LOVECRAFT (Vertigo 2003)

Those Lovecraftian winks in The Keep put me in the mood to break out this interesting item, a Christmas gift from DaveZ of Tomb It May Concern. This apparently began as a screenplay by Hans Rodionoff, but then was adapted for this graphic novel version by Keith Giffen (who, I'm honored to say, named Groovy Age of Horror as "Best Blog" on his Best of 2006 list), with Enrique Breccia doing the honors on the art, and an Introduction by John Carpenter thrown in for good measure.

The high-concept here is a vivid intermingling of Lovecraft's biography with the horrors that he wrote about. The true-to-life insanity of both his parents is attributed to their brushes with gibbering, eldritch beasties from beyond. The Necronomicon is a family heirloom, and with it, Lovecraft can move between this world and the alternate dimension of Arkham, where he's known as Randolph Carter. It's super-fun and easy to groove along with the premise that everything Lovecraft wrote about was real, and plagued him all his life--which is why it's somewhat disappointing that there's also a strong undercurrent of suggestion that he's actually insane,and only delusionally experiencing it all as real. To my mind, that only muddies the waters and undercuts the main appeal of the story.

For the most part, I found this quite engaging, and it's certainly beautiful to look at. Some poking around the internets, however, brought very mixed reviews to my attention. This one harshly slams Lovecraft for the license it takes with the biographical details, and with a simplistically sex-phobic interpretation of Lovecraftian horror (criticisms also mentioned here). These two are more positive. Amazon reader reviews are similarly divided. While I think the criticisms are fair, I don't think they need necessarily ruin your enjoyment of the story and art, unless you're the kind of reader who simply cannot overlook that sort of thing. I would recommend this, but I'm not much of a stickler when it comes to Mythos canon and whatever else hardcore Lovecraft fans might be sticklers about. Your mileage may vary, but I'm pretty confident that casual fans will find plenty to like here.