H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu by Gou Tanabe

Gou Tanabe is a manga-ka whose work has largely been adaptations of literary works - with a particular line in adapting H.P. Lovecraft stories. He's put out a fairly long shelf of work, but I can only speak to his two-volume version of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, which I read a few years ago.

Tanabe - in this edition, supported by Zack Davisson (translation), Steve Dutro (lettering and touchup) and Carl Gustav Horn (editor) - is, from what I've seen, a very faithful adaptor of the stories he chooses. He picks up large chunks of the original author's prose and runs those as large captions, floating over his pages, occasionally for several pages at a time. He also replicates the structure of those stories, at least in the Lovecraft works I've seen, which is particularly notable since Lovecraft tended to use a multi-section, fake-document style in his major works, and Tanabe closely follows that.

H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu - the Tanabe adaptation, I mean; the original short story is from 1928 - was published in Japan in book form in 2019, and this English translation followed in the fall of 2024. And it does adapt the underlying story very, very closely, turning a thirty-some page story into about two hundred and fifty pages of comics. The only thing I could think to complain about is that the main character, Francis, looks a lot more like Elric - very pale, thin face, stringy collar-length hair - than I think Lovecraft would have been comfortable with.

Tanabe's backgrounds and objects are hyper-detailed, especially the horrific visions - he's an artist who clearly delights in the monstrous and hideous, crafting his images of Cthulhu, cyclopean ruins, and the like with great care and to strong effect. His people are slightly less detailed, though still well into the realistic side of manga art styles - and he gives his people distinct faces here, something American readers don't always find the case with manga.

Do I need to describe the Lovecraft story? It's, like a lot of Lovecraft, one of the world's creepiest document reviews, as Francis gathers and annotates several statements by other people - all of whom, spoiler alert! - are dead because of the horrific things they witnessed, which slowly reveal to the reader the by-now well-known Lovecraft view of the universe: humans are small and unimportant; beings of far greater power and scope used to rule, and will come back "when the stars are right;" understanding humanity's very small and temporary place in the universe almost inevitably leads to a mental breakdown if not immediate death.

This story was one of the earliest crystallizations of that idea, the story where all of Lovecraft's ideas melded into the final form that he would work out in a series of stories over the next nearly twenty years. And Tanabe's adaptation of it does justice to Lovecraft's "unspeakable, unnamable" language - Tanabe is excellent at drawing gigantic, shadowed, horrific, bizarre creatures that both seem real on the page and yet are impossible. This is a fine adaptation of a major horror story; I'd recommend having a familiarity with the original story first, but anyone interested in a Lovecraft adaptation will have that arlready.