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Archive for ‘Nyarlathotep’
19 results.
Sorry for double posts. I fail at Comicpress and Falco fails at Jesuit mind tricks. (And I enjoy the Marx Brothers too much.)
I sat for at least one hour and tweaked Falco’s face in Photoshop. Better draw it right in the first place! He is a sensitive character to draw. I can’t just axe together his face like Andy’s, it’s a delicate matter. When I get some real clay, I’d like to sculpt a miniature Falco head just so that I can examine it from different angles and in different spotlights. (I have a little Pest Doctor mask, a souvenir from Venice, that I use for such purposes, but Falco would probably be offended if he knew. Yes, I use my characters as little moral compasses!)
Suddenly, Falco was super-easy to draw (and sexy, too). Touch of realism: no matter how good-looking they are, people don’t look sexy most of the time. Usually people look pretty silly.
I think Mochi knows more than anyone can possibly suspect (or explain).
I wish I could do this all the time. Two strips a day, on three hours sleep. 730 strips a year. I could get all of my ideas published within a decade. Nah, who am I kidding. Within a century. I’m one of those people who run out of steam long before they run out of ideas.
Today, my drawing skills are severely lacking again – maybe due to the mysterious runny nose that doesn’t seem to be a cold and doesn’t go away with allergy medicine. Whee.
In other news, I was in Malmö yesterday and had a nice chat with Mattias Elftorp, the creator of Piracy is Liberation and many other strange and curious projects. We shared some thoughts on HPL – it was his birthday, after all – and Mattias lent me a little black book containing the Swedish translation of Lovecraft’s own notes on dreams, ideas and random useful themes. On the bus back home I was already chuckling to gems such as “55. Man followed by invisible creature“, when a sudden stop made me look up straight at an advertisement board: “We are seeking city dreamers”. Below that, the name of the company: Dagon.
This strip is so overworked, I should make comics about the 1890′s instead (a very fine decade by the way, many weird things happening in the world – am currently reading Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which starts off in that time).
I also realize I need to know much more about quantum physics than there’s space in my brains. From physics to chemistry, can you guess who Marie, Goldie’s dear old friend, might be? Easy-peasy…
But, MOCHI.
Okay, there’s the teddybear. I wonder if they had to buy a ticket for it, too. Why did I introduce it in the first place…
I have been reading a big fat Swedish book from 1920 called Elektriciteten by E. Andréen and H. Holst. Some of the illustrations were used on the previous page. I must say that I don’t understand much of it (slept through most physics lessons at school) but what I understand seems exciting. Other fun books are Martin Gardner’s Relativity for the Million from 1962 and William Bonnor’s The Mystery of the Expanding Universe from 1964. What I like about the older books is the emphasis on alternative theories that have since been abandoned – of course the truth is always more astonishing than fiction, but the powers of human imagination should not be underestimated.
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Men! What can I say? We’ve all been there. And he gets what he wants, anyway, because LOOK at that NOSE.
In other news, Google celebrates Galileo’s telescope, German archaeologists are digging up a mysterious African civilization, and my sister’s hard-boiled action-drama-sliceoflife-comic Eva can be pre-ordered (in Swedish).
The full quote is found in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (originally published as Träume eines Geistersehers, 1766) by Immanuel Kant, available through Wikisource.
Kant expresses – with his dry sense of humour, but not without a certain Lovecrafty ominousness – the sceptic’s opinion in the very next chapter: “while I have not made insanity to be the cause of an imagined communion with spirits, I have yet connected the two by considering insanity as the natural consequence of such communion”.
The practical philosopher concludes with a concession to the faithful, as well as the faithless:
Human reason was not given strong enough wings to part clouds so high above us, clouds which withhold from our eyes the secrets of the other world. The curious who inquire about it so anxiously may receive the simple but very natural reply, that it would be best for them to please have patience until they get there. But as our fate in the other world probably depends very much on the manner in which we have conducted our office in the present world, I conclude with the words with which Voltaire, after so many sophistries, lets his honest Candide conclude: “Let us look after our happiness, go into the garden, and work.”
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Mochi tells the nasty man to “shut up” in Japanese.
The debate here reflects my annoyance with old adventure stories, where ancient African civilizations almost invariably were led by white people, and intelligence was measured by European beauty standards. Of course, such sentiments can be found in Lovecraft’s tales, but he relished in disrupting his own Anglo-Saxon purity ideal – nobody was safe, anybody could degenerate into a Dagon-worshipping fish monster or a cannibalistic ghoul. How much of his virulent racism was added for horrific effect, and how much was based on genuine convictions? HPL was a bit of a troll sometimes.
New to the Nyarlathotep storyline? Go to the Archives.
This was a tough one – because of Nyarly’s technobabble. There are other items that I would like to introduce, but the tuning fork did an impromptu entrance. He would of course have more effective oscillators for more sinister purposes.
As usual, the Nyarlathotep archives are here.
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