There is a certain expectation when an adaptation chooses to put the name of the original author in its title. Renounce all other versions, only this particular take can do the work justice. Of course, the very nature of an being an adaptation from one medium to another means things will have to change; Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the Francis Ford Coppola movie, is not actually like the Dracula written by Bram Stoker.1 Last year I wrote a whole article about the sheer impossibility of ‘properly’ adapting a literary work to comics, so there is no point in rehashing that argument in a book review. Still, if one wants to hold a ‘most loyal adaptation’ competition, at least in the field of comics, Gou Tanabe is certainly in running for the gold.
Stiff competition surrounds Lovecraft. I can’t offer pure statistics, but it seems to me that he has surpassed the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle as the most adapted author in comics - especially if we include works that only utilize his concepts without being based on any particular story. You can’t throw a stone in the world of comics without hitting a stray shoggoth, or a Deep One, possibly while having an orgy with Cthulhu. Which is to ask… do we really need another one? To which I would answer: Tanabe can keep adapting the Lovecraftian canon ‘till the end of time, and beyond, as long as he keeps things at this level.2
This is the third volume of Lovecraft adaptations from the Japanese writer-artist to see English publication by Dark Horse.3 In case you don’t know the story, it goes like this: a bookish young man finds himself drawn to a small seaside community called Innsmouth, a decayed village whose inhabitants all share a distrust of the outside world and a particularly fishy look, and naturally enough he discovers terrible things, both about the place and himself.
Zack Davisson, who has translated all three Tanabe books, explained the appeal of Tanabe’s approach thusly: “Tanabe is the visionary director who says, 'Hey! I’ve got an idea! Why don’t we stage Hamlet as Hamlet? Exactly as written? Not as a clever spin on corporate culture or boy bands or something like that? Just, as intended.” The first translated Tanabe volume, 2017's H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Other Stories, was fairly typical, condensing three short pieces in a minimal fashion. But The Shadow over Innsmouth, like 2019's At the Mountains of Madness, swings the pendulum all the way to other end - they are expansive adaptations. Looking at my Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, I see “The Shadow over Innsmouth” runs about 60 pages; the Tanabe version stretches across roughly 430 pages of b&w comics, with additional color images accompanied by snatches of Lovecraft's text.
Tanabe does not use that extra length to develop, add, twist, subvert, or change the text. Instead, his approach is to ‘open up’ the story - to show fully that which Lovecraft only describes briefly. A single sentence about things glimpsed in the darkness becomes, in Tanabe’s hands, page after page of shuffling hordes of fish monsters. Many of these are full or double-page images; Tanabe favors low panel counts throughout, the better to showcase his technical proficiency as an artist. Sometimes this hurts the story; Lovecraft’s revelation about the horror of the narrator’s origin comes like a lightening strike in prose, while Tanabe builds it up and up and up over so many pages that even the slowest of readers will catch on long before the narrator.
Yet, as a whole, I applaud this direction. Tanabe’s style does not befit anything that dwells in shadows; rather, he draws out, his pages marvelous with detail, no matter if he is drawing period technology or architecture, or a large group of ravenous fish-men. This desire to hold nothing back would seem like the wrong approach to take for Lovecraft stories, many of which famously involve things that cannot be seen and/or described, but Tanabe studies Lovecraft like a scientist, with singular attention to every facet. By all rights we should tire of underwater monsters after the third or fourth spread, but revulsion is just one aspect of Tanabe’s work; his main point of interest appears to be the clash between the need to explain the world and the limits of human knowledge. His take on the Lovecraft protagonist is that they never surrender to madness or fear at first go—which is part of the reason these adaptations tend to be so long—but rather insist on trying to make everything fall into a familiar pattern.
This admittedly worked better in At the Mountains of Madness, the protagonists of which are professional scientists whose attempts at offering rational explanations crumble before the grim reality they encounter. The narrator of The Shadow over Innsmouth has no one to talk to that isn’t already from Innsmouth for much of the text, so the contrast between the sense of ordinary reality and revelations about the true nature of things isn’t as sharp. At the Mountains of Madness is also filled with events: terrible discoveries and daring escapes involving distinct characters. The Shadow over Innsmouth is mostly about one guy listening to other people explain things, with a single frantic burst of action near the end.
Still, even in a story that doesn’t fully fit Tanabe’s aesthetic,4 one cannot help but surrender to the overwhelming sensuality of it all. You find yourself, much like the narrator, drowning in the sheer presence of these tablatures. It’s true that there is nothing quite as scary as what each of us can imagine to ourselves, but it is also true that Tanabe is much better at visualization than most. His is a gift of scale, which is a subject Lovecraft deals with often: the place of man, both as a species and as an individual, in a cosmos far bigger than he can conceive. These endless stretches of pages with their countless creatures help to establish the right mood of human insignificance. When Tanabe draws, you can certainly grasp your place in Lovecraft's world - another small thing, to be swept off by the waves.
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- To say nothing of the 1992-93 comics adaptation of the film adaptation, which might as well have been titled "Mike Mignola’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula." I have omitted Roy Thomas, for when Mike Mignola draws a vampire it becomes a Mike Mignola project.
- I also wouldn’t mind seeing Tanabe taking a swing at pre-Lovecraft stuff the author considered important to his work, such as from Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow.
- The second, H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, was split into two softcover books, though given that it is one story, and soon to be reprinted as a single hardcover, I am counting it as one volume.
- A translation of Tanabe's comic of The Call of Cthulhu, which seems more in line with his particular skillset, has already been solicited for July. Tanabe also wrapped up an adaptation of The Dunwich Horror in Japanese last year.
