Yuggoth: unpublished Lovecraftian tales

Art by Enrique Breccia. Not related.

There had been rumors in the past, but few weeks ago the topic resurfaced, on Reddit.
But let us take one thing at a time. 

Moore had already said that, despite his retirement from the world of comics, there could still be some unpublished comics written by him out there.  

Alan Moore, in 2024:  [...] "There may also be other comic book work out there, as yet unpublished, but volume four of The League was my last comic strip work, and was also, I think, a fond and comprehensive farewell to the medium."

In particular, after the conclusion of Providence it was rumored that he had written a sort of epilogue or spin-of linked to the Lovecraft lore. 

Well, as reported on Reddit, in 2024 Garth Ennis admitted  that... it was all true. This happened in a video interview that the acclaimed Northern Irish writer did for Monsters, Madness and Magic channel, posted on Youtube the 14th of November 2024 (watch it around minute 50). 

Monsters, Madness and Magic: [...] Have you and Alan had a chance to work together previously? I probably just slipped my mind if you guys had...
Garth Ennis: Well not not directly but Alan wrote a series of Crossed which was that horror story that I created some 10 or 15 years ago. Alan did a sort of a 100 years in the future version of that... and it was very gratifying that he would be interested enough to do that... 

Someday, you might see a series from Avatar, the publisher who sadly semi imploded and seem to have ceased publishing. But there's a series called Yuggoth, and it's based on the work that Alan did - Providence, Neonomicon, and some of the other Avatar books he did based on his love of H. P. Lovecraft.

And Yuggoth was going to be an anthology series. I do hope people see it. Alan wrote the first storyline.

Mine would have been the second. You also have Kieron Gillen in there and Si Spurrier. All this is written and drawn.

I do hope Avatar will publish it one day because it's tremendous stuff. And it was lovely to be able to play in the extremely dark and unpleasant universe that Alan had been able to access through his interest in the lore of Cthulhu and H. P. Lovecraft and so on." 

Later on, on Bluesky, Kieron Gillen confirmed the thing, sort of: 

Kieron Gillen: "My stuff isn't complete, it should be stressed - it only exists in script. [...] I don’t want to reveal stuff that Garth hasn’t - but I believe all the other stuff is, and more."

So, I tried to contact someone at Avatar to get some feedback: no answer.

Then I started thinking about the possibile artists involved in the project. And I remembered that years ago there were rumors about Gabriel Andrade, who worked with Moore on Crossed +100.  

So I contacted him and... 

Andrade replied: "Yeah! I was part of this work!

The story is a prequel that reveals much of the lives of dark characters who appear in Neonomicon and Providence, showing their experiences with the occult and ancient magic. I did the art for two entire arcs of 6 issues both. The first, written by Alan Moore and the other by another author, who I can't reveal. They are incredible stories.

Unfortunately I have no idea if this will ever be published."

What else to say... we need those stories published... the sooner the better!!!

Maybe we could put a dark spell on that! :D 

Lovecraft was an American William Blake

H.P. Lovecraft

Excerpt from a great interview printed on RAPID EYE n.3, published in 1995 by Creation Books. 

Notes: Yuggoth Cultures was never published. You can read more about it HERE.

The interview happened few months after Moore's 40th birthday, the 18th of November 1993: in that occasion Moore declared himself a "magician"!

MOON AND SERPENT
The World Of Alan Moore
D M Mitchell

[...] Alan is currently working on two book projects; one, a novel entitled Voice Of The Fire (to be published by Gollancz), is a very personal history, in 12 chapters, of Britain. The other, Yuggoth Cultures (to be published by Creation Books), is a lateral examination of the life and works of H P Lovecraft, with whom Alan has recently become intrigued. [...]

Alan Moore still lives in his birthplace, Northampton, and it was there in February 1994, in the informal setting of a local pub, that the following conversation took place. [...]

RE: [...] you've recently become interested in HPL's work in a way different to that in which you previously saw it?

Alan Moore: I've been interested in Lovecraft since I was thirteen, but I have recently seen him in a different light. It started out as an adolescent love of the man and his works, but as my critical faculties developed, I realised that he was not a very good writer in the technical sense. He used an archaic style when it was unnecessary. He made his work deliberately ponderous. What I feel now is that his ability as a writer is unimportant. The man was a visionary - a prophet. He was an American William Blake.
There was something leaking through - intimations of the future seeped through into his unbearably sensitive mind - a mind so transfixed by the terrors of the world that everything frightened him. The cold frightened him, the future frightened him, history frightened him - he became an unbearably sensitive barometer to all the things that are coming. 

I believe that in his story The Shadow Over Innsmouth, with its mentions of swastikas, concentration camps for the genetically degenerate and so on, he gives us an accurate prediction of the Nazi holocaust. In his descriptions of Azathoth he seems to have been talking about Hiroshima and the conceptual horror which followed. 

I no longer judge writers by their worldly, artistic abilities. | judge them by the energies that they seem to evoke by occult, unconscious means, irrespective of their actual, artistic talent.
 

RE: He was a direct ancestor of people like Burroughs.
 

AM: His work has that same channelled, mediumistic feel, although his writing was nowhere near as technically accomplished as Burroughs, nor was he as successful. He never had a novel published during his lifetime.
 

RE: Mainly due to his own snobbishness.

 
AM: He was holding back. I| get a sense of him almost deliberately thwarting his own progress, as if afraid of where he might be headed.
 

RE: His best work was published posthumously. If he'd lived longer he might have matured, yet he insisted on doing those often terrible revisions of other writers’ works.
 

AM: He was trapped in his own little hell, yet he was sensitive in a way most people in America were not. Fear stripped his nervous system down to a raw, twitching cluster of painfully acute antennae.
 

RE: He was certainly an outsider to the American Dream. He wasn't carried along by the vision of optimism which we now know never came true. In that way he prefigured the beats and hippies.
 

AM: I believe he was a power-point — a prophet.
In writing about Lovecraft, as I'm doing at the moment, I want to understand where he was, to become him, as it were. We're both pulp writers trying to express our vision of the truth. In this current book Yuggoth Cultures, I'm trying to divine that knowledge. You tend to work faster as a pulp writer and you're absolved of literary obligations and pretensions. Your vision is purer.
The obligations of the deadline leave the conscious mind less time to edit the subconscious outpourings and a truer story leaks through, despite what is lost in literary polish. I try not to make those decisions of preference any more, concerning what is literary and what is not.
A friend of mine tells me about his work as a nascent lama. One of the exercises they do consists of giving you a rose and a freshly laid dog-turd. The idea is to meditate on both until you realise that both are as beautiful - both are expressions of reality and reality is beautiful.
They bring you wine and vinegar and you taste both with the aim of realising that both are as palatable and when they've taken you through the course of opposites — shit and roses, wine and vinegar - they ask you to consider good and evil and see them with a new mind. That, for me, sounds like sanity. [...]

Ben Wickey and Fab Four Enchanters!

Art by Ben Wickey

Last December I posted an interview with the amazing BEN WICKEY, the artist behind the "Old Moores' Lives of the Great Enchanters" stories contained in Alan Moore & Steve Moore's The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. You can read it HERE.

Well, we are back again with Ben! This time I selected four Enchanters and he told me the secrets of their biographic pages starting from... the original art he created! Enjoy!

(Grazie mille, Ben!)

 

For more info about Ben Wickey visit: Instagram - IMDB

If you are interested in Wickey's art, included the Enchanters, visit his Etsy shop! 

Highly recommended!

ALEISTER CROWLEY 

(Enchanter n. 37, page 243)

Ben Wickey: The Crowley page was perhaps the most daunting, from a drafting and coloring standpoint. The preliminary inked-up version seen here looks simple enough. This page has more tiers than any other and so fitting the images with the many text boxes took a while to plan. Alan's thumbnail sketch was straightforward, except for the fact that he didn't specify where to fit all that text! It was left up to me, and I hope I did a decent job.
In the final tier, you can see Crowley on his deathbed, and blue lightning is disturbing the window curtains. This is based on a story I had heard in an interview with Crowley's final partner, Deirdre McClellan, who described seeing the curtains blowing across the room and hearing a giant peel of thunder just after Crowley's death, "which is, I think, the gods greeting him."

 

*****

AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE 

(Enchanter n. 40, page 246)

Ben Wickey: This page is perhaps my favorite of the Great Enchanters, only in that it is totally unique among the rest. Without a single drop of ink, I drew the entire thing with a very sharp pencil. I was trying to get a sense of Spare's style. Once scanned, I digitally added an overlay layer of old parchment over the drawing and then etched on top of that, pulling the highlights out. I rather liked the result. Notice William Blakes' face among the clouded jumble of "past lives" Spare was endeavoring to access with his art.

 *****

H.P. LOVECRAFT

(Enchanter n. 42, page 248)

Ben Wickey: This preliminary art for the Lovecraft page of the Great Enchanters shows the "bare bones" of what I wanted to achieve later digitally. Because the paper I was working on was so small (as I could not then afford a bigger scanner) I wanted to get the essential ink and graphite textures down first, and then add more Lovecraftian detail when I could digitally zoom in. As a New Englander, who grew up in the same settings as many of Lovecraft's stories, there are many details I wanted to get right, however small. Through Lovecraft's window in the first panel, I digitally drew the left-hand side of the home of Sarah Helen Whitman, the poet who at one time had been temporarily engaged to Edgar Allan Poe shortly before his death. I also hid the Cathedral of St. John, adjacent to Whitman's house, the churchyard of which served as a place of courtship between Poe and Whitman.
In panel 2, I wanted the Cthulhu looming over the authors to more resemble Lovecraft's original sketch of the Cthulhu idol: a rather portly, frumpy fellow with three eyes on either side of his bulbous head.
Other elements on this page like Lovecraft's grave were things that I wanted to achieve in a somewhat photorealistic way, since they are objects and places that can still be visited. In panel 4, I digitally added houses behind Lovecraft that I associated with his work: on the left I drew the Bowen House in Marblehead, MA, which was mentioned in Lovecraft's story, The Festival, and on the right I drew the house of my friend, Bill, in Salem, MA. Bill is a big Lovecraft fan, so I wanted to surprise him.

 ***** 

WILLIAM BURROUGHS

(Enchanter n. 47, page 267)

Ben Wickey: This one seemed very natural to me. As I said in our previous interview, I have been drawing William Burroughs since I was a teenager. The portrait in the final panel was especially a delight, as I got to draw him as I had always had. In high school I did a big pen-and-ink drawing of Burroughs as the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, which still seems rather appropriate considering he's speaking cryptically while smoking a hookah. Getting to draw Burroughs for a magical grimoire was therefore a profound experience, and felt like I was completing a circle.
The people behind Burroughs in panel 2, watching the infamous "William Tell act" that caused the death of his wife Joan, are based on the actual photographs taken by the Mexican press. I found a lot of pictures of the witnesses just after the event happened, and drew them into the scene to create what (I hope) is a historically-authentic depiction. I also found the name and likeness of the Shaman who exorcised the "ugly spirit" from Burroughs. It was also fun to draw Alan Ginsberg four different times in this book, at various stages of his life.

If you like, you can read it in Italian on Quasi magazine, HERE!

The Book of Magic: cover and... Cthulhu

The Bumper Book of Magic cover. Art by J. Coulthart.

I am currently trying to write a series of articles, diving into The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic section by section. They are serialized on the Italian web-magazine (Quasi) and so far two episodes are available (more to come, I hope. Don't hold your breath!) In Italian, of course.

 

In writing the pieces I also contacted some of the contributors to get, if possible, behind the scene info or extra bits of magic to include in.

In the following you can read what the great John Coulthart revealed about the cover, the magical alphabet and... Cthulhu. 

Special thanks to Coulthart for his time and kindness. Grazie mille!

John you created real magic for the book! And grazie ancora for the permission to share your original answers on this blog!

I highly recommend to visit Coulthart's official site and to follow his amazing { feuilleton } entries!

John Coulthart: The cover evolved from a request from Alan for something with the following elements:
a) the stylistic appearance of an old children's book (or "annual" as they're known here).
b) a central image showing a boy from the first half of the 20th-century holding a Tarot card in one hand and a wand in the other.
c) The title and names of the authors.

A very simple request compared to some of the covers I'm asked to create. The main task was finding a suitable figure for the central image. I could have drawn something myself but old illustrations have a unique quality, they always bring something of their own time into the present day. The boy was taken from a larger illustration on the cover of an American magazine of the 1930s. The first draft of this which I created in 2007 wasn't very successful compared to the version which appears on the printed cover. At the time I could only find a very small image of the original illustration--in 2007 there were fewer archive sources available--so I had to enlarge a small jpeg then paint over it using the mouse. It never looked bad but I was never wholly satisfied with the result. When I started work on the final layout in 2021 one of the first things I did was find a better copy of the cover boy. The image still required doctoring but this was easier to do with a larger picture and the drawing tablet which I now use every day. You'll notice that the final version has more definition than the earlier one, also the badge which I added to the artwork to make the difference between the old and new versions more evident. Everything else about the cover--the stars, the border (which features tiny moons and snakes)--was my own design.

Old version of The Bumper Book of Magic cover. Art by J. Coulthart.

    A note about "annuals". An annual for British readers was (and still is) a book published once a year, usually a large-format volume with a hard cover which would appear shortly before the Christmas season. 100 years ago children's annuals were often expensive productions but by the 1950s they tended to be printed on cheap paper and the contents weren't always very good. Even though The Bumper Book is for adults only, the intention was to create something that would look like the best annual a child could possibly receive as a Christmas gift.   

The alphabet was one of the first Moon and Serpent creations to emerge from Alan and Steve's magical explorations in the 1990s. I'm not sure when they put it together but some time in the late-1990s Alan sent me a computer print-out which showed in a rather crude form the layout of the letters as they are in the page, a grid with coloured letterforms and all their attributions. I'd already been playing around with fonts when I was asked to design the CD package for The Highbury Working so I scanned the shapes of the letters from Alan's pages then made them into a workable font which I used on the Moon and Serpent CDs and their accompanying posters.

The alphabet page was the first addition of my own to the book as a whole, this wasn't something listed in the original contents. I wanted to include it because it explained (at last) the alphabet I'd been using on all the Moon and Serpent CDs. I was always impressed with the alphabet which is why I was so eager to incorporate into the book. As well as being an early product of the Moon and Serpent project it's a clever condensation of a wide range of mythological and occult symbolism into 24 letters. It also looks like nothing but itself--it's not trying to emulate the appearance of older magical alphabets--and it really does work as an alphabet. Despite the unusual shapes of some of the letters the whole thing is relatively easy to read. Grimoires of the past (eg: Francis Barrett's The Magus) often contained pages of magical alphabets so this follows the tradition form while also adding something new to the idea of the magical alphabet. 

Art by J. Coulthart.

   Regarding Cthulhu, if you look at the attributions you'll notice that there are 12 male symbols and 12 female ones, so Cthulhu has been given a female assignation. I don't think terrestrial sex or gender designations can be applied to Cthulhu which is more of an "it" than anything else, and in the original Lovecraft story turns out to have a mutable form. Characters in the Cthulhu Mythos refer to Cthulhu as "he" but this seems more of a convenience or tradition than anything else. As for the letter, the utterance of Cthulhu's name isn't too far from the sound of "Q", while the attribution to Daath is part of Alan's theory that Daath is a kind of Lovecraftian abyss, something you see in the Magical Landscapes section of the book as well as in issue 20 of Promethea.

It's Providence time by Alessio Ravazzani

Art by Alessio Ravazzani

Above, a fantastic Robert Black portrait from Providence by Italian comic artist and illustrator ALESSIO RAVAZZANI. Below, some gorgeous making-of material. 

 

The illustration is part of the awesome gallery of homages to Moore's work included in Pelosi's essay  Alan Moore: Mappaterra del Mago.

 

For more info about the artist, visit: Instagram - Mammaiuto

Art by Alessio Ravazzani

Howard, Stephen, Neil and... Alan!

Alan Moore is one of the authors who are present as characters in Le dernier jour de Howard Phillips Lovecraft, an amazing book about HPL written by Romuald Giulivo with stunning art by Jakub Rebelka, published last autumn by French publisher ‎ 404 Editions.

Below you can admire some pages. You can recognize some familiar faces! 

Highly recommended!

Art by Jakub Rebelka; story by Romuald Giulivo

Agents of Oblivion

Above a great illustration by the amazing Dave McKean included in Agents of Oblivion by the extraordinary Iain Sinclair. The illustration features Algernon Blackwood but also Steve Moore and... Alan Moore!

Four stories starting everywhere and finishing in madness. Four acknowledged guides. Four tricksters. Four inspirations. Algernon Blackwood. Arthur Machen. J. G. Ballard. H. P. Lovecraft. They are known as “Agents of Oblivion”. And sometimes, in brighter light, as oblivious angels . . .

As host, as oracle, Iain Sinclair moves through this quartet of tales, through a spectral London that once was, or might never have been.

Furthermore: Alan's presence is very much there in the first story, 'The Lure of Silence'. - Iain Sinclair.

Unfortunately the hard-cover seems to be sold out. But... 

Paperback edition forthcoming Autumn 2023.

Highly recommended!

linus, Lovecraft and Moore

Cover art by Sergio Vanello

The September issue of linus - the acclaimed Italian magazine on comics, strips and pop culture - presents a huge dossier focused on H.P. Lovecraft, under a stunning cover by artist Sergio Vanello.

The 74-page section is packed with articles, essays, illustrations and short comics - most of them specifically realized for this occasion - investigating and paying tribute to the life and works of the Lonely of Providence.

I contributed with a 3-page article about the Lovecraftian works of Alan Moore - The Courtyard, Neonomicon and Providence. 

Furthermore, I "wrote" a 2-page short comic with art by my friend and artist extraordinaire Luca Paciolus. The comic was created years ago for an HPL anthology and printed in black and white; however, for this linus occasion, Paciolus colored it - and, let me say, he did a gorgeous job. The short story adapts a passage from a Lovecraft's letter, where he briefly described his formative readings and vision.

Needless to say, it has been a great honor to be part of this celebratory issue.

Art by Luca Paciolus

Moore is also a special guest in Howie, a funny 2-page contribution written and drawn by the great Massimo Giacon.

Alan Moore meets Lovecraft! Art by Massimo Giacon.

Even if you can't read Italian, this HPL linus issue is highly recommended! 

Illustration by Francesco Ripoli

For more info about the magazine visit the official Facebook page, HERE.

Julius Schwartz, HPL and Alan Moore

Julius "Julie" Schwartz 

Below, excerpt from The story behind the stories, an interview by William Christensen, edited by Antony Johnston, investigating Moore's lost project Yuggoth Cultures which was inspired by Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth. Originally published in Alan Moore's Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths n. 3 (Avatar Press, 2003) and reprinted in the collected volume (Avatar, 2007).

Alan Moore: [...] The first poem in Lovecraft‘s cycle is called The Book, and as an example of the way I was thinking at the time, my first piece for Yuggoth Cultures was also called The Book. But in my case it was a couple of pages long, and was an account of me, on one of the first occasions where I’d met Julius Schwartz. Julie had been showing me this huge book of autographs and memorabilia that he keeps in his office to dazzle impressionable young Limeys with. I was looking through this book, which was full of pictures of Julie as a younger man in a long dark coat, with a dark homburg hat, standing on a wintery New York street corner and talking with some fresh-faced newsboy that actually turned out to be Ray Bradbury, and all of these other giants of science fiction and fantasy...

So Julie was showing me this, and l got to this small piece of paper that was fixed into the book where it just said, in this very spidery pen and ink handwriting, “I remain, Sir, your obedient servant— Howard Phillips Lovecraft."

l was stunned, and asked, “So this is from Lovecraft‘? You knew Lovecraft'?” And he said, “Yeah, sure, I agented a story for him.” I foolishly asked, “What was he like?” To which Julie replied, "Well, it’s funny you should say that, because I remember at the time thinking, “I'd better remember what this guy’s like 'cos in fifty years Alan Moore's going to ask me about it..."

So I basically expanded that anecdote as my version of The Book. And there were subsequent chapters of Yuggoth Cultures, also based on Lovecraft's titles, or the feeling of the individual pieces. But most of these were subsequently lost in a taxi cab in London—the only copies. [...]

More info about Lovecraft and Schwartz HERE. 

Lovecraft, misprision and hypernovel

Excerpt from page 58-59 of Alan Moore's BBC Maestro Course Notes 1.0, related to the 29th episode of the series, Approaches To The Future. Full course: HERE!

Alan Moore: [...] I recently came across ‘misprision’, an academic term that – if I’ve got it right – means a wilful misunderstanding where you know that a certain idea is not correct but you use it anyway because it opens up creative possibilities. When I was preparing my H. P. Lovecraft opus, Providence, I was reading an awful lot of Lovecraft criticism including the so-called ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ that had been an invention of later writers and that Lovecraft himself would not have recognised. 

One psychologist, Dirk Mosig, suggested that all of Lovecraft’s stories were intended as episodes of some gigantic hypernovel, that he was creating a new form of the novel that comprised these 30 or 40 fragmentary stories. 

While H. P. Lovecraft had not meant anything like that, with the concept of ‘misprision’ in my mind, I thought, ‘But what if he had?’ 

And so I began building that hypernovel and so came the plot structure for Providence. [...]

Stream the full course HERE!

H.P. Lovecraft: foresightful thinker

The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories

Above a small excerpt from the 7-page preface, dated 4 October 2016, written by Alan Moore for H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories published by The Folio Society.

[...] The hindsight of almost a hundred years exposes H.P. Lovecraft as one of the twentieth century's most radical experimental writers despite the cobwebbed traditionalist disguise, as well as one of its most staggeringly original and worryingly foresightful thinkers. The infectious swoon of his delirious prose and his hallucinatory ideas evoke in the susceptible an escalating ecstasy of trepidation, like some legendarily unbalancing variety of absinthe that cannot be reproduced and isn't manufactured any more. [Alan Moore]

The Call of Cthulhu: a new preface by Alan Moore

Art by Dan Hillier.

Alan Moore wrote a new preface for H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories published by The Folio Society and available as both standard and limited edition with amazing illustrations by Dan Hillier.

Art by Dan Hillier.

"In a brilliant new preface, written for The Folio Society, author Alan Moore traces his own – and the literary canon’s – troubled relationship with ‘Providence’s paranoiac prophet’ and unearths a writer ‘more subtly insidious and more magnificently visionary… than the one that you remember or anticipate’. [...] 

Moore finds Lovecraft at once at odds with and integral to the time in which he lived: ‘the improbable embodiment of an estranged world in transition’. Yet, despite his prejudices and parochialisms, he ‘possessed a voice and a perspective both unique in modern literature’." 

You can buy these awesome books here and here.

Art by Dan Hillier.

S. T. Joshi and Alan Moore

I am Providence by S. T. Joshi.

Excerpt from S. T. Joshi's blog, dated September, 1, 2015.

S. T. Joshi, is an Indian American literary critic, novelist, and a leading figure in the study of H. P. Lovecraft. He is the author of the fundamental H. P. Lovecraft: A Life biography.

"[...] a colleague of the great comic artist Alan Moore asked me to give him a call, since he (Moore) doesn’t have e-mail or even a computer. I was happy to make the call to England, and spent some 30 or 40 minutes in an engaging talk with Moore, who flatteringly holds my work in high regard. He promises to have his publisher send me copies of his ongoing Providence graphic novel, which looks like a most tempting item." [S. T. Joshi]

From more info and news about S. T. Joshi visit his site: here.

Starry Wisdow: Alan Moore, John Coulthart and HPL

Yuggoth Cultures (1994) by John Coulthart.

Excerpts from a really interesting post published by John Coulthart on his site.

[...] "Yuggoth Cultures" would have been an earlier collection of Lovecraftian fiction and non-fiction that Alan Moore had begun writing for Creation in 1993. Alan’s idea was to take Lovecraft’s "Fungi from Yuggoth" sonnet sequence as the basis for a collection that would explore Lovecraft’s fictional world and also draw together a variety of figures from the same era: fellow writers, occultists like Aleister Crowley and Austin Spare, and Harry Houdini for whom Lovecraft ghost-wrote "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" in 1924. Unfortunately the stars were not right on this occasion; Alan took the sole copy of the half-written manuscript to London in order to read selections at an event in Soho but left the papers in a cab. Some pieces survived, having been copied and stored elsewhere—"The Courtyard" in "The Starry Wisdom" is one of these—and there was talk for a while of the lost pieces being rewritten but enthusiasm for the project flagged.

Cover sketch by Alan Moore.

This is Alan’s sketch for the cover, the idea being to have a Lovecraft head made of fungal growths rather like an Arcimboldo painting. The head would be sprouting tendrils whose loops would contain pictures of some of the people featured in the book. Alan’s quick sketch is actually a better approximation of Lovecraft’s strange features than my painted version which isn’t narrow enough. For the record (and because people always ask), the other people on the cover are Alan himself, Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley, Harry Houdini, Robert E Howard (not Al Capone as people often think) and Clark Ashton Smith. 

[...]

The complete article can be read here.

Moore talks about Providence

Except from an article published on PREVIEWSWorld.

Providence is an attempt to marry Lovecraft’s history with a mosaic of his fictions, setting the man and his monsters in a persuasively real America during the pivotal year of 1919: before Prohibition and Weird Tales, before Votes for Women or the marriage to Sonia, before the Boston Police Strike and Cthulhu. This is a story of the birth of modern America, and the birth of modern American terror. It is also, in my opinion, the most spectacular outgrowth of our original fungus-sample thus far, and I look forward with interest to the reaction of the modern Lovecraft audience and to that of modern Lovecraft scholarship. Above all this is a reappraisal of Lovecraft, not as an icon of the horror story’s past, but of its future. It may be that the stars are finally right. [Alan More]

The complete piece can be read here.  

Providence N.1, published by Avatar Press, will be released at the end of May.

Providence N.1 preview

Art by Jacen Burrows.

Providence N. 1 will arrive at the end of May published by Avatar Press, with art by Jacen Burrows. In the meantime, BleedingCool has published a 3-page preview from the first issue of the series.

More details here.

Art by Jacen Burrows.

Moore's ultimate Lovecraft story

Cover for Providence N.1 (Avatar Press) by Jacen Burrows.

Excerpt from an interview published on BleedingCool.

Alan Moore: I think that with [Providence], at least for my purposes, I have created what is “my” ultimate Lovecraft story. It’s a repurposing of the Lovecraft pastiche to make it a vehicle that tells us more about Lovecraft and his world rather than simply extending the roll call of unpronounceable gods. And rather than regurgitating tropes that were brand new and exciting back in the 1920’s, I wanted to create stories that were true to the essence of Lovecraft, but were as shocking and unprecedented as Lovecraft’s stories were when they first started to appear in small circulation fanzines and in the pages of Weird Tales.

The complete interview can be read here.

Annotated Lovecraft

Excerpt from the intro written by Alan Moore for The new annotated H.P. Lovecraft volume.

[...] it is possible to perceive Howard Lovecraft as an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread. Far from outlandish eccentricities, the fears that generated Lovecraft’s stories and opinions were precisely those of the white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant-descended males who were most threatened by the shifting power relationships and values of the modern world. Though he may have regarded himself, in accordance with the view held of him by his readership and even those that knew him personally, as an embodiment of his most emblematic fable, “The Outsider,” in his frights and panics he reveals himself as that almost unheard-of fluke statistical phenomenon, the absolutely average man, an entrenched social insider unnerved by new and alien influences from without. This, it might be suggested, is the underlying reason for our ongoing absorption in his work, a fascination that seems only to increase as Lovecraft and his times recede into the past. In H. P. Lovecraft’s tales, we are afforded an oblique and yet unsettlingly perceptive view into the haunted origins of the fraught modern world and its attendant mind-set that we presently inhabit. Coded in an alphabet of monsters, Lovecraft’s writings offer a potential key to understanding our current dilemma, although crucial to this is that they are understood in the full context of the place and times from which they blossomed. [...]

- Alan Moore

The new annotated H.P. Lovecraft