in the one spider's mouth on top of his head. Suitable for framing.

Here's some more art from inside the magazine.



That'll make nice tattoo flash if you're a complete degenerate.

A collection including some of their stories is available and recommended, Zombie Factory. It's forbidden fruit that'll make you feel guilty just for reading 'em... and that's high praise in my trashy little worldview.

Marvel Comics Acquires MARVELMAN!

BIG NEWS for us COMICS GEEKS!!!
... Marvel Comics has acquired the publishing rights to Marvelman from original creator Mick Anglo. (Hey Marvel, please please please please please don't fuck this up!!!)

A previous legal battle between acclaimed author Neil Gaiman and fecal sample Todd McFarlane determined that Gaiman's legal right to the revamped version of the character superceded T. McDouchebag's, though that didn't stop ol' Turd McFeces from issuing a statue + who knows what other dreck thru his line of "toys" based mostly on his "comics" like Spawn (yep... rhymes with yawn for good reason...).

Marvelman was originally created back in the 1940s as basically a British ripoff of Captain Marvel (y'know... Shazam!) + went away (except for reprints) for a loooong time... Micky Moran was a reporter who could utter a magic word, "Kimota!" and transform into the superhuman Marvelman. He even ended up with a stable of 'family' characters, just like ol' Cap'n Marvel.

Back in the 1980s, Eclipse Comics obtained the rights to the Alan Moore-penned Marvelman stories from Warrior magazine, as well as more stories to wrap up the then-current storyline + move forward from there... Moore's story was one of the first real revisionist superhero stories, treating the problems of the characters + their world as realistically as possible. Should've been an instant hit, right? Wrong... The first problem that arose was that Marvel Comics decided that there would be a copyright issue with a comic called Marvelman published by an independent comics company... the character was quickly rebranded as Miracleman, and Alan Moore publicly gave Marvel the finger for this asininity (real word? who cares?), announcing that he would never work for them due to the incident.

Eclipse published Moore's original storyline + then continued publishing more Moore-written stories, til Moore decided he was done with the character. After depicting the ground-breaking superhero battle that culminates in a devastated, corpse-filled London, Moore handed the series, character, and rights to the property to Neil Gaiman, who took over the writing just as Eclipse Comics began to have some serious cashflow issues... the books quickly became known for being incredible. And incredibly late. And then Eclipse went under, leaving the character mired in mountains of legal poopy... All of the issues + collected editions are looooong out-of-print and some of the most sought-after of modern comics.

So, what's gonna happen with the character? Gaiman had at one time commented that he still had stories to tell in the Miracleverse + there's even been some artwork seen from an unpublished Eclipse-era issue... Neil doesn't have a real problem with Marvel; he's written some stuff for them (not his best work, but still better than anything McFarlane has ever produced). So, will Neil write new Marvelman (gotta use the name again, right?) for Marvel? Hope so!

Will Marvel fuck everything up + try to assimilate the character into their one great + interesting, now completely fuckt Marvel Universe? Hope not (but prob'ly...)!

Will Alan Moore have any say in the disposition of his work on the character? Will the Alan Moore-era issues be reprinted by Marvel? Will Alan sue 'em? Cast a spell on 'em (he IS a practicing magicker, y'know)? Can Alan Moore prevent their use? Can he use this situation to become richer than a five-balled cat?

Should be a very interesting resolution to one of modern comics' most bullshit-ridden backstories, and hopefully the best work of Moore's pre-Swamp Thing period will be back in print before too much longer! (Artwork included is from the cover + interior of Miracleman #15, and is by John Totleben, who also worked with Moore on the groundbreaking Swamp Thing series. (...oh. I almost forgot... FUCK MARVEL + DISNEY!!!)

Last One from Me on This Topic... I promise!

Much has been made of the heavy amounts of plastic surgery that Michael Jackson had done in his lifetime, and the consensus seems to be that - at least at first - MJ was trying (consciously or not) to remake himself to look more like Diana Ross. Yep, Ms. Ross was the Motown diva to make all of the fellas a little nutty; both Michael and Marvin Gaye were deeply influenced by her during the time they each spent around her...


Well, consensus be damned! I have found an alternate theory + I am gonna share it with you now:


Michael was going through all of his plastic surgeries to look more like...

MORBIUS, THE LIVING VAMPIRE!!!

(...and yes, I know that I am an asshole. Whatcha gonna do about it? Wanna fight? I'll meet you behind the gym after school!)

pokey: feel the burn #5

The sun has made pokey delirious and his judgment suspect, no good can come of this...

pokey: feel the burn #4

Here, pokey gets a bit of sun poisoning, too much light can lead to unclear thinking.

pokey: feel the burn #3

pokey: feel the burn #2

pokey: feel the burn #1

So here is the start of a regular to semi-regular comic strip series. An introspective musing on the nature of free will in a deterministic universe, a modern Job with no job... Along with some speculative fiction that tries not to take itself too seriously...

Recommended reading...

Black Hole - Charles Burns

This striking + powerful graphic novel was originally released in comic book form, over an agonizing ten-year span. Waiting for each new issue was always frustrating... and always rewarding. Presented in a very stark black and white, Black Hole eerily implies a John Hughes teen-flick script rewritten + produced by David Lynch and directed by Tod Browning. Heavy use of black on the pages and thick lines reminiscent of scratchboard add uneasy weight to Burns' story as it rounds the curve into full-fledged horror.

It's the '70s in suburban Washington state and the teenagers are being suburban teens: hanging out, screwing, getting loaded... catching a sexually-transmitted disease that causes (usually grotesque) physical mutations. An excellent metaphor for the isolation + alienation of teen angst, these physical changes make runaways + outcasts of the afflicted teens. And there's no cure. And then... murder.

Now being adapted to film, with director David Fincher and Brad Pitt as producer. Neil Gaiman was working on the screenplay, but has reportedly now left the project. I've heard no word on Burns' level of involvement or his thoughts on the film adaptation... the people involved have done some great stuff in their careers, but that's no guarantee. Hopefully, Burns is getting a great payday from it!

Check out the artwork here!

Unrelated note: Pin-up queen Betty Page has been hospitalized after an apparent heart attack!
More here