Yuggoth: unpublished Lovecraftian tales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Moore had already said that, despite his retirement from the world of comics, there could still be some unpublished comics written by him out there.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 "There may also be other comic book work out there, as yet unpublished, but volume four of The League was my last comic strip work, and was also, I think, a fond and comprehensive farewell to the medium."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 

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

La Mappaterra del Mago

La Mappaterra by Pelosi & Frongia

Italian musician, actor, comic book author and scholar Francesco Pelosi is writing a series of articles focused on Moore's works: he is tracing a map and he named it la Mappaterra del Mago... The Magician's Map-Land. I am really proud to call Francesco... a friend!

Below, I translated - with a little help from another friend of mine, the extraordinary Omar Martini - a short excerpt from one of Pelosi's articles which includes the map drawn by Francesco Pelosi & Francesco “Checco” Frongia.

You can read the complete set HERE. Of course they are in Italian.

From the corner where we are now, from the special and elevated point of view of Citadel Supreme, we can finally see the whole Map-Land: it spreads beneath us but, on a closer look, also above and all around us.
At the centre there is From Hell’s black city [...]. Watching it from here, you can notice that it is wrapped in the flames of the Voice of Fire and that there is a Hole at its centre: there is the same Hole also up here, in the Citadel Supreme, because the two cities are equal and opposite, one black and rooted to the earth, the other gold and floating. However, when they are watched from above, from a place outside the Map-Land, they occupy exactly the same space - the only difference is that to access Citadel Supreme you have to go through the door/outpost called 1963.

Around the city of From Hell, there is an area of barren and even darker countryside, with an unusual circular shape. If we could look at the Map-Land from below, we would see that those dark lands are nothing more than the foundations of Providence/Neonomicon, an upside-down city, whose roofs and buildings, like rotting and incomprehensible roots, plunge directly into the ground.
The dark circle of Providence is defined by a series of streets that form the sides of two equilateral triangles, crossing themselves to outline a six-pointed star.
One of the points, the one looking at the Map-Land from above, seems to point to the sky or the West: it is the place where the city of Promethea lies. On the other hand, on the opposite point which seems to indicate the ground or the East, lies the city of Tom Strong.

From here, heading south, we find the townlet of A Small Killing […], then the Top 10 metropolis and going westwards, just before arriving at Promethea, the Lost Girls hotel. Following this path, we can see that the outermost part of the Map-Land is circular and all the towns in this area are connected to each other by roads and, in the same way, each town is connected to the centre of From Hell.
Then, moving from Promethea and heading north, we find the old and crumbling city of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the five districts of Tomorrow Stories (which include the village of Jack B. Quick, the swamp of Splash Brannigan, the film-set city of First American and U.S. Agent and the metropolis of Indigo, also known, depending on which side you access it from, as Greyshirt or The Cobweb). Finally, closing the circle to the east, we arrive at the small town of Mirror of love […] and again at Tom Strong.

However, the most interesting thing you may notice from this high angle concerns the shape of the land. The Map-Land, as it has developed until now, looks like a two-dimensional rectangle. If you look at it closely, you can see four dotted lines rising perpendicularly towards the sky from the vertex of the rectangle corners, each touching the vertex of another dotted rectangle that closes the airspace as if it were a box. The Magician's Map-Land is therefore both a two-dimensional rectangle and a 3D rectangular parallelepiped. Ultimately - and how could it be otherwise - we find ourselves inside a Block-Universe/Idea-Space.
The name of this all-encompassing place is Jerusalem. 

Francesco Pelosi

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.

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!

DAILY MOORE [22]

Art by Jacen Burrows.

Colors by Juan Rodriguez.
From: Providence n. 12.
First edition: 2017, Avatar Press.

Dreadful Beauty: Alan Moore on Jacen Burrows

Art by Jacen Burrows.

Excerpt from the intro written by Alan Moore for Dreadful Beauty: The art of Providence (Avatar Press, 2017).

"[...] Jacen Burrows is, in simple terms, the finest stylist to emerge from American comics in the 2lst century. His art, combining a realistic grasp of space, form and anatomy with the more usually humorous cartoon delivery and precision of the European ligne clair school, achieves a kind of perfect balance that is almost archetypal; makes the style appear somehow familiar despite its bold originality, as if it’s always been there. And indeed, if it had always been there -- if Jacen Burrows, born fifty years earlier, had been amongst the ranks of brilliant individualists that formed the classic E.C. Comics line-up, say-- it wouldn’t have seemed out of place. The artwork and the atmospheres it conjures have a timelessness, a blindingly apparent mastery that would distinguish them in any era. Burrows’ work, eschewing half-tones, hatching and all other modelling or shading styles as if they were a kind of visual noise, emerges as pure signal, albeit a signal lent immense intensity and power by the extraordinary weight of information and exquisite detail it is carrying. His almost forensic line, impeccably controlled, refuses any ambiguity and in this way conveys a sense that what is seen upon the page, no matter how alarming or impossible, has a verisimilitude that borders on the photographic. It might be thought to embody the exacting realism that’s required in presentations of the weird or the fantastical as posited by Lovecraft’s rigorous aesthetic, and as such made Jacen the only conceivable delineator for an opus as demanding and definitive as Providence would prove to be. [...]

Providence art book and slipcase on Kickstarter

Art by Jacen Burrows.

Avatar launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce a Providence art book and complete slipcase set.

At the moment of writing the campaign has been already funded with more than $94,000 pledged of $8,300 goal.

More details here.

Art by Jacen Burrows.

Brian K. Vaughan on Providence

Providence

Brian K. Vaughan compiled a list of ten of his favorite recent graphic novels "that take advantage of comics’ unique ability to explore the world and ourselves in ways that no other visual medium can." Providence is included in.
The complete list is available HERE.

Providence, by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows
The greatest writer in the history of comics is doing some of his finest work ever with artist Jacen Burrows and their harrowing exploration of Lovecraft. [Brian K. Vaughan]

Kurt Hathaway: lettering Providence

Lettering by Kurt Hathaway from Providence N. 3.

Excerpt from an interview with Providence's letterer Kurt Hathaway.

"Providence utilizes multiple fonts for various different characters from Salem’s fish-men hybrids, to Willard Wheatley, to the ghoul King George. Even Neonomicon‘s Deep One has his own font. How did you come up with the lettering style for each of these?
Kurt Hathaway: These are outlined by Alan in some way - no specific font, per se, but an idea of what he’d like to see graphically. A short description of the font style - and balloon style - maybe a color note - I then put together something I think may fit the bill.

This is something I do on a fairly regular basis on other series and graphic novels anyway, so I’m always prepared to put together something.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time designing all kinds of caption and balloon styles, so I have a gallery of styles to choose from when the request comes in. I have ghost balloons, and zombie balloons and all kindsa crazy styles already prepped in advance. I can usually grab one of those, and make a tweak or two to make it suit the book’s needs.

In Providence #3, there is a tiny unreadable font coming from some of the Terrible Old Man’s bottles. One of our readers actually took photos of it through a microscope device. A somewhat similar font appears in Providence #7 as Pitman and King George walk away. Are these just stand-ins for indistinct speech, or is there more to it that you would explain?
Kurt Hathaway: I’d forgotten about the bottles until I looked at my page file a few days ago - I was trying to locate one of the balloon styles to match it again. Not that one - another one, but it crossed my radar all the same. The bottles contain tiny people if I’m not mistaken, so that balloon indicates to the reader two things - there’s a tiny person in the bottle - and they’re voice is so low in volume, that its content is indistinguishable. But the balloon draws the eye to the bottle. It’s a clever storytelling device."

[The complete interview is available here]

The Queen of Spain likes Providence

As reported by El Pais, during the latest Madrid Book Fair, the Queen of Spain bought a copy of... Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows' Providence.

More info here, in Spanish.

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.

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.

Jacen Burrows on Providence

Page from Providence N. 1.Art by Jacen Burrows.

Excerpt from an interview to Providence's artist Jacen Burrows. Interview conducted by Hannah Means Shannon for BleedingCool.

HMS: For Providence, you get to draw monsters, you get to draw people, you get to draw people who are monsters. What do you think is viscerally scary for comic readers, and what are some of your strategies for affecting readers in such a way?
JB: [...] The hope being that when the horrific things happen or when our lead character stumbles into the darker corners of the Lovecraftian world that they will be all the more horrific in contrast. Robert Black doesn’t live in a shady nightmare world; he lives in our world, which sometimes intersects with things that will horrify him down to his bones. There are definitely some opportunities to design and show some really scary stuff, but I think it is the contrast with the recognizable but still somewhat alien 1919 setting that amplifies the creepiness.

[...]

HMS: What do you think of being the first artist to visually harmonize the majority of Lovecraft’s stories into a single universe?
JB: This is really Alan’s accomplishment. I know what it took for him to bring it all together and from the beginning my goal was just to deliver his vision as accurately as I could. As long as he is happy, I am happy. I’m sure once it is complete I will be able to appreciate the whole thing in more of an academic light as an enthusiastic Lovecraft fan.

The complete interview can be read here.

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.

Providence is arriving!

Art by Jacen Burrows.

The much awaited first issue of Providence, written by Moore with art by Jacen Burrows, will be released by Avatar Press in May 2015. [Source: Bleedingcool]

[UPDATE, 14th of February, thanks to Flavio Pessanha]
The building depicted in the cover is set at 317 W 14th St, New York, NY 10014, USA [Google Maps] and it's related to Cool Air short story.

Lovecraft wrote Cool Air during his unhappy stay in New York City, during which he wrote three horror stories with a New York setting. [...] The building that is the story's main setting is based on a townhouse at 317 West 14th Street where George Kirk, one of Lovecraft's few New York friends, lived briefly in 1925. [Wikipedia]

It's Dr. Muñoz room from Cool Air.
"[...] after a time I came upon a house in West Fourteenth Street which disgusted me much less than the others I had sampled. [...] in my third-floor front hall room [...] One evening at about eight I heard a spattering on the floor and became suddenly aware that I had been smelling the pungent odour of ammonia for some time. Looking about, I saw that the ceiling was wet and dripping; the soaking apparently proceeding from a corner on the side toward the street. [...] Mrs. Herrero disappeared up the staircase to the fourth floor, and I returned to my room. The ammonia ceased to drip, and as I cleaned up what had spilled and opened the window for air, I heard the landlady's heavy footsteps above me. Dr. Muñoz I had never heard, save for certain sounds as of some gasoline-driven mechanism; since his step was soft and gentle." [Excerpt form HP Lovecraft's Cool Air]

Alan Moore goes to... PROVIDENCE!

The 22th of September 2012, during the first N.I.C.E. convention, Alan Moore announced his new comics project to be published by Avatar Press, PROVIDENCE, a sequel of Neonomicon. 

It will be a 10 part series, set in 1919, featuring Lovecraft himself as a character and exploring the inspiration behind the horrific mythology he created.

The series' illustrator has not been officially announced yet but it's highly probable it will be Neonomicon artist, Jacen Burrows.

See and listen Moore talking about Providence in the video below.