The Call of Cthulhu, or to give it its full name – H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, is the fourth English language translation of Gou Tanabe’s works. Like all the previous collections, it’s an adaptation of a story by (quite likely) the most influential horror writer of the 20^th century. In fact, judging by the number of adaptations, reprints, scholarly pieces, references, homages, tributes, refutations, rejections, and internet debates, Howard Phillips Lovecraft is probably the most influential horror writer of the 21^st century as well. Not quite bad for a man who was virtually unknown all of his life and who died in relative poverty. 

In the world of fiction at large the word ‘Lovecraft’ has the same meaning that ‘Kirby’ has in the world of comics – a name that is a genre unto itself., with conventions and repeated ideas and ideals. They both have their high-priests (John Marrow, August Derleth) and modern schools (Tom Scioli, Thomas Ligotti). There are probably some apostates as well. 

Lovecraft was popular enough as adaptation fodder in the world of comics after his death – Vault of Horror #17 had a loose adaptation of “Cool Air” all the way back in 1951 – but the floodgates of comics really opened once Lovecraft’s stories became public domain. There are more Lovecraft adaptations than one could probably read in a lifetime (despite the noble efforts of Bobby Derie), with more coming every month, week, and day. Of course, comics is just the tip of the spear – video games, movies, TV shows, books, dolls, RPGs… This pop-culture ascendance was, partially, the subject of Moore and Burrows’ Providence, the creeping manner in which one semi-obscure creator, took over the 21^st century.

All of which makes one wonder – what’s the point of another adaptation? Certainly, what’s the point of another adaptation of Lovecraft’s best-known story¹? Summing up his own philosophy on the subject of horror, Lovecraft once wrote “the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Yet, there is no unknown left in these works anymore. Is anyone reading this latest version going to be shocked by the M.R James-inspired nested texts that follow question into question? Will anyone be awed by the depiction of a massive tentacled monster? Or unraveled by the grim philosophizing of the author about humanity’s place in the universe? If you have found such a person, a person wholly unfamiliar with Lovecraft who still wants to read this book, you have indeed ventured deep into the unknown.

The fact is, there is nothing ‘unknown’ about these stories. They have been cataloged and analyzed from seemingly every possible angle.  The degree to which even attempts to subvert, deconstruct, respond, or reconfigure the texts have also become familiar themselves, be it Providence or The Ballad of Black Tom or He Who Wrote Darkness². Why, then, should one read Gou Tanabe’s takes? Well, for the first of Tanabe’s three books in English, my answer was the same – “he’s doing a very good job at retelling these stories.” 

There is something almost fresh about Tanabe’s slavish loyalty to the original text³. There is an oft-repeated wisdom that many of Lovecraft’s horrors are ‘indescribable’ (only true to some stories); but, if so, no one told Tanabe. His pages are detail-heavy, the horror is not kept to the shadows but is shown whole. He pushes forward the more science-fiction elements of the text, especially notable in the long silent pages depicting the alien life forms in At The Mountains of Madness, or the pages depicting a full-on fishperson reverie in The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

One reason looking over these pages is joyful is because they are impressive; Tanabe is a master craftsman who knows how to properly crowd out a page and always appears to be giving it 100%⁴. The other reason is the manner in which that kind of drawing style becomes an interpretation by itself, a new point of view. Tanabe might have thought that he had done Lovecraft ‘as one should,’ nothing more and nothing less, but he ended up with something personal in its own way. Only someone with such a technical mindset⁵, and the hands to express it, would depict the horror so directly, with such biological fascination.

All of which leads me to ask – why does H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu not work? Reading through it, I felt no excitement, I didn’t marvel at the artwork; I was, mostly, tired of it all. Well, the obvious answer to why this doesn’t work would be the idea of ‘diminishing returns.’ Tanabe is still doing the same old song and dance, and what seemed unique five years ago when the translation of his work began, now seems familiar, certainly when he insists on adapting the same author over and over again. But there is more to the problems of The Call of Cthulhu.

The first is the manner in which he translates the nested-story structure. We are reading a recollection of a person reading several testaments and piecing them all together, which leads the ever-loyal Tanabe to drown the reader in words. If previous stories reached their creative zenith in their silent pages, in this collection, Tanabe seems to rejoice in drowning the reader in verbiage; pages 142-143, in particular, can give Edgar P. Jacobs a serious competition in terms of words per panel. This is necessary if one wants to translate the structure of Lovecraft’s story precisely… which just goes to show that one probably shouldn’t do it. If there is ‘only one way to shoot a scene’ and the script gives you another, you should probably ignore it.    

The Call of Cthulhu plays to Tanabe’s weaknesses. I am thinking in particular of the scene in the city of R’lyeh. Here is the manner in which the place is described in the original text: “He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.” What Tanabe draws in his adaptation is just a generic spooky location with lots of shadows and pointy rocks reminiscent of the excellent 2005 film adaptation, a silent black and white picture meant to mirror the kind of adaptation that would’ve come out at the time of the story’s release. In this film, though, the scene of a man falling into a crevice formed by one of these impossible angles is achieved via simple, yet unsettling, practical effects that make it appear he is falling in some tear within the screen. In Tanabe’s version, the same man simply vanishes into some shadows. There is nothing about the scene that is otherworldly, strange, or unknown. 

Maybe that’s it. There was nothing unknown about Lovecraft when I was born, nor nothing unknown about most of his successors by the time I started reading and now there is nothing unknown about Tanabe as well. The ‘weird’ of Weird Tales (the magazine that originally published The Call of Cthulhu) is now common. Cthulhu rising from his slumber can only be received with a shrug of one’s shoulders.

Lots of ink has been spilled on how much of Lovecrft’s monstrosities were shaped by his prejudices. But the reason we keep coming back to these stories, and the reason people keep coming back to Jack Kirby far after all the would-be successors have fallen by the waysides of history, is because these original creators expressed a personal point of view. The first Lovecraft stories are a true expression of the author, for good and ill. Too much of 21^st century Lovecraftian fiction expresses nothing but fidelity (or the adapter’s idea of fidelity). That means these works can never be more than a footnote.

The only way to do ‘Jack Kirby,’ to create the way he created, is to forget Jack Kirby, to make something new. The only way to create Lovecraftian fiction, to create a new sort of ‘unknown’ that would vacate the bowels of those who read it, is to unmoor oneself from the ship called ‘Lovecraft’ and venture into the darkness of the human mind. Until he does so, Tanabe will only end up being one of many who tried, a theoretical master in his field, that forever chooses to be an apprentice. 

1. Not arguing quality, but out of all the oddly-spelled oddities Lovecraft created, there’s a reason my computer easily recognizes ‘Cthulhu’ as a proper word. ↩︎
2. A terrible comics, but a theoretically interesting one
   ↩︎
3. Just like Tom Scioli’s works felt so new at the time simply by going far enough back. He drew and wrote as if Kirby was the newest thing possible, and for a good long while I believed him. ↩︎
4. Not to him is the shorthand, the featureless backgrounds, the crowed scenes fading into detail-less mush. If it’s part of the scene he would draw it proper – be it a main character in the foreground or a bolt holding a piece of machinery in the background.
   ↩︎
5. I’m thinking of the David Fincher quote: “People will say, “There are a million ways to shoot a scene”, but I don’t think so. I think there’re two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.” Tanabe probably doesn’t recognize his point of view, because to him he is simply drawing Lovecraft ‘correctly.’ ↩︎