The Ward

From those fine fellows over at the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast comes their Lovecraftian YouTube sitcom, The Ward! You can go here to view all three parts of the pilot episode, but part one can be seen below...

A Hideous Naughty Strangeness: Alan Moore's Neonomicon, and the Doom That Came to Lovecraft

Neonomicon
by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows

So Alan Moore’s farewell “fuck you” to the comics industry wrapped up recently, and… This unrelentingly dark and unpleasant book didn‘t exactly go where I expected it to, though perhaps I should have. He played fair with his literary mystery, after all, planting clues and images that pretty much told you where it was headed if you chose to view them in the right way. But I wasn’t exactly trying to solve the mystery anyway. I was more concerned with the commentary he was making on the works of HP Lovecraft, which is how I want to look at Neonomicon tonight.

Part of the agenda here seems to have been to give some teeth back to the incredible nihilism, the sheer hopeless existential horror that makes Lovecraft’s work so compelling, and that too often gets glossed over in the modern popular fan interpretations of the work. I mean, in a world where you can buy cute stuffed effigies of Cthulhu (I own one myself), it’s easy to forget how terrifying that fucker’s supposed to be. He’s an avatar of nameless, uncaring evil from beyond, a vast alien intellect that will devour all, and that we have no hope of defeating. He is nihilism made flesh, not a toyetic cartoon mascot.

I can understand how it came to this, of course. One of the ways people deal with scary things is to codify them, make them understandable, and (in the end) make jokes about them. And Cthulhu strikes the perfect balance between the bizarre and the relatable in Lovecraft’s pantheon of evil cosmic god-things. “Big flabby oceanic monster with an octopus for head” is way easier to grasp than, say, “formless boiling madness that sits gibbering at the center of the universe.” But it’s also more pleasingly strange than “black goat of the woods with a thousand young.” But still. Codifying Lovecraftian horrors is pretty much antithetical to the point of them. They are the unknown, the unclassifiable things that terrify us because we have problems wrapping our heads around them. That’s why it’s so difficult to do the man’s work justice on film, or in comics: visual mediums demand that you provide visuals for things best left to the imagination.

Jacen Burrows does supply visuals here, of course, and his Deep One (though a very cool monster) isn’t particularly horrifying in and of itself. But it doesn’t need to be, because of the kind of horror Moore has chosen to focus on. Which brings us back on-point, and into the realm of SPOILERS...

Ten Dorky Things To Be Thankful For

So here we are at the end of Thanksgivin’ weekend. We’ve had a grand ol’ American good time the last few days, and now we thought we’d slow down a little and take stock. Think about the thing this holiday’s really s'posed to be about: the stuff from the precedin’ year that we’re thankful for. There’s friends and family and good health and all that, of course, but... Bein’ on the Nerd Farm really makes us think most about all the dorky crap we loved in 2010. So here, in no particular order, is our list of Ten Dorky Things To Be Thankful For…

1. Mythbusters

There’s nothing dorkier than science, and this show combines science with urban legends AND blowing stuff up! Could documentary television really get much better than that? Not in our eyes, my friends! From the ridiculous concepts, to the fascinating practical science of the experiments, to the genius hosting odd couple of Adam Savage and Jamie Heineman (pictured), we love this show deep down to the core of our dorky little hearts. Even with the cheesy fake enthusiasm of the back-up team (who I like, don’t get me wrong), Mythbusters is like some kind of dork wet dream, and we’re thankful that they’re still making new ones.

2. JH Williams III

The single-best artist working in mainstream funnybooks today. With his innovative layout, mutable style, attention to detail, and talent for visual symbolism, Williams has made every comic he’s worked on twice as good as it might have been without him. This year, that comic was Batwoman, which was to funnybook art what Grant Morrison’s Batman was to funnybook writing: head and shoulders above the competition in the world of corporate spandex.

HP Lovecraft Was Right!

And the Dead Milkmen were wrong! We're facing a silent invasion of immortal jellyfish!

Also, courtesy my friend Gregory's blog, here's the best picture I've seen all week:

Did I Mention How Much I Love HP Lovecraft?

So I'm a big fan of the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast. It's two guys, armed with lit degrees and a healthy sense of humor, dissecting the works of HP Lovecraft, one story at at time, in the order they were written. I've been a big Lovecraft fan ever since I first discovered him at around age 12. His stories of Elder Gods and nameless horrors from beyond spoke to me then, and probably had a more profound impact on my world-view than I'd like to admit.

At any rate. The podcast is about a year old now, and they're just getting to the most prolific and creative part of Lovecraft's career. Last week, they covered his story "The Silver Key," and their discussion gave me a far greater appreciation of it than I had before. It's part of Lovecraft's Dreamlands cycle, and like most of the Dreamlands stuff, I read it kind of half-assed when I was a kid, and haven't really ever gone back to it. But their reading made me look at it (and all the Randolph Carter stories, ultimately) as a sort of fantasy autobiography. And in light of where Lovecraft was in his life at the time of writing (he'd just returned home to Providence after his life as a married man in New York fell apart), it's become pretty fascinating to me.