Platypus of Truth

  The Great Old One himself. Hard to make a guy with an octopus 🐙 head look scary, so I always turn to Blake's Dragon and the Woman series.

There are two innovative bits of cinema I've been watching over the past week. Each deserves attention as works of art, but also as pieces that authentically put women and minorities to the fore of a genre in which they have been all too often absent or exploited. The first is Netflix's Dutch horror series, Ares . Ares  follows the biracial and poor Rosa's initiation into an elite college fraternity with connections to the highest circles of Dutch society. The portrayal of the the way in which elite groups draw in their members, separate them from their families and values, make them complicit in the group's guilt, foster predatory competition, and ultimately claim to offer absolution from the corruption through radical loyalty to the group works as well for cults and political factions as it does for honors colleges and classics programs. I can't speak to how it actually portrays race and gender in Holland, but I can affirm that this is what it feels like to be a...

Schematic drawing found in the apartment of Pickman the artist. Lately of Boston.

H.P. Lovecraft excelled at creating visions of evil that were believable in a materialistic age. His witches, cultists, and eldar gods require no supernatural explanations, and yet resonate every bit as much as anything found in Cotton Mather or Algernon Blackwood. It is no wonder then, that H.R. Giger and screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett turned to H.P.L., particularly his At the Mountains of Madness , in creating the film Alien . Ridley Scott's direction of Alien , Prometheus , and Alien Covenant  consciously bathes in the arctic light of Lovecraft's novella. So after another viewing of Prometheus  and Alien Covenant  this summer, here are my own interpretations of the alien: part corpse, part machine, part dragon, part demon. It is a secular antichrist, man's failed attempt to become God.

We're already past July 4th, and I haven't addressed the critical issue of Summer Reading. In part, that's because I'm applying to grad schools and six to eight hours of each week day is devoted to language study and catch-up reading. So, right now, most of my Summer Reading is Wheelock's and Hanson and Quinn. Other things have managed to slip in, however. If you've been following this blog, you may have noticed the Neil Gaiman binge. It started with Troll Bridge , moved on to The Neverwhere , gained steam with The Sandman  vols 1-6, The Dream Hunters  and Overture , and finished up with Fragile Things  and The Ocean at the End of the Lane . That's a lot of Gaiman! To break up the flow of goth drama and tragic sexuality, we've also been listening to Stephen Fry read the Sherlock Holmes novels and doing our own read-through of Frank Herbert's Dune . We're looking forward to watching the Sci-Fi channels mini-series after we're done with tha...

There's a lovely little puzzle game on sale now from the Square Enix Collective: Goetia . My wife and I have just finished this beautiful little French puzzle-solver and are thoroughly impressed. The basic mechanic is similar to the Myst  games or the Monkey Island  series. Tonally, however, Goetia  is an artful blend of Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft, and Charles Williams. The plot is as gripping as the puzzles and we kept playing as much for the story and the eerie atmosphere as for the mechanic. Those who are squeamish about the occult elements the game's title suggests should know that it keeps a firm grip on Good and Evil and finishes off with a strong (but in nowise preachy) message about human nature.

Drawing of life form uncovered by the disastrous Miskatonic expedition to Antarctica in the 1920s No organic specimens related to these drawings has been located though a related bronze artifact of unknown provenance is in the keeping of the Mathematics department Please forward this picture and attached memorandum to Mr. Weyland

My Save the Cat  homework continues, this time branching out into films within the broader horror genre. Where I began with Alien , a 70s horror classic, I decided to move on to the late 90s with The Blair Witch Project . My first introduction to The Blair Witch Project,  appropriately enough, was a student film advertising Biola University's Saddie Hawkins week: The Babs Witch Project.  I particularly liked the on campus tie-ins in the spirit of the original: hanging stick figures outside the cafeteria. Anyhow, I regret to say that in spite of spending six years hanging out with film majors, I never saw the original. So here I am now, yet again, a day late and a dollar short. It's a happy coincidence however, since I now know more about Film and legend tripping . Preface aside, there are three things about The Blair Witch Project  that I appreciated and think helped to sell this rather unorthodox film: 1. Nostalgia -The film is set in 1994 and was released in ...

As part of my Save the Cat  homework, I'm working my way through the Alien  series. It also has the added benefit of getting me ready for a viewing of Alien Covenant , whenever that happens. In addition to all the Alien  material, I've also been taking a closer look at some of my favorite comic book artists. Mike Mignola and his team have been right at the forefront with Helllboy: Into the Silent Sea and Hellboy: The Midnight Circus  along with Witchfinder  volumes I-IV. On a very different end of the spectrum, I've also been looking back through Doug TenNapel's old black and whites. My eye is specifically on the use of shadow and highlights and last weeks Alien -inspired mini-comic reflects that. This week again merges my two fields of study into my ongoing quest to become a better artist. The above picture is a refinement of my first Alien  homage refined with Prismacolor markers and colored pencils (no computer editing). The second is a new piece co...

Ok, so one more before I close up shop for the night. Incidentally, have you noticed that the focal character in each Alien  movie is a woman? That makes it rather unique in a male dominated genre. When I was in college, the one unforgivable sin was not inviting the our female friends over for an Alien  marathon. So, Ripley, Shaw, Daniels... Why is it always a woman? Is it a matter of "give me the same thing... but different"? Is it that images of motherhood and birth dominate the dark language of the films? Does one necessitate the other? Given Alien's  roots in H.P. Lovecraft's fiction, the choice to consistently move away from an academic, male, hero is a decisive one. It's given us some great characters and a great string of movies (I leave the exceptions up to you).

Here are two more entries in what's shaping up to be my Alien -inspired oeuvre. These aren't taken from any movie in particular, but rather involve images from across films, comics, and concept art surrounding the series. After looking the material en masse, it underlines the Save the Cat  principle of "give me the same thing... bu different!" That's what these movies are: giving us the same thing by different. We, the audience, are paying for story, but fundamentally we're paying for the " Alien  Experience" one more time.

I was dissatisfied with my first attempt at creating a creature from Alien . Here is my second attempt using only black pen. I've tried to pull toward the Egyptian elements of some of the original artwork that keep the world of Alien  close to its lovecraftian roots.

Alien Covenant  has just come out and I thought I would make a small contribution here with a quick bit of fan art. The art of Alien  puts teeth into H.P. Lovecraft's tales of forgotten extraterrestrial civilizations or Clark Ashton Smith's journeys of interstellar doom. They are the consummate horror stories for a secular age.

It's been a few years since I last dipped in to the world of Robert E. Howard's sword-swinging barbarian, Conan. While the writing is always high quality, the racism and sexism that riddle Howard's oeuvre is hard to handle in large doses. After a good, long break, then, I decided that it was finally time to have a go at finishing my annotated edition of the complete works. The Servants of Bit-Yakin : The Servants of Bit-Yakin  returns us from the microcosmic novella that is The Hour of the Dragon  to the world of the standard Conan adventure story. Once more, we return to the pseudo-Africa that so dominated Howard's imagination. This tale, with its ruined city created by a lost race of white men who were able to perfectly preserve their corpses, and its eternal queen apparently owes its inspiration to H.R. Haggard's She . Rather than give us another She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, however, Howard evolves the adventure in his own way with the mysterious element  coming i...

As a fitting follow-up to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , I decided to doodle my way through a bit of Edgar Allen Poe. I've asked my students to do the same as a way of interacting with the text, moving from consumers to creators. It's an honorable tradition. After all, it's hard not to see Lovecraft's debt to Poe when reading The Fall of the House of Usher  and comparing it to The Rats in the Walls , or Ligeia  and The Thing on the Doorstep . Lovecraft binge-read Poe as a child and then turned his own hand to creating. So here we have the mysterious Lady Ligeia with her impossible to place features and flair for consumptive look (hint: consumption was linked with vampirism in the backwoods of 18th century New England). Next, we have the opium inspired bedroom/ritual chamber where Ligeia makes her final grand entrance. I wasn't sure how that last one would look on paper, but Poe's aesthetic is unfailingly creepy whether in words or colored pencil.

Never mind the Mi-Go... My skills-of-a-photographer still leave something to be desired, but here is my first-draft of the miniatures from Fantasy Flight Games' Mansions of Madness . I've supplemented the base set with all sorts of do-dads from my Warhammer collection and some old museum souvenirs I had lying around the house. Points if you get the inside joke with the cultists (aside from the obvious Cthulhu reference).

Fantasy Flight has produced an entire line of games dedicated to a New England author who dedicated his life to the study and praise of New England -it's like a dream come true! So here is the newest iteration of Platypus Gaming, Mansions of Madness , a dungeon crawl based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. The first thing I noticed about the game, right from the moment I opened the box, is the high art production value. Every element of the game is beautiful and represents a united aesthetic. Tone is such an important element in Lovecraft's short stories and deft art direction creates a consistently lovecraftian tone from the get-go. The second thing I noticed, while perusing the rule book, is that unlike many other dungeon crawls, Mansions of Madness  is truly adversarial. The game is set up to evenly match investigators (protagonists) versus the Keeper (antagonist) and let them duke it out for the victory. There's no issue here of a capricious "game ordinance direc...

H.P. Lovecraft was noted for his racist antipathy for the Quebecois, Irish, and Italian immigrants that flooded into a depopulated New England in the early 20th century. These people, my great-grandparents, form a constant backdrop to the anglo-patrician Lovecraft's tales of horror and degeneration. In one of his final stories, however, as the author slowly succumbed to untreated colon cancer in his mid-forties, he seems to have attempted a final rapprochement with my ancestors who would inherit his beloved New England. The Haunter of the Dark  presents the New England Patrician Robert Harrison Blake as powerless in the face of an avatar of the dreaded Nyarlathotep. It is the Irish and Italian immigrants who in the end have both the courage and the knowledge to restrain the creature. In the final scene of the tale, they surround the desecrated church where the Haunter in Darkness lurks with a wall of candles that can be seen clear across town as the anglo Blake dies in horror. For ...

Oh no! After too many games of Arkham Horror, Crochet Cthulhu appeared crushing everything in sight beneath his colossal tread. Before he could call to the Outer Gods whole dwell in the darkness between the stars with the help of his Evil Mayo, our investigators rallied to the cause. Assisted by the noble Platypus, they were able to force the Abomination back through the gate and seal it with the Elder Sign.

My wife and I picked up Fantasy Flight's Cthulhu Mythos game, Arkham Horror , over the break. We've been playing Eldritch Horror and Elder Sign: Omens for about a year now and we were eager to see the legendary game that started it all. In some ways, Arkham Horror feels like a less refined version of Eldrich Horror. There is less flavor text and the game mechanics are less stream-lined. After playing through two and a half games, however, I see the attraction. Arkham Horror is more flexible and more focused than Eldrich Horror. With the setting limited to a single town rather than the whole earth, the art and tone of the game are more focused. The less stream-lined mechanics also allow for a greater amount of control over the investigators (player characters), and thus a more intense game. And the game is much more intense than either Eldrich Horror or Elder Signs: Omens. Monster movement each turn creates all kinds of problems for the investigators. The frequency with wh...