Some of the most famous horror stories of all time are now available in comic form. The stories from H.P. Lovecraft have been transcribed into what are called The Lovecraft Anthology.
The Lovecraft Anthology is a graphic novel being published by London-based company, SelfMadeHero. Being edited by Dan Lockwood (The Trial, The Master and Margarita), Lockwood has brought together a team to work on the anthology including illustrator Matt Broker (H.G. Well’s The War of the Worlds, Leviathan) and editor Ian Edignton (X-Force, Leviathan). Lockwood is taking part in the adaption of three out of the seven stories for the first volume.
“I’ve been a fan of H.P. Lovecraft since I first started reading his stories as a teenager,” Lockwood revealed. “There was something about his bleak view of a hostile universe swarming with uncaring alien monstrosities that I found appealing. I had been reading Stephen King and Clive Barker for some time by that point, and discovering an author who had obviously inspired them was very exciting to me. I revisited his stories a few years ago and fell in love with them all over again. So I approached this project as a fan. My aim was to put together the kind of collection that I would want to read, with a mixture of styles and approaches.”
A lot of work was involved in the transition from novel to comic. This involved taking Lovecraft’s stories and re-imagining the scenes and monsters that are prominent throughout his stories. Another challenge was the lack of dialogue in the stories. Lockwood had this to say about that:
“Well, one of the major problems these stories pose for comic adapters is that there’s hardly any dialogue in them,” Lockwood reveals. ”Lovecraft’s protagonists tend to operate alone for the most part, sifting through newspapers or family histories. So you end up with a lot of narration, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself, but I know this was something all of the adapters were aware of. I think the main difficulty is retaining the atmosphere and core story while trimming down some of the detail.”
You can pick up the first volume of The Lovecraft Anthology right now and can look forward to the second volume coming out in October of this year.
