Michael Zigerlig

"Call of Cthulhu" is American weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft's best known tale, featuring his most iconic and enduring creation. First published in the classic pulp magazine "Weird Tales" in February 1928, the story is a fractured narrative based around the journal of Francis Thurston. Thurston inherits a body of work that belonged to his great uncle who had apparently sought to piece together information concerning dark cults and strange outbreaks of hysteria. The overall story is broken into three parts: the first, "The Horror In Clay" tells about the uncle's investigation into an outbreak of visions of an ancient, monstrous, city rising out of the ocean; the second part "The Tale Of Inspector Lagrasse" tells of the police raid on a black magic cult located in the swamps around New Orleans, where the cultists worship a creature similar to those seen by the hysterics and finally "The Madness From The Sea" which revolves around a sailor who was driven totally insane by his horrific experiences while on a deep sea voyage. Like most of Lovecraft's work it has a dense narrative style, is adjective filled and has a narrator relaying remembered details rather than a concerted focus on action. Despite Lovecraft's work having many memorable individual images, his narrative style makes it a difficult story to directly translate into the comics’ medium. Michael Zigerlig adaptation is, therefore, a notable achievement, particularly as he stays very true to the original work, using Lovecraft's meticulous prose almost verbatim and only using minimal abridgements. He uses captions rather than word balloons and concentrates on the imagery, developing an, at times, beautifully decorative and illustrative style; at other moments a hallucinogenic and distorted approach which dares to imagine Lovecraft's "indescribable horrors". The digital book is an excellent, bright and clear, package from Caliber Digital Comics / Devil's Due Digital (originally published by Transufzion Publishing) running to some 80 pages. The one criticism is that the page sizes cannot be manipulated and the overall size is therefore a touch small to properly experience on an e-reader. The artwork therefore loses some impact in its digital edition, but is still a hugely impressive artistic achievement. The book also comes with an introduction by bio-mechanical artist H. R. Giger, himself a great admirer of both Lovecraft and Zigelig’s fantastical art.… (meer)