Manga Thoughts: The Colour Out of Space
Mar. 7th, 2026 04:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIn working my way through accumulated stacks of manga I took a little while to get to the latest Gou Tanabe adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story via Dark Horse, “The Colour Out of Space.” “On the treadmill of series already begun” might have mixed with “saving something impressive ‘for later’” to slow me down, but I suppose there was a bit of crawling caution too about seeing an interpretation of something hitherto just in my mind’s eye. The manga’s cover happens to suggest the insects that show up in the story, and I have to admit to my own case of hard-to-explain uneasiness around many kinds of them. Beyond that, I could suppose moments later in the story head towards full-blown “body horror,” and even artistic representations of people “melting” or otherwise disintegrating unsettle me that much further.
So far as having an idea of what was coming goes, one early genuine dose of H.P. Lovecraft I can remember reading was an old paperback found at a book sale that happened to include this story. It invokes “Arkham” and alludes to past mysteries, but its terrors from beyond are a bit vaguer than the monstrosities of the full-blown “Cthulhu Mythos.” The story was published in Amazing Stories ninety-nine years ago (even if that involved Hugo Gernsback stiffing Lovecraft on a payment), and it does invoke the science-fictional setting of a wider universe to justify the unearthly happenings. Perhaps I’m merely better able than Lovecraft was to “compartmentalize” and suppose “things from beyond” less beyond our expectation and comprehension than this story insists, although in saying that I can imagine “dark matter” or even “dark energy” being invoked these days.
As for the manga I did contemplate black-and-white comics being able to dodge around a colour “almost impossible to describe,” even if there are colour plates inside the front cover mixing sickly shades including aqua and purple. The early oddities, when drawn, might have to bump into the ability to just say “not right,” although with other moments I can suppose it’s the reactions of the characters that make things unsettling rather than monstrous twists in appearance. I was able to think that for this adaptation “translation” was a bit more involved than just dropping Lovecraft’s original narration in (there’s not as much “narration” in total as there might have been), and that made things more interesting even as I totted up certain small divergences from the original.
So far as having an idea of what was coming goes, one early genuine dose of H.P. Lovecraft I can remember reading was an old paperback found at a book sale that happened to include this story. It invokes “Arkham” and alludes to past mysteries, but its terrors from beyond are a bit vaguer than the monstrosities of the full-blown “Cthulhu Mythos.” The story was published in Amazing Stories ninety-nine years ago (even if that involved Hugo Gernsback stiffing Lovecraft on a payment), and it does invoke the science-fictional setting of a wider universe to justify the unearthly happenings. Perhaps I’m merely better able than Lovecraft was to “compartmentalize” and suppose “things from beyond” less beyond our expectation and comprehension than this story insists, although in saying that I can imagine “dark matter” or even “dark energy” being invoked these days.
As for the manga I did contemplate black-and-white comics being able to dodge around a colour “almost impossible to describe,” even if there are colour plates inside the front cover mixing sickly shades including aqua and purple. The early oddities, when drawn, might have to bump into the ability to just say “not right,” although with other moments I can suppose it’s the reactions of the characters that make things unsettling rather than monstrous twists in appearance. I was able to think that for this adaptation “translation” was a bit more involved than just dropping Lovecraft’s original narration in (there’s not as much “narration” in total as there might have been), and that made things more interesting even as I totted up certain small divergences from the original.