There Are More Things: Culbard's At the Mountains of Madness

Friday, October 15, 2010

There Are More Things: Culbard’s At the Mountains of Madness

“El hombre olvida que es un muerto que conversa con muertos.”

-Jorge Luis Borges, “There Are More Things”, 1970

“Therefore a “post-Lovecraft” fidelity to the “Lovecraft event” would involve a measure of rejection of the ideological dominant of a capitalism that exploits avant-garde strategies.”

-Benjamin Noys, “The Lovecraft Effect”, 2008

at the mountains of madness cover It’s not very often one feels like a kid again. Growing up, I was fortunate enough to spend long days reading on the floor in front of the humble wooden book case where my father and my mother kept authors like Borges, Kafka, Chandler and Lovecraft. I first got into H.P. Lovecraft through Borges’s dedication to the Providence loner in his short story “There Are More Things” (the title originally left in English). From then on, nothing would be the same. The common-place phrase is true in this case. Reading Culbard’s graphic novel adaptation of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (SelfMadeHero 2010, £14.99; 128pp paperback w/flaps; Full colour; 170 x 240 mm) brought back to me the vivid sensation of of those first readings. Nostalgia, though, has not clouded my judgement, but I was meant to be partial to this comic book from the very beginning. Firstly because I am more forgiving of bad comics than bad books, and secondly because I am a Lovecraft admirer. (But this is a good comic book!… wait.)

in the case of their Heart of Darkness adaptation, SelfMadeHero have fearlessly dared to attempt the impossible. Lovecraft’s true talent, as many clever critics have already said, resides in his ability to describe, paradoxically, what he often detailed as the “unnameable”, “undescribable” “cosmic horror”; a complete pantheon of uncanny tentacled creatures, paradigmatic poster boys of the Return of the Repressed. And here the reader receives a colourful, clear, clean, almost innocent graphic re-telling of one of Lovecraft’s central tales.

Originally published in instalments in the February, March and April 1936 issues of pulp fiction classic Astounding Stories, the original At the Mountains of Madness, as a text, was no stranger to exercises in visual representation.

It is undeniable, as China Miéville argues in the introduction to the “definitive edition” of At the Mountains, that

“Lovecraft’s pantheon and bestiary are absolutely sui generis. There have never been any fireside stories of these creatures, we have neither heard of nor seen anything like them before.”

Nevertheless, Lovecraft’s creatures (and Miéville must know this; he wrote a very good book titled Kraken) had seen, in very visual and colourful form, similar and contemporary monsters, residing in the deepest unexplored depths of the sea, like the ones illustrating the story “Marooned Under the Sea” by Paul Ernst, from Astounding Stories, August 1930. In all fairness, Miéville recognises in Lovecraft an originality that did not contradict the multi-referentiality of his textual universe, from Jules Verne to Arthur Conan Doyle; from Robert Louis Stevenson to Edgar Allan Poe. It is the weirdness of Lovecraft’s imagination what had not taken place before in the history of written literature.

And Culbard’s adaptation is weird in a non-weird way. It is not black and white or baroque, like previous and even recent comics adaptations and comics inspired in Lovecraft’s works, that have ranged from the classic to the utterly disgraceful. The (I guess digital) colour palette is soft (blues, white, greys, brown, dark yellow) and smooth, with lovely shading effects.
It’s been said that Culbard’s style belongs to the ligne claire school. I can see the obvious resemblance to Hergé’s and Edgar P. Jacobs’s defined traces, especially in the characters’ eyes, but Culbard’s work in this adaptation lacks the centrality that lettering, detailed documentation and plain long written texts had in both of his predecessors. Compare for example two passages in which Jacobs (first) and Culbard (later) describe each a scene in a library (well, the reading room at the British Museum!):

Edgar P. Jacobs, La Marque Jaune, page 21 (Dargaud 1987)

I.N.J. Culbard, At the Mountains of Madness, unnumbered page (2010), image courtesy of SelfMade Hero

There are of course other pages in which Culbard includes more text, sometimes even to the point of resembling some of the text-lighter pages by Hergé or Jacobs. The adventurous, daring, detectivesque spirit of these masters lives in Culbard, and it is precisely in his distancing from their main aesthetic traits where the frankly delicious freshness of his trace can be experienced. Culbard has reintroduced Lovecraft into the adventure genre, and in doing so he exhibits the genre archetypes that informed his style.

The first person narration, from the point of view of geologist William Dyer, is faithfully respected, and so are Lovecraft’s plot and its essential elements: the journey into the unknown, academic knowledge and the lonely (though passionate) life of the scholar as a route to madness, the archetypal importance of writing, the rare book, libraries and research, the ultimate impossibility of communicating “true” knowledge as expressed by the uncanny, etc.

Culbard takes his time and lets the story set its own tempo. Unlike Hergé and Jacobs, he doesn’t cram the page with complicated panel architectures. He gives the story air, and lets the reader fill in the gaps between the panels and the pages, and therefore between the original story (what it tells) and the comic (what it can’t tell).

I am aware many Lovecraft fans, usually also aficionados of variants of heavy metal and other dark arts (as I was once too as a young man) will be disappointed by Culbard’s clean take on what is otherwise a really scary tale. But they should beware: Culbard has had conversations with dead men. There are more things to the visual representation of the macabre than black and white. By not being “post-modern” or experimental, by remaining faithful to a very literary tradition of comics storytelling Culbard practices the “post-Lovecraft” fidelity Benjamin Noys wrote about.

Culbard’s version remains very scary. Behind the light of his colour scheme cosmic horror oozes out, and stays with you.

—-At the Mountains of Madness, a graphic novel, is published by Self Made Hero and distributed in the UK by Turnaround.