Bleeding Fiction

The titles of my past two entries have been references to the story "The Call of Cthulhu" by Pulp author H. P. Lovecraft. I guess I've had a bit of Lovecraft on my mind lately which is, if you've ever read Lovecraft, a disturbing prospect. The man was, truly, a master of horror. He wrote stories that you scoff at and dismiss as obvious and childish. But three days later, late at night when everything else is quite, while you're walking the ten feet from a friend's house to your car or you look out the window of your bedroom, you think of a particular turn of phrase, a certain indescribable image and you shudder uncontrolably.

I need to take some time soon and re-read a few of his stories (particularly "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth") as research for stories I'm working on that deal with some similar themes. One of them is, quite possibly, one of the stranger ideas to ever scurry across my brain. I want to write a comic book, a redeaux of Aquaman done for DC's Vertigo line connecting Aquaman with the Cthulhu Mythos.

Aquaman is, of course, one of the lamer superheroes to ever exist. His main power is the ability to speak to fish. Whoopie. As if most fish would have anything interesting to say. But the thing is, Cthulgu and the Deep Ones are fish. Of a sort... For this series, I'd discard the entire panoply of superhero paraphenalia and iconography and tell the story of a man who washes up from the ocean onto a strange New England shore and the things he discovers about the quiet town of Innsmouth... and about himself.

It's still in the works, but I like it a lot, and I have always wanted to write a comic...