THOUGHT BUBBLE THOUGHTS

I will be attending Thought Bubble this Saturday and will be shackled to the SelfMadeHero tables like Kong. People may approach (with caution) and would be best advised not to use flash photography. If you pick up a copy of At the Mountains of Madness I will sign it for you and scribble in it too (a Mythos entity of your choosing or character from the book). And I will be doing that pretty much all day.

Rob Davis (keep an eye out for his upcoming adaptation of Don Quixote - its an incredible comics opus) has written his recommendations on what to buy at Thought Bubble this coming weekend (as he too will be attending and will be promoting Solipsistic Pop3 to which he's contributed the excellent Torturer's Garden) and he's also written a review of At the Mountains of Madness:

Ian's adaptation is perhaps the best of his SelfMadeHero books. Here "Britain's answer to Darwyn Cooke" works in double page spreads and uses the broader space to give us snowy vistas, frozen oceans, alien cityscapes and vast mountain ranges. The writing is stripped down and the book zips by, in stark contrast to the heavy going Lovecraft texts. All is rendered in Ian's trademark style, a kind of Yves Chaland/Frank Robbins lovechild.

As I know from struggling through my adaptation of The Dunwich Horror (which Ian has drawn and, in my opinion, is his best strip work yet!), voice overs are pretty inevitable in Lovecraft comic adaptations. Here the best sequences are where Ian shakes off the voice over and lets the characters play off one another or the action move seamlessly. If I have any criticism of the book, it's really a criticism of the source material - and that's the characterisation. I didn't really care about them. Lovecraft's characters are flat; he's all about ideas and the characters too often become cyphers. What Lovecraft excels at is spiking the imagination with his poison and enveloping the reader with a sense of menace beyond our ken. Ian's version loses non of that. You won't buy a better Graphic Novel or comic at Thought Bubble, don't hesitate to get it.