Better Than Underwhelming
Oct. 20th, 2014 05:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerA lot of "popular" references to the work of H.P. Lovecraft do seem "joking" (as opposed to the introductions written by academics who proofread errors in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s and sniff that trying to fit his cosmic horrors into a "mythos" misses the real point of his stories as postmodern commentaries on materialist malaise), and his elaborate prose and the way his horrors wound up more "strange stuff piled together" than variants on physical dissolution might make those cosmic horrors more comic from a skewed perspective. I can't seem to shake the feeling, though, that not taking the mythos seriously is taking it seriously, that the humour winds up very much the "gallows" variety. As much as I can imagine a "self-aware" take on the mythos making those who prefer to take a more positive, perhaps even "science-fictional" take on cosmic depths and that which might follow different patterns within it just the first to get eaten, I guess I'm not quite inclined to grin at "The indifferent immensity of the universe will drive us mad before it drives us from existence? Now that's funny!"
When I saw a link to a webcomic series by Patrick Dean getting under way that pushed beyond mere "underwhelming" depictions of the Lovecraft anti-pantheon to six-panel adaptations of his early short stories (where some of Lovecraft's personal hangups about "the other," knowing about which may help me think he's not necessarily revealing some hard "universal truth," weren't quite so coded), though, I started thinking there might be something I could enjoy about it. I suppose it does help that I've read the original stories and can contrast them against their lightweight compressions, but the comics are fun in their own way. That the series has just completed a six-part adaptation of "Herbert West--Reanimator" (which I've seen described, in academic notes no less, as Lovecraft getting to the point of parodying himself) may have helped produce a positive impression too. I am wondering how much further the adaptations will go and whether they'll get to the more famous yet longer later stories.
When I saw a link to a webcomic series by Patrick Dean getting under way that pushed beyond mere "underwhelming" depictions of the Lovecraft anti-pantheon to six-panel adaptations of his early short stories (where some of Lovecraft's personal hangups about "the other," knowing about which may help me think he's not necessarily revealing some hard "universal truth," weren't quite so coded), though, I started thinking there might be something I could enjoy about it. I suppose it does help that I've read the original stories and can contrast them against their lightweight compressions, but the comics are fun in their own way. That the series has just completed a six-part adaptation of "Herbert West--Reanimator" (which I've seen described, in academic notes no less, as Lovecraft getting to the point of parodying himself) may have helped produce a positive impression too. I am wondering how much further the adaptations will go and whether they'll get to the more famous yet longer later stories.