Quite amazingly, greydogtales is FIVE. Months, of course, not years. Who would have thought that a penniless match-girl from the cholera-stricken slums of Yorkshire could rise to command such an empire of weird pleasure? No-one, of course. Instead, dear listeners, we married her…
Gosh, those tablets were hard to swallow. Much like greydogtales. But we feel better now, so for the last few posts of 2015, we’re going to wrap up our first calendar year of lurchers, literature and life by providing a miscellany of updates and oddities.
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The great controversy of the year, of course, has been the cutting-edge debate on whether or not Django should be wearing pants, given his shameless habit of lying upside down with his legs apart. So far the consensus is that as he doesn’t have his family jewels, he should get away with it.
We had two unexpected successes during 2015, both of which started as mere whimsies. The Lurcher for Beginners series, which began in early September, took off rather dramatically. We can still tell when we’ve published one of these by looking at the huge spike in readership for days afterwards. And if we don’t write about longdogs and lurchers often enough, we get sent huge spikes. So that series may have to continue in the New Year.
The other series which went down surprisingly well was our extended tribute to William Hope Hodgson, The Writer on the Borderland, throughout October. We didn’t think we could get more niche and limited, but enthusiasts of the ‘grandfather of weird fiction’ emerged in great numbers from their protective pentacles to take part. We shall have to celebrate someone far more obscure and less popular next time.
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Later in the year we discovered South America, which must have been a surprise to the South Americans, who thought they already knew who and where they were. So our first end-of-year link is to a documentary by our friend Diego Arandojo, who came on greydogtales along with the illustrator Sebastian Cabrol in November. Diego has just produced Alcatena, which looks at the life and work of the famous Argentinan cartoonist Enrique ‘Quique’ Alcatena, the creator of worlds and fantastic creatures, with contributions from colleagues, friends and family.
The documentary is predominantly in Spanish, but well worth a view even if you don’t speak the language. For one thing, Diego has captured numerous pieces of Quique’s artwork, from space opera to the Metal Men comic, and these are a joy to behold. Additionally, if you hover around after 1hr10m, you will see and hear US comics writer Chuck Dixon talking (in English) about his projects with Quique. Dixon is known for his work on Marvel’s Alien Legion, The Punisher and DC’s Batman (amongst many other things), and here he discusses the Leatherwing comic featuring ‘Pirate Batman’, and other projects he has done with Quique.
Alcatena (2015, Diego Arandojo)
Vida y obra del historietista argentino Enrique “Quique Alcatena”. Una mirada profunda sobre este creador de mundos y seres fantásticos, con el aporte testimonial de compañeros de trabajo, amigos y familia.
As we’re on Diego anyway, we might as well mention that his site lafarium now includes a new piece, available in English or in Spanish, dedicated to an interview with Edward Packard. In 1969, Packard came up with the idea of writing multi-path second-person adventures, in which the reader makes choices that affects how a story unfolds and thus how it ends. “The Adventures of You” were eventually picked up by Bantam Books and published as a popular series of children’s books. The English version should be found here:
lafarium – edward packard interview
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Towards the end of the year we chose a weird art theme, and as part of this we interviewed the creative Richard Mansfield of Mansfield Dark, looking at their work on bizarro fun films, cunning cut-outs and shadow puppetry.
Their adaptation of E F Benson‘s famous horror story The Room on the Tower, which we mentioned as forthcoming in that article, is now available on Vimeo. Follow the link below to watch it:
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In August (we don’t like to be too linear), we introduced the stories of Henry S Whitehead, set for the most part in the Caribbean. Tales of jumbees and strange spirits, curses and hauntings, these stories are well worth a read. This next bit gets complicated, so do keep up.
In that article we mentioned that Whitehead was a friend of H P Lovecraft. Recently, whilst putting together an introduction to the writer H Russell Wakefield we asked the scholarly Bobby Derie about Lovecraft’s opinion of Wakefield’s work. He kindly opened up his library on this matter, and we got talking. Whitehead’s name came up, and Mr Derie pointed us to facsimiles of some of Whitehead’s few surviving letters. There are many interesting little tid-bits therein, but we particularly liked this passage:
Obeah and voodoo should be carefully distinguished. Obeah is the “White” magic; Voodoo “Black”. “Obi” (or some similar, local rendition of the first word,) is the current term for BOTH throughout the Islands. This has deluded many writers into supposing that the term PROPERLY covers all kinds of West Indian and even African magic. Such is, emphatically, not the case. Obeah is concerned with safeguarding people from natural and supernatural bad influences. Voodoo invokes such influences. To the former belong: A. Herbal medicaments. B. Fortune-telling. C. “Song-making”. To the latter belong the Worship of the Snake; “Le Chevre sans Cornes” (The Goat Without Horns) i.e child sacrifice; and “Long-Pig” i.e. , cannibalism.
November 18, 1925, to Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales.
This letter’s especial relevance is that it was written from St Croix in the Virgin Islands. The Virgin Islands, formerly the Danish West Indies, are the setting for some of Whitehead’s best supernatural tales.
NB. Some quotes from Lovecraft’s letters, again courtesy of the helpful Mr Derie, will feature in the H R Wakefield article in January.
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Finally for today, there have been many ghostly stories bandied about over Christmas, it being something of a tradition at this time of year. As an antidote to the troubling supernatural reverberations of those stories, we suggest the following, by the rather talented writer, broadcaster and performer John Finnemore:
Terrifying stuff, eh?
Next time, End of the Year Part Two – more updates on those sundry weirdnesses we covered during the year, and perhaos some utterly misguided plans for 2016…