Tag Archives: Cthulhu Mythos

Skook Words (and Pictures) #37

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No, you’re not hallucinating. It’s Friday again.

Seven days have staggered by. It only feels like yesterday.

Mother Shub-Niggarath

Cthulhu gets all the spotlights. August Derleth named H.P. Lovecraft’s story cycle “The Cthulhu Mythos” so that helped to put a stamp on things. Cthulhu itself also makes an appearance in one of the stories. That’s more than most of the rest of the Great Old Ones. Nyarlathotep has more in-story visitations but he’s just a guy who could be an indescribable eldritch horror if he wanted but, in the stories, he isn’t. No one is making plushies out of his bad self.

Of the Great Old Ones that aren’t Cthulhu my favorite is Shub-Niggarath. Who wouldn’t love The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young? No one the other GOO have such a distinct soubriquet.

I don’t remember if Lovecraft ever wrote a description of her. Most versions I’ve seen depict her as a sort of swirling cloud with teeth. Not very goatlike.

Being a GOO, I wouldn’t expect her to actually be a goat but, when I set out to do her portrait I thought I should give her some resemblance to the randy critters.
This design is available on schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Ease On Down

My friend Rae Dinsmore passed away on July 3rd of this year. I was able to visit her in Fairbanks, Alaska for a few days at the end of March. I’d initially planned to help her and her family reorganize her mother’s home so that the mother and Rae could better manage it. Between the time I made reservations to fly up there and the time I actually arrived, Rae and her mother had moved into a retirement community and their former home had been sold. So I spent a few days helping Rae sort as many of her boxes of (very well packed) stuff as we could. Many of the boxes hadn’t been opened since her move up to Alaska from Texas a couple of years previous.

I did the black and white illustration above for the back cover of a reprint of the first issue of Steve Ahlquist’s Oz Squad back in 1992. These were my versions of the artist Andrew Murphy’s version’s of Ahlquist’s versions of the original Fabulous Foursome. Among Rae’s possessions we found a thirty year old photocopy of the original art. It was neatly rolled and the only obvious indication of its age was my signature. Rae and I had been a couple when I did the art. She’d kept the photocopy and decorated the walls of some of her apartments with it in the years since. She gave me the copy and I brought it home with me.

I had the idea of coloring it and sending her the new version as a poster. Things got in the way. Work. Other health crises. She went into hospice and passed away.

I’d done a little work on coloring it right after I got home. I started a written tribute to her right after she passed. It exists in bits and pieces on my hard drive. I haven’t been able to make any more progress. My grief gets in the way. But I’m better with images than words. A little at a time I worked on coloring this image. I finally finished it on Monday.

Rae brought color and life into the world. Those colors remain.

May the next seven days pass, for you, in glorious bliss.

Autumn is arriving. Ghost and goblins will soon be abroad.

Cheers!

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Skook Words (and Pictures) #22

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Here we are. The latest Friday with the latest newsletter. I hope your week has gone well. I hope it’s been full of more good times than otherwise.

For me, the last week has felt busier. We’re waiting for the publisher to get back to us on Billi 99. Until that happens (and, hopefully, when it does) there’s nothing for me to do on the book. They sent us some examples of the books they’ve published in the past and, damn, they’re nice packages. So, while waiting is hard, the results will be better than what we would have come up with on our own.

Without Billi in the forefront of my brain I’ve got room again to think of my own art projects. That’s where the busier feeling come from. I’m managed to do a little inking on the next Mighty Nizz story. I posted the Nizz designs to which I’ve added words to my Redbubble shop. While I was there I did some searches of some of my other designs to see where they are showing up. It appears that Redbubble’s search function is broken. Every search I did gave me results that had nothing to do with the tag words I was using. That gives me even more incentive to set up my own dedicated shop.

Process

The next step in coloring these sketches was coloring the figures. Since I’m working monochrome my choices were pretty simple. I know, this doesn’t look much different than last week. Sorry about that.
Next week the complicated work begins.

If Company Should Come

I regularly go back through my computer to see if any of my older illustrations can find new life on schtuff. Back in 2011 I contributed a couple of illustrations to the AKLONOMICON, an anthology of Lovecraftian fiction. Apparently there was a bunch of drama between some of the folks putting the book together and only a few copies got printed. I didn’t get a physical contributor’s copy. I did recently get a new PDF of the book’s contents. I think I received one prior to publication but that copy was left behind two computers ago.

I like both the illustrations I did but, of the two, this one for “If Company Should Come” by Edward Morris works best as a stand alone image. It’s an enigma but it has focus.
Add some color …

And now the enigma can be found on shirts and posters and shower curtains and …

I’ve got other, original, designs on the drawing board. More next week.

Between now and then, live a good life. Be kind when you can. Show up. Brush your teeth. Ignore the internet.

See you in seven!

Skook WiP #96

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Greetings and salutations!

This issue and, most likely, November’s newsletters, will be shorter on personal news than previous issues. In order to give myself time for NaNoWriMo in November I’m writing at least the basics of the letters in October. Given that I have no powers of prognostication I’ll be leaving off the “These Days” sections. Let’s just pretend that I’m having fun delivering mail and getting lots of writing done in my off hours.

Mugshots

This month’s process GIF is … hmmm. One of those images that came to me without any explanation. I’m sure there’s a story to be told here but I’ll leave it you to start it.
This design can be found on:
A mug in my Zazzle store
A variety of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Mighty Nizz

Below is the scan of the latest page of the first Mighty Nizz story. The finished color page can be found here.

Sketches

Practice, practice.

Daughter of Spiders

I’ll be setting up a gallery (or galleries) for the illustrations featured in this project. The text will be going away on November 1st. If you’d like to read it before then I recommend starting here.

I hope your week goes smoothly and is dotted with plenty of joyful moments.

See you in seven!

Tuesday Night Party Club #19

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Gallery: The Unspeakable and the Inhuman

Above is my 2007 cover design/illustration for a give away CD of recordings of The Unspeakable and the Inhuman. Unspeakabe was a comedy horror podcast serial produced that year. The series was written by Derek Fetters and Sam Stewart. It’s an original, very funny take on the Cthulhu Mythos. Derek handed out the CDs to interested folks at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival that year. He and I attended the Festival a few times before life got in the way.

Derek and Sam put together nine episodes of Unspeakable before, yeah, life got in the way. Those episodes are currently being hosted at 19 Nocturne Boulevard, a site that presents original adaptations of horror stories. Download and listen!

In 2008 a friend of Derek’s designed a website for the show and asked if I could contribute some art. That website is gone but the illustrations are below.

Story Seed #42
1-800-MAKEDIE

Posted in a less prominent place on one of those community bulletin boards often found in grocery stores and coffee shops and bars, a small flyer reads:
1-800-MAKEDIE
Call anytime. Leave a name. No explanation needed.
We’ll handle the rest.

The protagonist calls the number. Perhaps as a joke. Perhaps out of morbid curiousity. Perhaps in a moment of late night drunken justification. Leaves the name of someone they hate on the recording.

Possibilities:

  1. The person named is found dead, horribly murdered. The protagonist waits in agony and guilt for the other shoe to drop. Time passes. The murder goes unsolved. The case is forgotten. The protagonist calls the number again.
  2. The person named is found dead, horribly murdered. The protagonist waits in agony and guilt for the other shoe to drop. Time passes. The murder goes unsolved. The case is forgotten. As time passes the protagonist breaks down morally and mentally.
  3. The person named is found dead, horribly murdered. The protagonist waits in disbelief and guilt for the other shoe to drop. Time passes. The murder goes unsolved. The case is forgotten. The protagonist becomes obsessed with finding out who was behind the number and who committed the crime.
  4. The person named is found dead, horribly murdered. The protagonist waits in trepidation for the other shoe to drop. Time passes. The murder goes unsolved. The case is forgotten. The protagonist has saved the flyer. When a friend laments about a horrible person in their life, the protagonist gives them the number.
  5. The person named is found dead, cause unknown. The protagonist waits in agony and guilt for the other shoe to drop. Time passes. The protagonist questions whether they were responsible for the death or if it was just a weird coincidence.
  6. The person named is found dead, horribly murdered. The police arrest the protagonist and charge them with the crime. The protagonist was at home, asleep, during the time of the murder but has no witnesses and all evidence points to their guilt.
  7. The person named comes after the protagonist with murderous intent. Their family has been kidnapped and the ransom is to kill the protagonist.
  8. ….?

Recommendation: Monster Brains

Monster Brains is a primarily visual blog from Aeron Alfrey. The blog is themed around fantasy illustration. Each post is spotlights a single subject. Sometimes it’s a run of covers from a specific publication. Sometimes it’s a collection of related images – VHS box art or book covers. Usually each post features the work of a different fantasy artist. Alfrey has been updating this blog for years so there are thousands and thousands of weird images to peruse. If you like what you see, add something to the tip jar.

Current Events 

I love how “unlimited data” becomes “we didn’t expect you to use this much data so we’re throttling your usage”. We get our cell phone service from Consumer Cellular. The Nephew spends most of his waking moments using his phone. On Friday I got a notice that we had reached the limit of our unlimited data plan. Kinda. Sorta. Consumer Cellular gives us 35G of shared data per month. “Unlimited”. Once we hit 35G we can use more data, they just throttle the speed that they provided that data. For an additional fee they will allow the data to be provided at high speed.

So Consumer Cellular has gone from being a company I’d recommend to being just another lying cell phone company. Their plans are still cheaper and easier to manage than the previous companies we’ve worked with. And if we didn’t have a Nephew our data usage would be much, much lower. I’m just not a fan of being lied to.

That I’m leading with complaints about our cell phone service tells you how exciting our life is right now.

Big Sister delivered another cooler full of wonderfulness – French Beef Burgundy Pie, Cuban Pork Ribs over Red Beans, and Thai Green Curry Chicken. We are lucky, luck people.

This week did demonstrate why I’m still more concerned about dog bites than about infectious diseases. One of my fellow carriers got her hand mauled by a dog. She’s the sixth carrier to get bitten in the last 12 months. I don’t know the exact circumstances of this bite. Like far too much news I heard about it via a post on Facebook. She included a photo of her bandaged hand. Dog bites happen more in sunny weather. Customers leave their dogs out in their yards or leave their front doors open to get some air in their house. They think that keeping their screen door closed with keep their dog in the house. And that works until the dog sees someone approaching that door.

I’ve had it happen a few times over the years. The dog leaps at the door (or window) and goes through the screen. Oftentimes the dog is surprised that the screen didn’t hold and pauses momentarily to process this new state of being. It had, after all, been throwing itself against the door (or window) on a regular basis and had never passed through it before. On a good day the dog’s owner will grab the mutt and pull it back it in. On a bad day someone gets bitten. On my route I’ve learned which houses are inadequately prepared for dog breakouts and I just don’t deliver on days when they’ve left door and windows open.

Things get trickier when delivering on other routes. You never know what ferocious beast might be lurking on the other side of a fence. Even the sweetest, friendliest dog has sharp teeth. A concientious carrier will include dog warnings for subs in their pulldowns but they can’t cover all the addresses all time. People dog sit. People have new dogs. People have dogs that the carriers don’t know about.

I end up appreciating the friendly, mellow dogs on my route even more. The ones that just look out the window at me and shrug. The ones who just don’t care. Those are my “good dogs”.

Hopefully your week has passed pleasantly. Hopefully your coming week has something worth looking forward to nestled amidst the chores and noise. Take care of yourself. Be good to your friends and family. Be kind to strangers. And if you have the opportunity to punch a Nazi be sure to wear gloves.

June the 11th, 2019

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“What do we know,” he had said, “of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will generate waves acting on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.”
From Beyond
H.P. Lovecraft

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The moment of discovery