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H.P. Lovecraft's Family in comics

© Henry Armitage

In 1975 George Kuchar drew this H.P. Lovecraft's biography. This is a version in Italian.

Mr. ¡Lovecraft... wake up! You still have those nightmares.

 

Lovecraft wakes up terrified in bed at Jane Brown Memorial Hospital, where he will die on the 15th of March, 1937. The comic strips try to explain the real horror little Howard had to suffer in his childhood.

Everything seemed so real (I hope her hand keeps on caressing my head... Mum never did so)

Lovecraft tells his nurse about his childhood, about his parents: Susan and Winfield. It is a sincere confession (that Lovecraft never did, as a matter of fact). It could make things clear about nightmares he had to suffer through his childhood.

Mum had married a commercial traveller in 1889. He was always away from home... During ono of his business journeys men in white coat took him away...

Help! They accuse me of having raped the chambermaid downstairs.

He died mad, five years later, when he was 44.

An evil image points with its finger who is the that one who is responsible for the mental decease in the family.

He was damned, destroyed by syphilis.

We'll live at grandpa's

The protective figures begin to appear in little Howard's childhood, the first one is his grandfather, who encourages a great love for books. Years later, as his mother's substitutes will appear his aunts and Sonia Green, the woman whom he married.

My grandpa, Whipple Phillips, had a wonderful house in Providence... full of books.

(He had headaches as mum... I hope I never have them)

Don't look at my daughter... er, at my son, he's so ugly.

Mum was a strange woman, she was strange and very sensitive and she was worse and worse every day.

Susan was a very strange woman. She was always overprotecting her son, making him feel as a weak child. She always wanted to have a daughter, and without any reason she considered him as an ungly child and she never took Howard to walk in the streets, so nobody could look at his face.

The evil figure appears again mocking at Lovecraft's mother and her sick mind.

Little time later, men in white coats pay a visit again.

They are in the garden and they want to take me away.

Mum's decesase, grandpa's death... then it was the turn of my aunts to take care of me.

Be good and I will make a cup of chocolate for you.

I don't want any chocolate, I want beans and ice-cream ... I had a terrible headache!

I have lived almost always there, but strength both in my body and soul was my dear Providence.

Here Lovecraft appears dressed in the 18th century fashion, loyal to His British Majesty and not like a North American patriot.

This this the portrait of Lovecraft made in comics by George Kuchar hecha in 1975.

Translation and comments by Henry Armitage

Copyright © 2001

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