H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness by Gou Tanabe (2 vols)

Adapting a book is always a tricky thing, especially in a format where you're turning words into pictures. (Radio dramas, I suppose, have somewhat different issues.) And when the author you're adapting is...um, shall we say overly fond of long, ornate, elaborate words in general and detailed descriptions in particular, getting those pictures to resemble the mental images from those words gets even tougher.

And that's just for just the adaptor -- every reader will interpret "partly squamous, partly rugose" a little differently, so how will they take your pictorial description?

All of that is to say that adapting H.P. Lovecraft into a visual medium is a tricky thing. There have been some movies, a few of which have been more-or-less successful. He's been a bit better served in comics, which is much more of an auteur medium to begin with -- for example, I.N.J. Culbard adapted four long Lovecraft stories into graphic novels about a decade ago, each in its own style, and all successfully. (Well, successfully to my eye, since that's the point I just made.)

Not long afterward, the manga-ka Gou Tanabe embarked on a longer adaptation of Lovecraft's novella "At the Mountains of Madness" in 2016-17, in twenty-three chapters (plus prologue and epilogue) and over six hundred pages. That was published as two volumes in English translation last year: The First Volume and The Second Volume. I'm not clear on what the original Japanese publication schedule was, but my guess it was the usual: the chapters appeared individually in some magazine or other (weekly or monthly), and then objects closely resembling these two books came out as tankobon.

This is a very faithful adaptation -- Tanabe uses a lot of chunks of Lovecraft prose, both to set up chapters and as narration over his pages, and the length allows him to get all of the events of the novella into his adaptation. He also keeps the 1931 setting and all of the technical details the same, which other Lovecraft adaptations don't always do. So, if you're familiar with the Lovecraft story -- and that's the audience for this book, obviously -- Tanabe's version won't surprise you in the storytelling.

The art, though, might surprise you, particularly if you have an outdated view of what "manga art" looks like. Tanabe uses a very detailed style here, with lots of blacks and washes, and he clearly draws the fantastic elements of Lovecraft's story while often keeping them in shadow to suit the dark caves and cyclopean ruins the characters wander through. For Western readers, getting used to manga-style "reading backward" might be an issue to begin with, but Tanabe's panel flow is clear and he sticks to boxy, square panels with occasional splash pages -- there's nothing here to throw off people who aren't regular comics readers.

As for the story itself: it's that Lovecraft staple, the man of science describing events that led him (always him, always a very particular kind of him) to learn Things That Man Was Not Meant to Know and putting them down on paper in hopes that everyone else will listen and never go back there again. In this particular case, it's an Antarctic expedition, out of Lovecraft's fictional Miskatonic University [1] in Arkham, Massachusetts, with specialists in a variety of disciplines (geology, biology, and so on) planning to explore, collect samples, and do some basic science.

But instead they find calamity and an escalating series of discoveries: bodies of a totally unknown type leading to a giant previously unknown mountain chain leading to a vast ancient city beyond those mountains where two of the team will find....well, that would be telling.

The thrills and joys of Lovecraft are in those moments of discovery, where the veil is lifted, bit by bit, on visions of deep time and unexpected creatures. Tanabe is good at translating that feeling into comics, and his page count and the generally unhurried pace of manga pages serves him well here -- there's enough space and time to go step-by-step with Lovecraft through all of the stages of disbelief and dawning understanding.

So this is a good adaptation. "Mountains" is one of Lovecraft's less-problematic major stories, and Tanabe silently eliminates any vaguely racist stuff about the swarthy crewmen of the expedition's ships. (I don't remember anything specifically, but Lovecraft was vaguely racist all the time, so I'm assuming there's at least a few sentences to make a modern reader wince in "Mountains.") And Tanabe's art style is a great fit for Lovecraft: he's detailed in a dark, horror-tinged way, and can make the ancient architecture and alien creatures creepy and menacing rather than just funny-looking.

I understand Tanabe did one book of shorter Lovecraft adaptations before this, and has been adapting other Lovecraft stories since then, so, odds are, if this sounds appealing, you'll have more than just this story to enjoy.

[1] Go, Pods!