Review by Frank Plowright

Gou Tanabe’s sixth adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft material concerns his most famous terror, Cthulhu, and he uses the few colour pages available to produce first a portrait of Lovecraft’s elder god, then a gloriously excessive spread of the giant, multi-eyed and multi-tentacled, bat-winged creature. It floats above dozens of terrified people with the lurid attraction of a 1950s film poster.

Lovecraft’s stories regularly feature a distanced narrator discovering the story of another, and our introduction to The Call of Cthulhu is Francis Thurston, a young man in 1926 who inherits the papers of his Great-Uncle, university professor George Angell. These prompt Thurston to investigate further, leading to a second set of recollections, this time of a disastrous sea voyage.

It’s usual for Lovecraft’s plots to build suspense for most of a story, only revealing the full horrors toward the end, but due to The Call of Cthulhu essentially being two stories linked by Thurston, it differs. There is a tense journey toward the unknown before a monstrous revelation witnessed by much of the New Orleans police department. It culminates in arrests and Tanabe illustrates the descriptions given during interrogation as if some form of shuddering Biblical fury.

As with all of Tanabe’s Lovecraft adaptations, the art is astonishingly good. There’s the discipline required to accommodate the often wordy text, while the period detail is researched and convincing. One scene takes place at an academic conference, for which Tanabe designs several different looking attendees in hats and coats. That’s not what readers are here for, but if he’s taking the time to accurately represent minor scenes of that nature, then you can be sure he’s putting the work into everything else.

The second story supplied by Norwegian sea captain Johansen initially seems a repeat as he encounters a boat full of Cthulhu’s rabid acolytes, but this time Lovecraft takes matters further, toward an eventual encounter with the shambling beast. Tanabe’s version of Cthulhu is a profoundly terrifying creation, portrayed in detail over several spreads and single page illustrations.

Readers already captivated by Lovecraft’s dark fantasies aren’t going to find a better graphic novel version of this horror.