Tag Archives: Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection

Tuesday Night Party Club #31

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Gallery: Pulp Action Cousins

I finished illustrating the Lovecraft Country … oops … The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection a few weeks ago. Our book has had a title change in order avoid confusion with a certain HBO series called Lovecraft Country. The series is based on a book of the same title. Confusion wasn’t expected when it was just the book out there but TV series tend to be more noticed than books. The studios that produce them also tend to have lawyers on hand to make sure that no one can profit on a property, even accidentally, without proper payment and licensing. Our book is only related to TV show in that they are both inspired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft but who wants to deal with lawyers when a simple title change can let you avoid them?

The final illustration is of the Cousins as grown ups. Oscar wrote two versions of them. The first was as “regular” adults, at least as regular as the Cousins were likely to manage. Those versions of the Cousins appear on the cover of An Eldritch Legacy. That book is kickstarting now.

The versions of the Cousins below are the Pulp Action versions for folks who want to play characters who are more rough and tumble. One thing I like about working with Oscar is his willingness to roll with some of the stuff I put in the illustrations. When I showed him the sketch I suggested that the Cousins were fighting Serpent People. When he posted it online he included this description – “On the Island of Blood, the cousins are ambushed by the Dino-Sapiens, transported here from a parallel universe by the Thule Society! The Eldritch New England Cousins as adults for Pulp Cthulhu.”

Oscar asked me to do this illustration in black and white to evoke the look of an old Saturday matinee serial from the 1930s.


I like how the illustration came out but I’d visualized it in lurid color as the cover of a pulp fiction magazine. So, for the fun of it and to satisfy my itch to see it closer to how I’d originally imagined it, I did a quick color job on it and added a title.


Story Seed #50

Take the cover above. Forget everything you know about the Cousins. Who are the Abnaturalists? How did they get together? What sort of adventures do they have? Many a pulp magazine was started with a spare cover that the publisher had laying around and then had stories written to fit it.

Recommendation

This week I’ve done very little reading of newsletters or watching of youtube videos. The reason is below.

Local News

I spent most of my non-postal time in the last week working on my Zazzle shop. I did some research to see if Zazzle was actually the best place for me to establish a shop and the answer was … probably. There are print on demand sites that have more focus but, of the comparisons I read, Zazzle is as likely to work for me as Red Bubble or Society 6 or … They all require me to market myself. They all require me to create and add products. So what the hell, I’m starting with Zazzle. I’ve made individual products from the site in the past and was happy with the results.

So far it’s both a little fun and a little frustrating and a little weird. The fun part is taking art I created years ago and putting it on … something. A t-shirt. A coffee mug. Leggings. The frustrating part is adjusting the images to fit some of the products. I did a lot of illustrations at a 5×7 aspect ratio. That ratio works well for greeting cards. I did a lot of others at a 6×9 ratio. That  ratio works for comic books and trade paperbacks. Neither of those ratios work as well for posters or puzzles. 8×10. 11×14.

But it’s more fun than not. I’ve posted links to Facebook and sold a few items. Yay!

Beyond the creation of products I need to figure out how to market them to people who have never met me.

The links above should take you to the store. Once I’ve gotten used the process I should be able to set up a store page here at Skookworks that will link directly to the Zazzle one. Please check it out. Let me know if there are certain types of products or images on which you’d like me to focus. Thank you!

I hope your week has gone well. Thank you for stopping by. Stay safe. Stay cool. Remember to drink a lot of water. And wear a mask!

Tuesday Night Party Club #10

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Artstuff

My big project, at least for the first half of 2020, will be finishing the illustrations for The Lovecraft Country Holidays Collection. It’s an anthology of role-playing game scenarios written by Oscar Rios featuring a sextet of adolescent cousins living in (H.P.) Lovecraft Country i.e. legend haunted parts of New England featured in the Cthulhu Mythos. The project was successfully kickstarted in the fall of 2019 and I’ve been working images ever since.

Before it could run on Kickstarter, we needed promo art – a cover illustration and four interior illustrations. I did the cover first. Mark Shireman worked his design magic to create two great book covers. Above is the cover for the RPG collection. Golden Goblin’s publishing strategy is to publish fiction companions to go with its RPG collections. Below is the cover for the fiction collection. For the fun of it I’d done a monotone version of the cover illustration in the style of “olde tyme” photographs. Mark and Oscar went with it for the fiction anthology.
I like seeing process videos by other artists as they produce their work. I don’t yet have the ability to make an actual video of my work process but I thought it would be fun to put together a gif of some of the stages in making this illustration. The results are below.

Story Seed #34

A sequel needn’t be a rerun: Terminator

The Terminator was released was released in 1984. It tells the story of Sarah Connor, a woman who is destined to give birth to John Connor, the savior of humanity. A Terminator has been sent back from the future to kill her and prevent that birth. A soldier from that future has followed the Terminator in order to save Sarah.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day arrived in 1991. John Connor is 10 years old. Another, more advanced, Terminator has been sent back from the future to kill him. A reprogrammed Schwartzenegger style Terminator is sent back to stop save him. This film cements the pattern for the franchise – a killer robot time travels back from the future to kill a crucial human and someone else time travels back to stop it from succeeding.

One of the things I liked about The Terminator is that the time travel element is a closed loop. Skynet, the future computer system running the Terminators and other machines, has been defeated. It sends the Terminator back as a last ditch effort to save itself. Ultimately its effort to destroy John Connor ends up creating him. Time paradoxes are minimal. History is not rewritten.

Most of the Terminator sequels follow this formula – a Terminator comes back from the future to kill someone and someone else follows the Terminator to prevent it from carrying out its mission. The more times this formula is repeated, the more the flaws show. Both Skynet nor the human rebels act defensively. Skynet could simply send a Terminator back to establish itself sooner, to unlease a plague to wipe out humanity, or otherwise start its war before humanity has a defense. Killing single humans is inefficient. One would think an AI would have more imagination than that. Conversely, the future humans could send back agents with better operating systems to give Skynet a benevolent focus rather than a genocidal one. If they can reprogram Terminators they can reprogram Skynet, especially if they do it before Skynet launches.

To me, all the back-from-the-future stuff gets tiresome. If the future is not set, neither is the present. Skynet and the humans can keep creating new timelines but the conflict never really gets resolved. So, consider a sequel to The Terminator that doesn’t feature time travel.

Terminators takes place in 1997. John Connor is twelve years old. Unlike the John in T2 this John is a true believer. Sarah has taught him well. He’s well trained, he’s charismatic, he’s ready to be the savior of humanity. He’s ready enough that he wonders if it’s possible to stop Judgment Day. Kyle Reese told Sarah that Skynet would launch its attach on August 29, 1997. Sarah tries to convince him that the future is set. Trying to stop Judgment Day is pointless. John created himself by sending Reese back to save her.

John convinces Sarah to try. John and Sarah research Cyberdine, the corporation behind Skynet. They hack into its systems and discover that Cyberdine has already created Terminators by reverse engineering the model that tried to kill Sarah back in 1984. John insists that if Terminators already exist then the future is not certain and it might be possible to prevent Judgment Day. When Sarah remains unsure John sets out to take down Cyberdine on his own. Sarah pursues him.

From there? Well, this is a story seed, not a plot diagram. Perhaps the new Terminators have a plan to wipe out humanity in a less infrastructurally destructive way than a thermonuclear war. Perhaps the new Terminators are simply tools of the Cyberdine corporation and Cyberdine has its own plans for world domination. Perhaps John has been trained too ruthlessly by Sarah and is sort of a human terminator, willing to kill anyone who gets between him and his objectives. Sarah must deal with the human monster she has created. Perhaps Judgment Day is prevented. Perhaps it happens anyway.

Other Newsletters

Karavansara is the website of Davide Mana. Mana is a working writer (that is, he pays his bills with his writings) living in Italy. He writes in both English and Italian in a variety of genres. He also blogs about his projects, movies he’s watched, books he’s read, odd bits of history and politics, and many other fascinating things on a daily basis. He’s currently in a part of Italy that’s under quarantine for the Corona virus. Yuck.

If his blogging entertains you I’m sure he’d appreciate you supporting him via his Patreon.

Lifestuff

And speaking of the Corona virus – it mostly exists as background noise in my world. I’m not downplaying it and I’m not ignoring it. I live in Seattle. There are outbreaks and deaths as a result of the disease but no one I know has been infected. I’ve had to work more overtime that I planned because more carriers that usual have been calling in sick. Staying home when sick is more encouraged than usual. Most of our work is done solo but we are all in one place when we’re putting our routes together in the morning.

Whether or not I’m scared or cautious of danger depends on my statistical awareness of that danger. I spend a lot of time driving. I’m more likely to be in an auto accident than to catch Corona. I walk a lot. I’m more likely to be bitten by a dog than catch Corona. People who are elderly or have weak immune systems are in danger of infection from just about everything. I’m basically healthy.

So far. So good.

May you stay healthy. Take care of yourself and look after your friends. See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #5

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Artstuff

I’m currently working on illustrations for The Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection. This book of four Call of Cthulhu RPG scenarios was successfully kickstarted last year. One of the stretch goals that we didn’t reach was a fifth scenario: The Mystery of April Snow. We did get close enough that Oscar Rios, the engine behind Golden Goblin Press, decided to offer the scenario as an add-on. Separate projects need separate covers so:

This is a scan of the physical black and white art. I guess you’d say it’s “mixed media”. It’s a combination of pencil, brush, Micron pens and Copic markers.

This is my finished art. Photoshop got used and abused.

And above is the finished version. Mark Shireman worked his design magic to turn a fairly simple image of a girl’s creepy stare into a compelling book cover.

Story Seed #29
What if the Martians hadn’t accidentally been killed by Earth germs?

A lot of folks have written sequels to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. As far as I can tell they’ve all worked from the same premise – the Martian’s initial invasion was a failure. The Martians’ first set of invadors died due to exposure to Earth’s diseases. The sequels are usually about a second invasion from Mars. A few of them are about Earth forces taking the war to the Red Planet.

But … what if the Martians expected to die from exposure to our germs? They had interstellar travel. They presumably were scientifically advanced enough to expect and prepare for infection. What if those first Martians brought their own diseases with them – on purpose? What if they were here less to beat us by blunt force than to begin transforming our world with their native biology? They’re observed draining humans of their blood. They plant the red weed.

In Well’s novel, the Martians are cyphers. We don’t know how they think. We don’t know their politics or religions. We don’t know if they consider themselves individuals. What if, once the technological warfare ceased, the biological warfare continued? At the time of publication, germ theory was commonly accepted but even the most medically advanced countries were unprepared to deal with epidemics from another world.

Other Newsletters

SCIOPS – this newsletter by Max Anton Brewer is often about how fucked up our technology and our economic systems are making us. I think about that stuff all the time. But Brewer has a different perspective about reality than I do and I find that useful. He has different understandings of the whys of the fuckedupedness. I need different understandings of the world to make navigating it more tolerable and to help me continue to be compassionate with my fellow humans.Give a few issues a read. Maybe his perspecitves will be useful to you as well.

Lifestuff

Most days at work we have what we call “stand-ups”. These are meetings where all the carriers gather together and the supervisors give us safety talks and pass on relevant information from upper management or the outside world. Most of what gets said has been said many times before.

Last Friday I got to be the subject of the safety talk. An hour earlier I had been walking through the station on my way to do my daily vehicle check and my feet got tangled in one of those plastic straps that are used to hold together bundles of magazines. Down I went.

I got up quickly because embarrassment is a more poweful motivator than pain. My right hand hurt from trying to brace my fall. My left thigh hurt a lot more. The concrete floor had slammed the phone and wallet in my pocket into my leg. I seemed functional and didn’t think anything was broken but I reported the accident to my supervisor and got the necessary paperwork just in case. Our station manager talked about the accident in our stand up and repeated (for the umpteenth time) the need to pick up those damned strap.

I delivered my route as usual. Mostly. My hand got more sore as the day went on. Sorting the mail wasn’t a big deal. Turning the key in the starter, using the gear shift, putting on seat belt, closing the truck’s door – all that hurt more as time passed. My leg also hurt more. The pain lessened every time I did a walking part of my route but the leg would stiffen up during the driving parts. Getting out of the truck got less fun by the hour.

I woke up stiff and sore on Saturday. My hand had some weird bruising. Disappointingly, my thigh looked fine. For the amount that it hurt I felt like I should have a glorious purple bruise. I drove down to Portland and back for a friend’s surprise birthday party. Three hours driving south, three hours sitting in a restaurant, three hours driving north. My leg really hurt by the time I lurched into bed.

Sunday I slept in. For me that was staying under the covers until 7:30. My leg hurt less. I’d taken some tylenol before I went to sleep. That probably helped. The bruising on my hand was a little more colorful but really only noticeable in good light. Sarah and I went out for a late breakfast and them mostly stayed at home.

Monday I was back at work. I expected my leg to hurt more as the day progressed but it stayed mostly a low throb with occasional “ow! ow!” moments when I had to bend it tighter than 90 degrees. I did a little overtime on my own route due to mail volume.

I’m writing this before 5 am on Tuesday. Both my leg and hand are sore but they’re feeling much improved. I expect to do a regular workday. Still no bruising on the leg. That’s disappointing. I’ve found bruises on myself plenty of times in the past and couldn’t remember what I’d done to get them. The discomfort of the last few days seems like it should be heralded by vivid purple and green. Ah well.

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That’s it for this week. Do something kind for someone who doesn’t expect it. Thank you for reading.