Twice Told Tale: Examining Comics Adaptations of At the Mountains of Madness

Abstract

At the Mountains of Madness has proved to be one of H.P. Lovecraft’s most enduring works. S.T. Joshi positions it front and center in his first volume of his Annotated Lovecraft, noting that it “may represent the pinnacle of his craft as a writer of weird fictions” (Joshi 1997, 17). Lovecraft himself refers to it, alternatively, as “my best story” and “my most ambitious story” (in Joshi 1997, 176). Lovecraft’s style and thematic interests are fully crystalized in it, and unsurprisingly, given its popularity, it has been adapted several times, including into the medium of comics. Two of these adaptations are I.N.J Culbard’s At the Mountains of Madness (2010) and Gou Tanabe’s H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (2019–2020), each differ by both the affordances of the medium of comics and the personal style of the writer artist. Examining these two adaptations, alongside the original story, permits us insight into the way adaptations of Lovecraft in the twenty-first century create their own hypotext. Not just a Lovecraft story, but the graphic texts and narrative traditions that inspired them before. In that manner, a graphic adaptation of Lovecraft becomes something more than a retelling of the story.