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__sol__ 's review for:
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath & Other Stories
by H.P. Lovecraft, Jason Bradley Thompson
A delightful comic adaptation of four of Lovecraft's Dunsanian dream-stories, "The White Ship", "Celephaïs", "The Strange High House in the Mist", and of course The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. The first three are short fables, while the last is a long quest story taking up the majority of the book. In it, one Randolph Carter of Boston, Massachusetts, makes an epic journey across the phantasmagoric world of dream-land in search of the hidden city of the gods. Along the way, he employs his knowledge of cattish, is kidnapped to the moon, meets a painter from one of Lovecraft's more famous stories, and much more.
The art is exquisite. Crammed full of detail, this is a comic to pore over, absorbing every panel at leisure. Every location has unique architectural motifs, leaning to the Orientalist. There is adventure, beauty, and horror at every turn. In a strange choice, each dreamer is represented as a small man with a mostly featureless face and rope-limbs. But only within dream-land. This is apparently a non-diegetic depiction, since the dreamer Kuranes of "Celephaïs" is shown to resemble his waking self when he appears in Kadath, and he sees Carter as a human. It largely works, probably because it helps Carter stand out from the visual tangle surrounding him, and because it's not used for humour. The whole thing is a massive labour of love that's simply fun to look at and get lost in.
The story itself is a rip-roaring adventure, full of strange incidents, places and people. Danger, daring, discoveries, setbacks, companions, travel far and wide, a lofty and seemingly unattainable goal, every ingredient of a great adventure is there, and it all plays out to perfection. Having not read the original, I don't know how it compares, but it seems to mostly follow the same story.
In addition to a plethora of references to the works of Lovecraft and Dunsany, there are shoutouts to contemporary dreamworlds like Eddison's Zimiamvia and Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus, and more modern works of dream like "Where the Wild Things Are" and Gorey's "The Doubtful Guest". Thompson has written a guide to his adaptational choices and sources of inspiration. To give an example of how small and specific they can get:
The strange design in the village square of Ulthar is based on the design from the Centaurus Festival in the 1985 anime version of Kenji Miyazawa’s 1927 allegory NIGHT ON THE GALACTIC RAILROAD. The story of two friends who ride a ghostly train through the cosmos (no relation to the much later manga/anime GALAXY EXPRESS 999), the original novel is good, and the anime is an amazing and dreamlike production. As for why a mandala in a Japanese village in NIGHT ON THE GALACTIC RAILROAD might be found village of Ulthar, there’s this: in the anime (though not the novel), all the human characters are drawn as bipedal cats, due to quirky character designs based on a manga adaptation of the novel by cat lover Hiroshi Masamura.
