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gomro
[12971019]
[2010-02-10 19:49:19 +0000 UTC]
"JBL"
(United States)
# Statistics
Favourites: 63; Deviations: 347; Watchers: 88
Watching: 208; Pageviews: 10968; Comments Made: 153; Friends: 208
# Interests
Favorite visual artist: Steve Ditko. Jack Kirby. Alex Toth. De Es Schwertberger. Philippe Druillet. Lee Brown Coye. And others.Favorite movies: The Wizard of Oz. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Superman. White Christmas. The Bishop's Wife. Phantasm. Night of the Demon. etc.
Favorite TV shows: Thriller. The Outer Limits. Alcoa Presents One Step Beyond. Night Gallery. Kolchak the Night Stalker. Tales of the Unexpected. Babylon 5. Deep Space Nine. Firefly. Stranger Things. Gravity Falls. and so on.
Favorite bands / musical artists: Magma. Van der Graaf Generator. Emerson Lake and Palmer. Alamaailman Vasarat. Univers Zero. Art Zoyd. Stormy Six. Miriodor. L'Orkestre des Pas Perdus. to be continued.
Favorite books: The Stars My Destination. The City and the Stars. The Reproductive System (aka Mechasm). My Life and Hard Times. The Complete Lovecraft. Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969 edition). Fellstones. From Below. 20th Century Ghosts (aka The Black Phone)....
# About me
Born February 1956. Father unknown; mother listed only as "Jane Doe." Adopted later. No wonder I feel a certain kinship to Wilbur Whateley.Encountered first monster at the age of 6 in a comic book, SHOWCASE #39, written by the legendary Robert Kanigher: the Metal Men, a band of heroic robots, versus CHEMO, THE DEATHLESS DOOM -- a mindless horror, created by an accidental mixing of chemical formulae, that sprayed lethal chemicals at anything that came within arm’s reach. This literally traumatized me -- I would hide the book, then run back and look at it, then get scared and hide it again, ad infinitum. I'm told monkeys will do the same with a snake in a box. A snake in a box would have been a blessing compared to Chemo. Unto this day I still collect any comic with Chemo in it; he has a place in my private teratological pantheon right beside Great CTHULHU and the motion pictures’ “Brancusi robot,” KRONOS. However, Chemo has never again been as mindlessly, monstrously Lovecraftian as he was in that first glorious story.
The next year THE OUTER LIMITS premiered, bringing both Lovecraftian horror and Lovecraftian-style speech into our living room every Monday on WHTN-13: “We were sired by the coming together of sick, nameless nuclei that had waited a billion billion years for that precise, ungodly moment. We fell to earth, and the velocity of that fall quickened the seed of intellect, at the same time it stunted the evolution of our primitive forms,” --- body-stealing alien from OL ep “The Invisibles.” Destiny was priming the pump, so to speak.
It wasn’t until 1969 that I ran afoul of Lovecraft; I had owned a book containing THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE for many years, but never read the story, because the title sounded dumb. Of course there’s no colour in space, it’s BLACK! However, one day I had little to read or do, and I realized I’d never read that boring and bad thing about colourless space, so “West of Arkham the hills rise wild...” This encounter, and the discovery of THE RATS IN THE WALLS and THE DUNWICH HORROR mere days later, shattered the little sanity I had left and set me, at the age of 13, tearing around looking for the Necronomicon in my Jr. High library.
I didn't find it.
# Comments
Comments: 16
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I have no fewer than 3 different attempts to bring the Necronomicon to reality. Including the Simon book.
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My testament:
When I was a youngster in my home town, I found, in an scifi anthology, the story THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE. It eclipsed the preceding and following stories. I even tried to draw a comic book rendering, but my art skills were then -and still are - inadequate to the ambitious project and only page 1 ever started.
I next found the story -and others- in a Lancer paperback of Lovecraft's stories, along with THE CALL OF CTHULHU. Later a 2nd Lovecraft paperback from Lancer was purchased. That was the start of my Mythos shelf.
Now both Lancer books, notorious for binding problems, have been long replaced by Arkham editions. I was lucky enough to get many before they became Out of Print.
Later,I stopped looking for new mythos fiction, as it had drifted into the realm of fan fiction. Without Lovecraft's guiding light, all sorts of contradictory stuff .... Nobody quite captured Lovecraft's horror of the starry skies (arms groping down to seek & grab you !) or of the ocean (corruption from under the waves).
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