So I have posted on various pulp comics here, most of them American, but also a few European ones which I feel either use American pulp characters or themes or use European pulp characters. But so far I have never done any pulp manga, because this largely doesn’t exist.
For most, manga/anime are made up of large-eyed girls and the like. But actually, manga covers a lot of genres, but few overlap with pulp. Probably the closest is Lupin the III, who is the grandson of Arsène Lupin, a manga character who has had several anime adaptions as well as movies, both live-action and animated.
But I was not aware of the manga adaptions of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Horror is one of the genres of manga, and some of it can be pretty intense. Mangaka Gou Tanabe has done several adaptions of Lovecraft’s stories, and Dark Horse Comics has put out English versions in a series of volumes. So far we have:
- H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Others (2017, includes “The Temple” and “The Nameless City”)
- H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (2019, two volumes)
- H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth (2023)
- H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (2024)
- H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space (TBP 2025)
All these volumes are digest-sized, with black-and-white artwork, though there is some color artwork. They are printed in Japanese style, which means you read from back to front, and the panels are laid out right to left. There is a page at the “front” of the book — actually, the back — that explains this.
So first off is H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Others, which is the smallest volume at about 170 pages and has three stories: “The Temple” (1925), “The Hound” (1924), and “The Nameless City” (1921). “The Temple” is the longest one, covering about 70 pages. The original story was set in World War I, but for some reason, it’s been moved to World War II. It concerns the fate of a German U-boat, which, after finding a dead British sailor with a strange piece of carved marble who is clinging to the sub. The crew starts to experience strange things, there is an explosion in the engine room, and the sub is pulled south, with most of the crew dead, and only the captain who narrates the tale in a log that is later found.
In “The Hound,” the two main characters, grave robbers, find themselves being stalked by a monstrous hound. It is nearly equal in length to the first story. And in “The Nameless City,” the narrator tells of his search for and discovery of a lost city in the desert of the Arabian peninsula.
The next volume, H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, is so massive that it was reprinted in two paperback volumes, coming in at 288 and 336 pages each. There is also a deluxe hardback volume with the entire story. This adapts the novella telling of a Miskatonic University expedition to Antarctica and the horrors they found there. It does a very detailed adaption of the story, as you can imagine.
Then H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth adapts that story in 442 pages. It concerns a young man’s trip to the coast town of Innsmouth in search of his roots, where he learns about the Esoteric Order of Dagon, the Deep Ones, and his connections to them — and the “Innsmouth look.” Pretty intense.
And then H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu adapts this story that introduces old Cthulhu himself in 282 pages. Like the original story, it’s told in various parts, with learning about the “Cthulhu Cult,” the adventure of Inspector Legrasse in the swamps of New Orleans, and the ship that sadly encountered R’lyeh, and Cthulhu, arisen from the ocean.
Finally, I have since learned that another adaption is coming in mid-2025, this time its “Colour Out of Space” in under 200 pages. And looking at Tanabe’s Wikipedia page, there appear to be at least three other volumes collecting his adaptions of Lovecraft stories in Japan, so I expect more will be coming our way.
I’ve seen some other comic book adaptions of Lovecraft’s stories, and these strike me as much more intense as they are longer, not constrained like most American comics and go into greater detail. Take a look at these and see if you agree.
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