Type: single volume
Author: Hans Rodionoff, Keith Giffen
Designer: Enrique Breccia
Publishing House: Magic Press
Format: paperback
Price: 11.50 Euro
Little Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born under a bad star: his father in an asylum, his equally insane mother who dresses him up as a child, his grandfather who fills his head with monsters and legends. Growing up as a recluse HPL seeks escape routes through his imagination, which, however, seems to produce only nightmares and claustrophobic visions of interdimensional horror. Will the beautiful and vital Sonia Greene be able to rid him of ghosts of his mind that now seem more concrete than reality itself?
Hans Rodionoff updates the figure of the Loner of Providence with a courageous and ingenious balancing act between biography and fiction, mixing real facts (on which he appears to be very well versed) with the monstrous literary parts of one of the most important figures in fantasy literature of all time. The result is an invaluable volume for those unfamiliar with the Cthulhu myths as well as for the expert, an affair capable of astonishing on every page for the richness of the inventions both at the level of the script (Keith Giffen's contribution in filtering and adapting certain ideas of the author is indispensable) and at the level of the drawings. Enrique Breccia has never seemed so talented in his long career, and he fills each panel with phantasmagorical creations, alternating pages with a dense and more controlled stroke (which coincide with the chapters that are more biographical and closer to "reality") with moments in which the line ceases its function as a boundary marker and frees on the paper an orgy of colors and shapes that succeed admirably in representing the alien creatures typical of the Lovecraftian universe. We are in the same vein as John Carpenter (who in fact writes the introduction) and The Seed of Madness, and soon the reader will find himself so (pleasantly) bewildered that he will not be able to distinguish the real from the imaginary: the secret is to indulge in the narrative flow without analyzing every word in search of an erroneous or logic-free datum; the result will be an experience very close to a lysergic journey, at once alienating and perturbing.
Kudos to Magic Press for its editorial policy that has continued undaunted for years to offer us some of the most important volumes in recent comics history.
Reviewed by Elvezio Sciallis
