The occasion for this examination is the ongoing publication, over the past two decades, of the most sustained, expansive, detailed, and to my mind successful project of adapting Lovecraft’s major fiction into graphic narrative: Japanese mangaka Gou Tanabe’s nine-volume (so far) series for the Kadokawa publishing conglomerate, which began in 2004. (...)
For decades, critics such as Edmund Wilson derided Lovecraft’s work as objectively “bad art” arising from innate “bad taste” (Wilson 288), but recent years have witnessed a growing acknowledgement among literary scholars that whether one enjoys it or not, Lovecraft’s writing style represents a highly self-conscious formal strategy that bears comparison with other more canonical modernist experiments with which it was contemporaneous. In other words, Lovecraft’s aesthetic significance derives from the material density and specificity of his prose, just as William Faulkner’s, Djuna Barnes’s, or James Joyce’s do, and the themes or concepts that emerging from his prose cannot be legitimately separated from the textual form. This melding of form and content constitutes Lovecraft’s “pulp modernism”
- Fig. 7, “The Call of Cthulhu” by John Coulthart