Manga Thoughts: The Call of Cthulhu
Dec. 13th, 2024 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerNot all that long, or so it seemed, after I‘d read Gou Tanabe‘s manga adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft‘s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Dark Horse announced another adaptation was going to be translated and released over here. This time it would be “The Call of Cthulhu,” significant enough for providing the name for the whole “Mythos.” I got around to buying and reading a copy.
One thing I was a little conscious of starting into the manga was thoughts of the original story being a bit peculiar in structure. Its hapless narrator Francis Wayland Thurston passes everything along second or third-hand. Reading the manga, though, I did start to wonder if the story has more “action” in it than a mere ominous build to a final flight from horror. (With several protagonists, though, I did start to wonder if Tanabe‘s art just might be an odd outlier on those anime where people complain that “all the characters look the same...”) I had an impression of certain small tweaks throughout the adaptation, although after finishing it I went back to the original story (it‘s the first piece in one collection of Lovecraft‘s work I have) and decided there might not have been quite as many divergences as I‘d first thought. Mentioning the differences that stuck with me would stretch this post out, but not in an altogether interesting way.
Another consciousness I had to deal with was the story encompassing both that cosmic part of Lovecraft‘s bleak reality that gets discussed with interest and a certain unpleasantness closer to home brought up in a different way, if maybe not as often; looking back, though, I did realise I‘d said pretty much the same thing about “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” I did consider how Cthulhu was said to be revealed in artistic renderings before the climax of the original story, wondered if the horrors of his dread city R‘lyeh were rendered in a more interesting way here, and then went back to earlier parts of the manga and asked myself if there might have been more of a buildup than I‘d first thought. What further horrors in this vein might follow are still an obscurity at this point, but perhaps I‘m not recoiling from the mere thought.
One thing I was a little conscious of starting into the manga was thoughts of the original story being a bit peculiar in structure. Its hapless narrator Francis Wayland Thurston passes everything along second or third-hand. Reading the manga, though, I did start to wonder if the story has more “action” in it than a mere ominous build to a final flight from horror. (With several protagonists, though, I did start to wonder if Tanabe‘s art just might be an odd outlier on those anime where people complain that “all the characters look the same...”) I had an impression of certain small tweaks throughout the adaptation, although after finishing it I went back to the original story (it‘s the first piece in one collection of Lovecraft‘s work I have) and decided there might not have been quite as many divergences as I‘d first thought. Mentioning the differences that stuck with me would stretch this post out, but not in an altogether interesting way.
Another consciousness I had to deal with was the story encompassing both that cosmic part of Lovecraft‘s bleak reality that gets discussed with interest and a certain unpleasantness closer to home brought up in a different way, if maybe not as often; looking back, though, I did realise I‘d said pretty much the same thing about “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” I did consider how Cthulhu was said to be revealed in artistic renderings before the climax of the original story, wondered if the horrors of his dread city R‘lyeh were rendered in a more interesting way here, and then went back to earlier parts of the manga and asked myself if there might have been more of a buildup than I‘d first thought. What further horrors in this vein might follow are still an obscurity at this point, but perhaps I‘m not recoiling from the mere thought.