Tag Archives: H.P. Lovecraft

Skook Words (and Pictures) #25

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Some Fridays arrive heavily. Today is one of those.

I’d already set up part of this newsletter, the parts with the art and my comments about it, earlier in the week so I’ll lead with that.

A Quiet Seaside Town

If you’re read H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” or have played enough Call of Cthulhu then you get the joke. Explaining it won’t make it funny.


The colors evolved quite a bit as I worked on this design. I originally went with representative colors but that didn’t come across as either funny or creepy enough.

I put a green layer over the image but that didn’t improve anything.

I finally decided that simpler was better and a monochrome in conjunction with the color of the text worked best.

This design is available on schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Process GIF

I like making GIFs. I like posting GIFs. If you thought I was done sharing sharing those sketches – sorry. I made GIFs for all of them. Here’s the first one. Another will be post each week until I run out.

These Days …

So.

Yeah.

A dear friend of mine will be gone soon. She’s been in hospice since April. Sarah used to talk to her every day. I talked to her as often as I could. I texted her every night. She hasn’t responded in a week. I’m not grieving yet but when she goes I know it’s going to hit. I can’t talk to her anymore. I’m told she’s mostly unconscious. Strong pain medications to handle strong pain. I’m writing down my memories of her and what she means to me. If I write something coherent, I will share it here. I know that many of y’all knew her.

Be good to those you love. We’re all just passing through.

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 #71

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Greetings and salutations! It’s wonderful to see you here again. And wonderful to be seen.

These Days …

Speaking of seeing, I’d planned to have my first cataract surgery on Tuesday. I scheduled a week off from work for recovery. We put in a lot of work last week moving our previous housemate to her new apartment and rearranging our apartment to be available for a new housemate so that I wouldn’t be tempted to do anything physical this week. I had the date for the surgery but not the time. I was tol that the surgery center would call me with the time. At first I wasn’t told when they might call so I called a couple of times in previous weeks to get that time. I was told I needed to wait. They are short staffed and the surgery calender hadn’t been worked out for May yet. I was told that someone would call me two business days before the appointment.

Two business days was April 29th. Halfway through the day I got tired of waiting and called them. I was told by the doctor’s office that they would send a message to the surgery center to have someone call me. And no one did.

On Monday morning Sarah tried calling but couldn’t get through. I called during work breaks and got shuffled around but finally spoke to the surgery center. My name wasn’t on their list of patient scheduled for Tuesday. I called the doctor’s office, again, and was sent to the scheduler She checked. Yup. I hadn’t actually been scheduled.

The scheduler was apologetic. I sighed and got new dates from her. I think she was surprised that I didn’t rage at her. I didn’t see the point. Yelling at her wouldn’t have gotten me an appointment.

One of my frustrations here is that I don’t have a way to check their surgery schedule and no one I talked to checked for me. They made the assumption that I was scheduled and the surgery center would call me when they had a time. I sent the doctor’s office an email expressing my frustration with this situation and got another apology from the scheduler along with assurances that she would personally call me when my surgery time was determined.

Hopefully that will happen.

In the meantime this is my Long Week, the six day work week that occurs every six weeks because of our rotating days off. So I’m tired.

Mugshots

This weeks process gif is of a bookshelf of Cthulhu Mythos tomes. I think of this as the metal version of the books. I suspect that the books, if they actually existed would be more sedate looking. But what would be the fun in that?

As usual, this design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store and on all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Here’s Licking at You!

I get a lot of ideas for designs while I am delivering mail. Most of them fade away after a few minutes. This one stuck with me until I had a chance to draw it.

This one is only on schtuff in my Redbubble store. It didn’t fit well on a mug.

That’s it for this week. I hope you are well and living your best life.

See you in seven!

Tuesday Night Party Club #46

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Gallery – Strange Aeons

Ah, Strange Aeons 2. The project that launched my most read blog post. If I’d had had sense this either would have been my last project with Chaosium or I would have insisted on being paid upfront from then on. If I had had sense …

Chaosium’s assignments were always fun and they gave no significant editorial oversight so I accepted further commissions. And had to deal with further late payments. Silly me.

Strange Aeons 2 was a collection of Call of Cthulhu scenarios by different authors set in different time periods in different parts of the world published in 2010. The variety made the project fun. My complaints only occurred after I’d done the work.

Story Seed #95
The Price of Redemption

How does a monster find redemption? I’m not referriing to nonhuman monsters – King Kong, dragons,giant ants, whathaveyou. Forces of nature don’t have sins that need absolving. They can smash a city in one story and save humanity from alien invasion in the next without causing a lot of cognitive dissonance in the audience. Human monsters, villains, shouldn’t get such an easy pass. For people, hurting others is a choice. Choices are conscious decisions.

Fiction, especially the adventure genre, is filled with villains. A good villain makes the story more interesting. With series (novels, comics, television, movies) the hero usually faces a different antagonist each episode with a few “archvillains” making repeat appearances. In horror fiction, the “villain” is often the most interesting part of th story. Whole movie series are built around the villain with the hero rotating out with each new installment. Villains become “anti-heroes”.

A bad guy who becomes popular often has their sharp edges shaved off. They get a tragic back story that explains why they’re driven to do bad things. We might learn that their victims were also bad people – perhaps worse than our popular bad guy. Our bad guy might start acting more decently. The really horrible things they did when they were first introduced aren’t mentioned. Those actions get forgotten. Our bad guy “reforms”.

Except that’s not really reforming. The popular bad guy gets a pass for his bad actions because now he has fans. They themselves don’t address their own past actions. They don’t come to terms with the damage they’ve caused. “I tortured and ate your family? Oops. I don’t do that now. I only kill evil people these days. Get over it.”

There are stories to be told of how a human monster comes to terms with their past and makes restitution to, if not their victims, then to greater society. Stories less about how they are forgiven than about how they become forgiveable.

Recommendation

Yes, I did the cover illustration for this book. Buy it for that reason if you like. I’m recommending the book because it’s well written and very funny. For more info and a chance to pre-order, click here.

Local News

The cold and the wet has returned to the Pacific Northwest. Our station manager managed to get our start time moved back to 7 am from the 7:30 we’d been stuck with for the past few months. Maybe I’m getting a cold. Maybe my body is just complaining.

When I started working at USPS I Ididn’t have time for much other than the job. I did very little art. I put a hold on commissions because I had no idea when I’d be able to finish them. I didn’t post here for a year. As I got used to the job I started working on black and white images to get used to drawing again. Quite a few of those featured the Mighty Nizz aka Little Red.

I’m currently adding color to those illustrations and adding them to my portfolio at Redbubble. They are a bit of an odd size. When I originally did them I was thinking about getting art done not where that art might end up.

This:

Becomes this:

This:

Becomes this:

I’ve got another half dozen in process. I will post them as I finish.

Thank you for dropping by. May you have good books to read, good food to eat and good friends to keep you company – even if you can’t see them in person. See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #34

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Gallery: Delta Green

Most of my RPG illustration work has been for Call of Cthulhu related projects. That’s the result of intention and good luck and accident.

The Intention part happened in the year 2000. I submitted some illustrations to the Delta Green website. Delta Green was a Call of Cthulhu RPG set in modern times – the late 199os. Most CoC games are set in the 1920s/1930s, the time the original stories were written and set. I discovered Delta Green in 1999 when I working at Half Price Books. I was the buyer when a customer sold us his collection of RPG manuals. In the buy was Delta Green and its sequel Delta Green: Countdown. I bought those books for myself. I loved the ideas behind the setting. It updated the Cthulhu Mythos for the late Twentieth Century in ways that surprised and delighted me. It created a means and a reason for investigators to, well, investigate the horrors from beyond.

I’d wanted to illustrate RPGs but didn’t have much of a portfolio of examples to show. I found the Delta Green site early the next year. I don’t think it had a way to send submissions and I don’t think they were asking for any. What it did have was a way to submit fan art and writing. So I worked up three illustrations (see the follow gallery) and submitted them. They got posted. No one from Delta Green contacted me.

Oh well.

Two years later those illustrations got me work at The Black Seal. But that’s another post.

The original photoshop files of these illustrations are, possibly, residing on an old back up drive. It’s formated for Mac and I currently use a PC so I haven’t tried plugging it in. A lot of the work I did in the first ten years of this century was done on a Mac. The art always started as graphite and ink on paper and then had photoshop magic applied to it. I’ve got the original drawings in big metal flat files but the art that got published looks different.

Earlier this year I realized that I’d sent most of those illustrations to the editors and publishers via email and I’ve never deleted any personal emails. So I’ve tracked down a lot of that older art and will be showing it in future galleries. I found the two black and white illustrations in the above gallery in my emails.

The first three images, however, I couldn’t locate in my gmail archive. AOL has long since deleted all my old emals. At first they didn’t appear to be on the current Delta Green site but, after doing some obsessive google searching and some sort of back door poking around on DG I found them in an archive. Huzzah!

Story Seed #53
The Time Line AntiDefense League

There are a lot of stories that feature some sort of organization whose mission is to defend the “correct” timeline, to make sure that history works itself out the way that it is “supposed to”. Bleah. How about an organization whose mission is to create timelines where history works itself out in the best ways for the most people?

Recommendation

Beeple. This person’s art started showing up in my tumblr feed, shared by other folks I followed. It was weird and creepy so I subscribed to his feed. He posts an image a day, every day.

Also, the Growing Up / Overnight Kickstarter concludes on the 30th. If you’ve been putting off backing it. please jump in.

Local News

Last week, in one of our stand up meetings at USPS, we were reminded that we, the letter carriers were not supposed to talk to the press. That if a member of the press attempted to engage us in conversation we were to refer him/her to management. Also, while we were in uniform, we were not to engage in political discussions with anyone lest they assume that our views represented those of the USPS. We were also to be careful not to express politcal opinions on social media in such a way as to lead people to believe that our views represented those of the USPS.

Sigh.

To be clear, anything I write here about my job at USPS is just my experience and my opinion. I like to assume that those of you who read these newsletters recognize this but, on the off chance you don’t, I AM NOT A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE POST OFFICE. I’m just a guy who works there. In my opinion, the USPS can’t actually have an opinion since it’s an organization. Organizations are not people. The people in charge of organizations may claim that their opinion represents the opinion of the organization but that’s just a fiction.

Anyway.

The most interesting part about the day job right now is that I have a new T6. USPS delivers mail six days a week. Regular carriers work and deliver theri route five days a week. A T6 is the person who delivers the route on the regular carrier’s day off. My last T6 had medical issues that prevented them from delivering my route on a regular basis. My new T6 is healthy and detail oriented. More detail oriented than I am, actually. And that’s good. It means I’m updating labels in mailboxes and doing maintenance on my route that I’d let slide. I keep most of my customer changes in my head. Having another person who has to regularly work my route reminds me that I should communicate customer changes in clear, written methods. It’s only polite.

We’ve also moved our start time from 7 am to 7:30 am. I’m not a fan but I’m adjusting.

I’ve left my alarm at 4 am. I get up. Drink coffee Write. Do computer art or make products in either my Zazzle or my Redbubble stores. I’ve updated my various websites to include a “store” page with links to each. This week I spent most of my store time working on an Oz Squad collection for Zazzle. Oz Squad is Steve Ahlquist’s creature but, as a fan and sometime collaborator, I try to find ways to keep the brand active.

In the evenings, once we’ve finished dinner and our spot of television, I work on physical art. Right now I’m doing pirate sketches. More about that when the project can be talked about publically.

Thank you for dropping by. Remember that life has always been insane. Look out for yourself and your friends. That’s where sanity and security dwells.

See you next week!

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.

Tuesday Night Party Club #1

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Welcome to the first official post/newsletter of 2020. As of this writing I have 193 subscribers. A few of you folks are subscribed directly from this website. The rest of you follow my posts on Tumblr and Twitter. At least, that’s what WordPress tells me.Quite a few of you are probably Russian bots. Welcome anyway. The basic format of these posts will be a little art and a bit of writing.

Artstuff

In my first unofficial post on New Year’s Day I said that I’d made new image banners for this site. I made a dozen of them. They load randomly whenever you refresh a page or move to a new page. Rather than ask you to reload the site a ridiculous number of times to see them, I’m posting them all here –

Back in 2013 I tried to do something with my twitter account by posting story ideas. With twitter’s word limits it seemed like a good use for the site – idea summary with a longer commentary at a blog I called Storythinking. I posted 24 ideas before I got distracted by other things. That blog got rolled into this website and I collected the “story seeds” onto a page here called #99Stories. This newsletter seems like a good spot to release some new ideas into the wild. If any of these ideas spark something for you, feel free to take them.

Story Seed #25
Little Nemo in the Dreamlands

I’ve looked and, so far as I’ve been able to find, no one has mashed up Winsor McCay and H.P. Lovecraft. I’m kind of surprised.

Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay is one of the greatest comic strips of all time. It’s also kind of boring. Yes, it’s visually stunning and inventive. But the strip’s formula means that nothing of consequence happens. Each strip ends with Nemo waking up. Storylines and adventures may carry over from strip to strip but that beat of Nemo walking kills suspense and reminds me that he’s just dreaming. I know that I’m reading the strip differently than it was intended. It was meant to be read once a week not sequencially in a book or online.

But it’s 2020. Daily comic strips have mostly been simple gags for decades. The Sunday installments are only slightly more complex. In 2014 Locust Moon Press kickstarted Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream, a massive collection of new one-off Nemo strips by over 100 different artists. Little Nemo was again revived as a graphic novel by Eric Shanower and Gabriel Rodriguez in 2016. Both of those projects were beautiful.

My dreams are mostly pretty boring. My imagination seems most active when I’m awake. Asleep it tends to send me wandering through endless corridors or driving around delivering mail. Lots of other creative folks have very vivid dreamlives. H.P. Lovecraft was one of those folks. His Dreamlands stories (as well as many of his other writings) were inspired directly by his dreams.

Both McCay’s and Lovecraft’s works are in the public domain. How would Little Nemo fare in the more hostile environs of the Dreamlands? How would it work if he couldn’t wake up every time danger loomed? Would King Morpheus send help? The strip could be charming and funny and childfriendly – Nemo meeting more benign versions of Lovecraft’s horrors. Or it could be raw and terrifying and adultsonly – Nemo barely escaping and going gibbering mad. Or a perhaps one could come up with a middle ground.

For added flavor one could blend other dream worlds into the mix – Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland comes to mind. What adventures could Alice and Nemo have together, especially when pursued by Night Gaunts?

Perhaps it’s a 21st Century Nemo trapped in a technologically advanced Dreamlands? Steampunk ghouls? Industrialized Celephaïs? Slumberland, Wonderland and the Dreamlands are rooted in the early 20th Century. What we imagine and dream evolves with our culture. What would these places be like today?

Lifestuff

It’s 2020. New Year. I’m not one for resolutions. I try to make changes as needed rather throughout the year rather than in one big push. The one change that seems necessary this year is cleaning up and moving my studio from one part of the house to another. Entropy has claimed far too much of the current space and only a move will create new order.

At USPS (my day job), the big change I expected is apparently only happening to other carriers. Our station covers four zip codes – 98146, 98136, 98126 and 98106. I have route 0633. Last year management did route inspections on all the routes in the 06 zip code with the intention of eliminating one of those routes. That was a bad idea. Fortunately, they figured out that a better idea would be to more fairly distribute the work load of the current routes. So the routes in my zone are getting adjusted so that, on the average, it takes a carrier eight hours to prep and deliver a route. My route is the one route that’s staying unchanged. I can keep doing it in my sleep.

Fine by me.

Subscribe!

Lastly, if you’re following this blog on Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook – thank you! I appreciate the attention. Today I’m inviting you to subscribe and get each new installment directly in your email. There’s a subscribe button in the sidebar just under the search button.

December the 23rd, 2019

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There are self made monsters – people who, through selfish intent and callous deeds, cut themselves off from warm company. And then there are the so-called monsters – creatures who, in their uniqueness, stand out from the crowd and cannot fit in, no matter their desire to so. For the former I have nothing but contempt. For the latter I have much sympathy.

Happy Birthday to:
Joe Carr