COMPLETE GUIDE
HP LOVECRAFT
WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK |^097
IAN CULBARD:
IN CTHULHU’S
IMAGE
Comic artist and writer I N J Culbard,
has adapted a number of Lovecraft’s
stories as graphic novels, all
published by SelfMadeHero
What is your process in adapting a
story of this kind as a graphic novel?
I treat the adaptation as a work in its own
right, adhering to two rules: stay true to the
spirit of the story and stay true to the medium
to which the story is being adapted. I read
through the book with a highlighter, then
break the structure apart and put it back
together again, considering everything in
terms of the second rule – staying true to the
medium – while retaining only that which
adheres to the fi rst rule: the spirit of the story.
In lots of ways, I end up with another draft of
the story, told with the benefi t of hindsight.What are the challenges of adapting
Lovecraft’s work?
One of the criticisms Lovecraft levelled at his
own work was the lack of characterisation.
There was also no dialogue in At The
Mountains Of Madness, so I had to create all
of that because I needed to have characters
speaking to one another, and those
characters had to have personalities. There
was a good deal of manufacturing going on
with that book but always in the spirit of what
I would subjectively interpret. So I’d have to
really read into the text to fi nd things to justify
my interpretation. In Charles Dexter Ward, for
example, there is a character whose identity
is never revealed but because I was working
on a standalone story and the identity was
reliant on a visual, I thought it important to
decide who the character was in context with
the book I was adapting. So the internal logic
of his stories would be readdressed in this
way to fi t the internal logic of my adaptation.All of I N J Culbard’s Lovecraft adaptations
have been collected in a single volume,
Lovecraft, published by SelfMadeHero.too close in the eyes of various studio execs.
Lovecraft has in some sense hovered behind
all the horror made since 1968 that gave
audiences not only a dark, but a decidedly
bleak ending. Stephen King explores these
themes in novels like Revival and tales like The
Mist, a very Lovecraftian fi lm.”
LaValle has other favourites. “I thought
Re-Animator captured the best of Lovecraft
on the visceral level. Watching it, you almost
can taste the pulp between your teeth! On the
other end of the movie spectrum I’d say a fi lm
like Pan’s Labyrinth also captures the sense
of mood, the beauty and strangeness of the
man’s work.”
Lovecraft’s singular vision, as assessed
by polemicist Michel Houellebecq in his
1991 critical essay, ‘H P Lovecraft: Contre Le
Monde, Contre La Vie (H. P. Lovecraft: Against
the World, Against Life)’ is the opposite
of reassuring. Lacking religious faith and
convinced of the universe’s fundamental moral
emptiness, Lovecraft’s atheistic perspective
chimes with a few and unsettles many
others. In a world still beset by violence and
intractable confl ict, it’s as jarring, and as
stimulating, as ever.
LaValle perfectly sums up the curious
appeal of Lovecraft’s mythology: “At heart, I
think there’s something bracing about cosmic
horror. It can feel like the grown ups are fi nally
talking to you with their adult voices. No more
pretending everything will be alright. Instead,
we’ll exist, and then we won’t, and no one but
those closest to us will notice or care. That’s
not an uplifting message, but for some of us
it smacks of the truth. And it’s good to be told
the truth.”W Scott Poole’s Wasteland: The Great War
And The Origins Of Modern Horror is out
now, and Victor LaValle is currently working
on an adaptation of The Ballad Of Black Tom
for AMC.The dread of the
unknown...
“Lovecraftian” is a
catch-all term.