Gou Tanabe's Visions of Lovecraft, Part 3: Cosmic Chromaticism
Leveraging the medium's limitations, Gou Tanabe takes on the challenge of depicting Lovecraft's most inhospitable and incomprehensible locales.
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| Tanabe, Gou. H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness Volume 2 |
If you're just jumping on board—or need to refresh your memory—check out Part 1 and Part 2 first!
One of the most subtle details in Lovecraft's imagery is his use of color (and you will hopefully forgive me if I deliberately avoid any discussion of Lovecraft's opinions on race, genetics, etc.). His narrators must contend with the suffocating darkness of the ocean depths as well as brilliant hues that shine with extradimensional luminosity, finding them just as confounding as any alien city.
This poses an interesting challenge to a mangaka like Gou Tanabe, whose illustrations are primarily black-and-white. He works within this limitation to create stark contrasts for extreme environments—see "The Temple" and "At the Mountains of Madness"—and while the omission of color is noticeable in some cases, Tanabe manages to illustrate "The Colour Out of Space" in a way that somehow imbues an otherworldly luminosity with texture—a feat for any artist in this medium.
We begin with "The Temple", a relatively early Lovecraft story that takes place almost entirely onboard the German submarine U-29. Its narrator, Lieutenant Commander Karl Heinrich, slowly falls victim to "the vastness, darkness, remoteness, antiquity, and mystery of the oceanic abysses" (Lovecraft, "The Temple") after discovering a fragment of an ancient carving. The tale's psychological horror builds on the basic human fear of the dark, and its narrative revelations are, appropriately, only made possible by the sub's searchlight. After all, and there's not much that Heinrich can describe about what he can't see.
Gou Tanabe's adaptation, on the other hand, fully submerses the reader in the jet-black Atlantic waters. The darkness here is so pure, so all-encompassing, that the vessel's feeble lights are barely capable of illuminating the nearby terrain, and Tanabe frequently depicts the submarine surrounded by crushing gloom:
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| Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's The Hound and Other Stories |
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| Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's The Hound and Other Stories, 63 |
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| Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness Volume 1 |
As the protagonist, Dyer, approaches by plane, Tanabe emphasizes how even the sky begins to change over the mountains. The clouds hang low and heavy opposite the setting sun, and as the aircraft prepares to cross over into the unknown, heaven and earth mark the border:
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The black-and-white artwork has its shortcomings, though. Actual colors must be left to the reader's imagination, such as the omnipresent green of the aforementioned city of R'lyeh covered in part 2. Lovecraft writes of "green stone" covered by "green ooze" and, hidden within, a "gelatinous green immensity"("The Call of Cthulhu", Ch. III) from beyond time and space—a pattern clearly emerges. However, like most manga, Tanabe's take on "The Call of Cthulhu" is set in a greyscale world that, despite the superb shading, cannot quite elicit the same revolting response that green slime typically receives, especially when Tanabe rarely mentions the color during the hapless explorers' short, madness-inducing stint on the island.
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| Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu 193 |
Nonetheless, Tanabe excels in spite of these limitations in his his adaptation of "The Colour of Space". In this slow burn of a tale, a mysterious meteorite crashes onto a New England farm. Scientists take samples from its core and discover a substance of unclassifiable color and properties. Over half a century after Lovecraft published the story in 1927, Terry Pratchett would achieve a similar effect with the creation of octarine, the color of magic which was described as both an Ur-color "of which all the lesser colours are merely partial and wishy-washy reflections" and "a sort of greenish-purple". Lovecraft, however, offers no such hints or explanations as to the nature of his titular creation, going so far as to say that "it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all." The only other clues that Lovecraft provides are vague notions of "shining bands" and "luminosity" (Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space), and thus, Tanabe has free reign to illustrate the meteorite's undefinable hue as he pleases.
Tanabe accomplishes this with fluid, amorphous whorls of white and grey, preserving the purity of Lovecraft's vision with a paradoxical lack of color. It would, of course, be impossible for an illustrator to actually create a new, never-before-seen color outside of absurd branding efforts by major corporations (see Minion Yellow and Vantablack), so forcing readers to imagine the color for themselves is the perfect solution to this insurmountable problem.
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| Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space 33 |
As the story progresses and the meteorite's contents begins to transform the nearby flora, and farmers note "that the queer colour of that skunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous bands of light shewn by the meteor fragment in the college spectroscope". The fact that Tanabe's version of this "color" is more of a texture allows him to visually represent its insidious spread with a similar "haunting familiarity" (Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space), an instantly identifiable match for what the scientists had discovered months before:
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| Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space 88 |
The region quickly becomes overrun with the mysterious color, which infects the surrounding landscape with its unearthly glow. The well, the trees, the house, and eventually the air itself become saturated until the color seems to come alive with ghostly light. All this is deftly illustrated with swirls of white and grey that still manage to contrast with the surrounding characters and backgrounds. The solution is so elegant that it makes me wonder why several other adaptations, such as this animation and the recent Nicholas Cage film, choose to represent the titular color as some sort of pinkish purple.