When an adaptation loses any of this, it loses what makes Lovecraft’s writing unique and memorable. And his characters are seldom more than stand-ins for the author, with all his bookish quirks intact. His dense prose, occasionally bordering on logorrhea, is often ridiculed today. He favored obscure words and archaic spellings. But Lovecraft simply wasn’t modern, even by the standards of the early 20th century. Second, they flesh out the characters, giving them backstories, unique characteristics, and natural dialogue.įor modern horror, these might be laudable traits. First, they tend to emphasize bizarre and fantastic imagery, shocks, and gore. The problem with many Lovecraft adaptations is twofold. But then, quality interpretations of Lovecraft’s writing for other media are rare, and American attempts are no exception. How can this be? Tanabe’s culture and the one that produced Lovecraft couldn’t be more different. Given all of this, it may be surprising to learn that, in my opinion, some of the best recent comics adaptations of Lovecraft’s weird fiction have come from the pen of Japanese manga artist Gou Tanabe. In fact, they underlie many of his most memorable stories.
While the degree to which he was an overt racist is sometimes overstated, his xenophobia and his mistrust of unfamiliar cultures were real. In fact, the farthest he ever ventured from his beloved Providence was to New York, an experience that later led him to describe Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood as “a maze of hybrid squalor.”Ībout that word, “hybrid.” Lovecraft wasn’t one for mixing with foreigners. He identified as an Easterner, having spent most of his life in New England, but of the Far East he knew nothing. Lovecraft never wrote with an Asian audience in mind. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth (2023) Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness (2019) Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time (2018) Lovecraft's The Hound and Other Stories (2017) Lovecraft's The Haunter of the Dark (2016) Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space (2015) It is this common thread in Lovecraft's stories that particularly struck me." Īccording to Junji Ito, a famous horror manga artist, he had considered adapting Lovecraft's stories until Tanabe did it first. Tanabe has noted how Lovecraft's characters "lose all hope and appetite for life. His adaptations have proven so popular that they have been translated into English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. Horror Gou Tanabe is a Japanese manga creator, best known for adapting the stories of H.
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