Humor and the, oops, that's The Mythos do not mix--or so some people have declared, ranted and proclaimed. Plush Cthulhu, Kovalic's My Little Cthulhu, the Little Gloomies Carl Cthulhu are all seen by some as a sort of sign of an impending HPLocalypse or something I guess. Several folks have decried such things as somehow trivializing the Great Old Ones or diminishing the horror-quotient of the squishy-gellid-squamous blasphemies from beyond time and space. Maybe they just don't appreciate the paradoxical juxtaposition of horror and humor, but all that is required is to hear a lunatic laugh and all becomes quite clear and cogent let me assure you. It's nowhere near as paradoxical as it might seem on the unspeakable face of it. HPL wrote about the fears lurking in the heart of an uptight xenophobic racist ultra-conservative prude who feared modernity and lusted after sterile, dessicated quasi-Victorian hyper-intellectual fabrications of How Things Ought To Be (but aren't ever going to). He was the sort of guy who might well have masturbated over (the personal acquisition i.e. conquest of) rare books, with gloves, with the lights off. Then he'd eat a big bowl of ice cream and get back to writing another long, long letter with the same hand, though he would probably remove the glove. Probably. I won't even get into the asexual versus homophobe/repressed gayness argument, though the whole squishy tentacle-faced squid-beast lurking under the sea symbolism fairly speaks for itself, even if you find Freud more freaktacular and weird than HPL. Hillbilly-cultists babbling prehuman blasphemies ain't the only pervert in-breeders, you know. Ick. The horror of it all...
"I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me."
The Tomb, by H.P. Lovecraft
Honestly, how anyone can take the horror-fiction of HPL seriously is beyond me, but the Mythos as a shared sandbox we can all mess about in to our various respective black-heart's delight, like a passle of disrespectful alley-cats in the moonlight, that is frikkin' awesome and a lot of fun. Trying to bring the scary back into HPL's stuff is a good challenge, but few have managed to pull it off. Most of the time things simply descend into gross-ness and puerile nonsense. A lot of it is funny without meaning to be, and in this age of sparkly vampires and well-groomed domesticated-lycanthropes maybe HPL's miscengenation tales and pre-Unabomber technoloathing fables have lost a lot of whatever charge they once carried...maybe. But maybe not.
I double-dare you to say that three times fast...with a straight face...
In a Mythos dominated by a blind, idiot god writhing at the center of the universe surrounded by the patron saints of couch potatoes and reality programming, humor definitely has a place in The Mythos. But what is that place exactly? Is it quite what we might imagine it to be, or are we being lulled into a false sense of security? Is it really funny, or is the laughter more of a nervous release, the kind that occurs when confronted by terrible things that just cannot be processed, let alone accepted by the conscious mind?
It's an interesting, even intriguing notion...
Here are a few of my favorite HPL-spoofs and Lovecraftian Parodies from YouTube:
The Love Craft. A short spoof of the classic Seventies TV-show The Love Boat, only now with Cthulhu as the special guest star. Asenath Waite as the Cruise Director was a stroke of genius. And it has Charo. Cthulhu+Charo=Priceless Soul-Shattering Horror.
Elder Sign. Absolutely one of the best Lovecraft-spoofs ever done at YouTube. The Plumber's matter-of-fact delivery is spot-on and the whole mock-ad is definitely quite a bit funnier than anything the old gent ever wrote himself. It's a classic, like the phony Myth-Os cereal-ad, both of which have been around for a while, but are worth a chuckle.
Reanimator Versus Sin City. Incredible editing work turns clips from these two movies into one very creepy faux-trailer. It really gets you thinking about what Frank Miller might do with some of HPL's stuff...and this guy's mash-up of Herbert West taking on Ash of the Evil Dead movies is also pretty well done, though the Herbert West: Benny Hill clip is a little funnier...
Cthulhu's Clues. Blues Clues meets the Mythos. Yeah. What can you really say? It was apparently a reaction to the Cthulhu Lego clip.
For the HPL-inclined Troma-fans there is LoveCracked: The Movie from Biffjuggernaut...which looks equal parts gross and funny...in a decidedly Troma-esque manner, which is obviously an acquired taste, like cannibalism sudoku puzzles. This is a fun project that thankfully doesn't take itself too seriously and deserves a bit wider distribution beyond Innsmouth, Arkham and points East. If you like the trailer enough, you can get a copy of the whole thing via amazon. It's cheap. Take that however you will...
The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu. Ouch. Funny, well-done, but you can hear HPL turning over in his grave...which reminds me of My Little Cthulhu and Cutethulhu...which brings this particular list to an appropriate end, with the Old Gent himself beating his skull against his coffin-lid in disgust.
Some people prefer to debate the merits of humor and whether it has any place in the, ahem, The Mythos? Apparently it most certainly does, whether anyone approves of it or not. It's all around us. Practically ubiquitous. You could say that it squirms around like slimy tentacles behind the scenes all over the place, lurking and waiting for the opportunity to spill forth inappropriately or grotesquely, in some of the weirdest, strangest, most unlikely places. Whatever one's personal opinion on the matter, Mythos-derived/inspired humor is a reality, a fact of life. Just as HPL deftly skewered the old tropes and conventions of Horror and developed his ambiguous, anomalous, squamous and insidious modern mythology to replace the out-moded and tawdry remnants of lingering folklore that once actually frightened grown-ups (consider the cases of Peter Plogojowitz or Peter Stumpp, or Urban Grandier, for examples), now, in turn, his own tropes, conventions and so forth are showing signs of wear, tear and the stretchmarks associated with having to adapt to radically different social conditions than anything HPL imagined as likely or possible.
Or is that really the case?
Stop for a moment and consider this; the proliferation of spoofs and parodies rooted in HPL's synthetic mythology may really be more of an indication that we've passed the threshold he feared, that we've entered into the End Times predicted by Dread Cthulhu's demented prophets and inbred cultists alike. Didn't the old Gent himself write that:
"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return."
Where once serial killers were inextricably wound-up in the folklore of Lycanthropy, which they may or may not have inspired, a man who has knives jutting from his hands isn't just the latest incarnation of the boogeyman anymore, he's also a psychopathic superhero and one of the most notorious real-world serial killers of all time was himself a clown. A clown. Who says that humor has no place in The Mythos? We can laugh all we want at the octopus in the room, but in the end, Cthulhu laughs last and loudest because, like a literary STD, HPL's Mythos has managed to infect just about every and all aspects of our popular culture and that is the most pervasive, insidious, and all-too-real horror of them all. It kinda makes me want to laugh...
Shambleau is very likely C. L. Moore's most famous story. It concerns her hero Northwest Smith encountering a weird, un-woman-being called a 'Shambleau' on Mars. The locals are gathered together in a lynch mob to kill the thing and Smith, being the macho adventurer-dude who thinks with his gun, jumps into the fray to defend what he sees as a fairly defenseless and very feminine victim.
All het up and ready for a fight, Smith stands up to the mob and instead of having to crack a few heads like he expected, he finds they instead are revulsed, disgusted and incredulous that he's not only come to the shambleau's defense, but that he claims it as his--the shambleau (obviously female) is claimed as some thing--if not exactly someone--that he fully intends to defend personally against the angry mob. There's something about his taking possession of the shambleau that somehow almost feels like it is bordering on quasi-bestiality more than any trace of atavistic chivalry. The mob reacts to his declaring that the shambleau is his with confusion, displeasure and outright incredulous disgust. This scene is important to the overall piece as it allows Moore to evoke a miasmic whiff of potential bestiality and the spectre of miscegenation both and she does it skillfully, making your skin crawl slightly without overtly hammering the point home like HPL might have (Like the Anti-Tarzan Arthur Jermyn or the immigrant riff-raff in Horror at Red Hook or the Call of Cthulhu...just to pick three quick/easy/obvious examples). In 1933 in the USA it was illegal for mixed-race couples to get married in most, if not all of the states. The civil rights movement was more than thirty years ahead in the future when Moore wrote this story. The whole sordid business of race purity doctrines, politics rooted in eugenics and the scientific ethnic cleansing of the populations of Europe and Russia were just getting going. Sweden, for example maintained race hygiene policies up until the Seventies. It wasn't just Nazis who were interested in human biology and applying modern agricultural techniques to human beings. But that's a very loaded and very tangential area, so we'll just skirt by it this time out. For our purposes, it's enough, for now, to simply keep in mind that racism was very much part and parcel of nearly everything back in the Thirties and the notion of half-human races of semi-aboriginal/quasi-mulatto (pseudo-quadroon?) hybrids and half-breeds out amongst the periphery of civilization was fairly commonplace throughout early science fiction. It wasn't just Edgar Rice Burroughs who had the local humanoid egg-laying aliens turn out to be physically (and reproductively) compatible with the good, hearty stock of terran humanity. It also didn't start with Roddenberry's ultra-famous space-satyr Captain Kirk who left a trail of his seed across dozens of worlds either.
Back to C. L. Moore and Shambleau. After Smith rescues the shambleau from the angry mob he leads the thing back to his rooms. He acts in the heat of the moment and doesn't really think about what he's doing, he just spontaneously comes to the defense of a frightened female in distress. He's a slave of his glands, and his upbringing, which is very clearly an idealized form of noble chauvanism. He saw a pseudo-woman in trouble and leaped into the fray to protect her. Standard operating procedure. She might have been an axe-murderer for all he knew, but that doesn't stop Smith. It's not until they get a moment away from the threat of mob violence that it finally occurs to Smith what he has done. Maybe, just maybe the creature exerted some influence upon his mind or his nervous system to get him to come to her aid, but Moore is cagey and never reveals that detail. We're left with the impression that Smith is impulsive and rash and that he tends to leap without looking, a real daredevil, devil-may-care sort of vagabond adventurer. The kind of guy who gets himself into sticky situations that are fun to read about. He's definitely not an accountant who lives at home with his mother, six cats and a host of neuroses and allergies.
He examines the shambleau and it's not what he was expecting at all, not that he was really expecting anything at all...though he did realize that the thing is female and that triggered his chivalric impulse...or was it something a bit more carnal in nature? The subtle allure of the shambleau seems to co-mingle both an almost pheromonal aspect with a vaguely mesmeric come-hither gaze, making it a truly effective femme fatale. Moore describes the shambleau's eyes as:
"They were frankly green as young grass, with slit-like, feline pupils that pulsed unceasingly, and there was a look of dark, animal wisdom in their depths -- that look of the beast which sees more than man."
Then it gets slightly more racy as Smith looks at the thing that he has rescued and thinks to himself:
"After all, she was no more than a pretty brown girl-creature from one of the many half-human races peopling the planets."
Yep. A pretty brown girl-creature. A grateful female from one of the obscure half-human races that were to be found all over the backwater regions of various other planets, the vaguely humanoid minority underclass beings who didn't have any real, formal place in society. And hey, she was already partly human, so someone else already committed the really unpardonable crime of mixing the blood, of miscegenation, previously, thus it wasn't anywhere near as bad as that were Smith to consider relations with this fragile-seeming, obviously persecuted and oh so vulnerable female with the smooth, sweet brown skin...if Moore missed any opportunity to pile on the racial/sexual innuendo and erotic implications in this encounter, it wasn't for lack of trying.
Moore deftly and skillfully evokes eroticism without stooping to blatant Romance Novel language nor by hitting the reader over the head with it, she's very sly and stealthy and subtle--just like a shambleau would be--and she builds up the hints and clues and implications like a net of incense smoke in moonlight, never quite coming out and saying it, but then lingering long enough to let the idea of what she's intimating sink in almost osmotically, like a text-borne drug or the luminous malevolence of the unforgettable eyes of Florence Marley in the classic 1966 space-vampire movie Queen of Blood--featuring one of the most shambleau-like movie monsters so far. But of course the vampiric-Queen is green rather than brown...and she's a blood-drinker not a vitality draining addictive co-dependent...but you can't have everything. The trailer is right below:
If you're interested, you can watch the entire movie (cut up into parts) of Queen of Blood at YouTube. It's a bit dated, but still one of the better space-vampire movies, and like I said, the vampiric Queen comes pretty close to being a shambleau. At least as close as I've seen so far.
"She had risen soundlessly. He turned to face her, sheathing his gun and stared at first with curiosity and then in the entirely frank openness with which men regard that which is not wholly human. For she was not. He knew it at a glance, though the brown, sweet body was shaped like a woman's and she wore the garment of scarlet—he saw it was leather—with an ease that few unhuman beings achieve toward clothing. He knew it from the moment he looked into her eyes, and a shiver of unrest went over him as he met them. They were frankly green as young grass, with slit-like, feline pupils that pulsed unceasingly, and there was a look of dark, animal wisdom in their depths—that look of the beast which sees more than man."
Frank openess. Brown, sweet body. She has a body that is blatantly shaped like a woman's. Clingy red leather. You can almost hear a porn movie guitar in the background. That there 'shiver of unrest' is a nice touch. Does anyone doubt that Mister Smith has wood at this point? But alas, Moore is too refined to refer to her male protagonist experiencing a boner. It was a simpler, less vulgar time that she was writing for, not like today where we'd get way too much in the way of graphic description with nothing left to the imagination.
And it is in the imagination that Moore's shambleau works her feral-erotic black magic best.
"There was no hair upon her face—neither brows nor lashes, and he would have sworn that the tight scarlet turban bound around her head covered baldness. She had three fingers and a thumb, and her feet had four digits apiece too, and all sixteen of them were tipped with round claws that sheathed back into the flesh like a cat's. She ran her tongue over her lips—a thin, pink, flat tongue as feline as her eyes—and spoke with difficulty. He felt that that throat and tongue had never been shaped for human speech."
She ain't from around here. She's a stranger in these parts, much like Smith himself. The pseudo-cat's claws make her oh so slightly more dangerous, yet they also hint at a cat-in-heat, perhaps...the thin, pink tongue likewise reinforces the symbolism and is another very sensual cue or hint. The creature might be not-quite-human, but she's not shy and very possibly aroused and you know that Smith is thinking impure, immodest thoughts.
"Not—afraid now," she said softly, and her little teeth were white and polished as a kitten's.
"What did they want you for?" he asked her curiously. "What have you done? Shambleau . . . is that your name?"
"I—not talk your—speech," she demurred hesitantly.
"Well, try to—I want to know. Why were they chasing you? Will you be safe on the street now, or hadn't you better get indoors somewhere? They looked dangerous."
"I—go with you." She brought it out with difficulty.
"Say you!" Smith grinned. "What are you, anyhow? You look like a kitten to me."
"Shambleau." She said it somberly.
"Where d'you live? Are you a Martian?"
"I come from—from far—from long ago—far country—"
"Wait!" laughed Smith. "You're getting your wires crossed. You're not a Martian?"
She drew herself up very straight beside him, lifting the turbaned head, and there was something queenly in the pose of her.
"Martian?" she said scornfully. "My people—are—are—you have no word. Your speech—hard for me."
"What's yours? I might know it—try me."
She lifted her head and met his eyes squarely, and there was in hers a subtle amusement—he could have sworn it.
"Some day I—speak to you in—my own language," she promised, and the pink tongue flicked out over her lips, swiftly, hungrily.
One thing leads to another and before you can say 'I told you so' in ancient Venusian, Smith becomes the shambleau's victim/lover/addict. She's some sort of worm-haired medusa/vampire/lamia creature, one of a species that is very, very old and exceptionally well-traveled, and very well acquainted with humanity. She also feeds on human souls in a highly erotically-charged manner that leaves her victims feeling all sorts of guilt, shame. It affects them very deeply and makes them feel very, very dirty...and quite desperate to do it all over again, despite it being (eventually/ultimately) lethal. In fact, if Smith's partner Yarol hadn't come looking for him when he did, Smith would have wound up completely drained and left behind like some sort of dessicated junkie-husk that the shambleau shamelessly cast off like the once-shiny wrapper of a yummy soul candy bar.
Yarol is familiar with shambleau, or at least recognizes the thing and the danger it poses, and he kills her without any remorse or hesitation. To him the shambleau is poisonous vermin, not any sort of half-human paramour. Smith doesn't really recover from his addiction to the shambleau. Instead he's left wondering where he might find another shambleau, despite (eventually) promising to try to kill any other shambleaus he might encounter on the spot. Ha. What's more horrifying, a soul-sucking medusa-vampire woman-thing loose on Mars, or a man who admits his vulnerability, sexual addiction and feelings of violation after having been fed upon by said medusa-vampire on Mars in a story penned in 1933? Ouch. The horror.
Shambleau is a fascinating story, not just for the cowboy style space opera aspects, or the deftly merged atmospheric horror and space fantasy tropes, but for the way that Moore takes a seemingly simplistic space western into the dark heart of mythology and human sexuality in a way that's still a bit shocking and thought provoking today and she manages it without being really blatant about it.
That's some damn fine writing.
H. P. Lovecraft cobbled together his Yog Sothery / Cthuluhu Mythos out of his perceived need to come up with new forms with which to convey horror as the old stand-bys such as vampires, werewolves, etc. were ridiculous, ineffective and just too old fashioned to be of much use any more. He discusses this in his voluminous correspondence and in his essays. The old critters of the night just aren't scary to modern people in the way that they once were. Look at Twilight etc. and you can see the apotheosis of vampires and werewolves who've fallen from being terrifying figures of dread and horror to being cartoonish parodies of their former selves suited for being soap opera sex objects, teen angst magnets, goth superheroes or literary devices for tackling the very meaningful issues of contemporary whatever. Lovecraft substituted gelatinous alien gods, bizarre geometries, hackneyed poetry and gurgling inbreeders, not to mention buzzing interplanetary fungi or hillbilly cannibals (amongst a few dozen other innovations) for the tired old lycanthropes and stylishly groomed undead.
But wait a minute.
The vampire, lamia, medusa thing is old stuff. It goes way back. By transposing it to Mars, Moore managed to revitalize a synthesis of various aspects of the old myths and accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of making it work here-and-now. In her skillful hands, Moore makes the vampiric-medusa-lamia-werewoman thing relevant, creepy and horrifically effective all over again...which kind of flies in the face of HPL's whole argument.
Huh.
But is the horror inherent in Shambleau more in regards to the creature, or to Smith's psychological violation and his shame over his total surrender to its foul, lurid, and very much erotic feeding upon his soul? Or in his realization that given half a chance he would very likely succumb to another shambleau voluntarily, eagerly, like an addict? Wow. That's a very intimate kind of horror, even if it partakes of certain HPL-ish 'cosmic' aspects and takes place both in the future and on another planet.
It really would have been something to have had the final Northwest Smith story dealing with him facing off against another shambleau. How would he have reacted/responded? That one interaction would have summed the guy up better than just about anything else he could ever have done or said.
As it is, we're lucky that Smith's stories aren't all about his obsessive and unrelenting search for another shambleau. But it could easily have become a very real sub-plot through all the Northwest Smith stories. Now that would have been weird, horrific and downright creepy.
Shambleau is included in the Paizo/Planet Stories collection Northwest of Earth, which is definitely one of their best offerings to date. Like Gemma Files of Fearzone.com said in her review/blurb for the book; it's a lot like crossbreeding Clark Ashton Smith with Star Wars, only Moore did it originally back in 1933 and it was her first professional sale at that.
Wow.
The above illustration is from a version of C. L. Moore's Shambleau as illustrated by the one and only Jean-Claude Forest, the creator of Barbarella. It's available over at the Cool French Comics site. You can find it here. Of course the text is in French, but you can always read along in English and look at the pictures as you go. It's classic stuff.
You can find out more about Jean-Claude Forest's most famous character here, here and here. Oh, and those rumors about a re-make of the 1968 cult-movie? Don't hold your breath. But then again, stranger things have happened...
Okay. I'm late to the party, again, but this time I've spent a few weeks side-lined with a nasty shoulder injury and the combination of muscle relaxants and pain-killers were almost worse than the persistent, never-subsiding pain itself. Almost. But I'm reasonably better now. Now it's time to get caught-up on a bunch of long-overdue stuff. Like this one. Please excuse the sub-par illo above--I only had ten minutes to cobble something vaguely relevant togther. Better stuff is in the works now that I'm back at least part-time.
Available all over the Internet or from your local supplier of RPG-madness.
What If H. P. Lovecraft Wrote Comic Books? Sure it's as unlikely as R. E. Howard writing soap opera scripts, but then if you keep in mind that Hank Williams derived a great deal of song-writing inspiration from Romance Comic Books...well...maybe it's not quite so far fetched as it might sound at first blush. Besides, HPL really needed the money...and much respected and revered Sci-Fi Great Alfred Bester (amongst quite a few others) did a bit of time writing for the Comics (as in Green Lantern--Bester invented GL's Oath, for example), so why not HPL writing for Nedor comics?
The One and Only Kenneth Hite reveals the long-lost account of H.P. Lovecraft's long suppressed and entirely too obscure comics writing with all the versimilitude of a hoax, just the way the old gent said that such a thing ought to be done. It's one of those dream-projects where it really ought to have happened, but at least now, thanks to Mr. H, we get to see what it might have been like, kind of...
Adventures Into Darkness includes:
A complete historical overview of H.P. Lovecraft's comics career, including a wonderful section on just How It Came To Be...
Full Mutants & Masterminds (Second Edition) statistics for 17 of Nedor Comics superheroes and 'super-ified' HPL-derived protagonists, from the Fighting Yank and The Black Terror to Nodens, "Doc" Strange and on to Randolph Carter, Dream Master...super trippy, yet with a ring of esoteric authenticity few other authors could have pulled off...
Eleven supernaturally sinister villains, including that dreamy-witch herself Asenath the Body-Snatcher, the fiendish Nazi sorcerer Baron von Junzt, the eldritch Yellow Lama, and the demi-god Dagon, amongst other favorites...
Monster stats for grotesque ghouls, fiendishly ferocious Frog-Men, outrageously ostentatious Outer Ones, tainted tribal Tcho-Tchos, naughty nightgaunts, and the ultra-creeptacular Dark Haunter, all lovingly detailed and ready to rumble right off the bat...
An up-to-date Price Guide that details just how much your rare Lovecraft comics will bring today, should you consider parting with such terrifying treasures...
A complete section detailing how-to mix together the Golden Age of Comics with the madness of H.P. Lovecraft, and either dragging things kicking and screaming into full-out supernatural terror, or just wild and wooly flights of madness-tinged imagination and oneiric phantasy...
Super Sanity rules .. and what HPL-inspired supplement can be complete without talking about SaNiTy in some capacity? Insane superheroes grappling with soul-shattering Elder Horrors from beyond...it's not just for contemporary comics any more, even the Golden Age can be subverted and retroactively polluted by the toxic genius from Providence...and thank Cthulhu the Stars are Right for this to happen now!
Ken Hite delivers -- really delivers -- a timeless, eldritch mutation of unholy dread and delight as he combines the horrific cosmic-nihilism of H.P. Lovecraft and the daring, dashing and determined Nedor superheroes in Adventures Into Darkness, one of the maddest, most deranged and wonderful mash-ups ever imagined.
The Black Terror is a superhero from the old Nedor Publishing comics line that is in the Public Domain, and he's one of a group of vintage characters that have been revived and re-imagined by Alan Moore (Mr. Moore at Wikipedia) via ABC/America's Best Comics (Terra Obscura), DynamiteEntertainment'sProject Super Powers (Highly Recommended), AC/AmericomicsFemForce, and others. Ken Hite has expertly and deftly re-imagined the Black Terror, Fighting Yank and other Nedor heroes as if they had been written by H. P. Lovecraft himself and made it all available as a supplement for Mutants & Masterminds. This is truly Fun stuff! What Mr. Hite doesn't know about HPL isn't worth knowing, generally, and he displays here a fairly lucid and well-researched grasp of the old Nedor superheroes that does an obscure comics geek's heart proud. With some effort this stuff could be ported or adapted to quite a few other superhero RPGs, and with some inventive sneakery, one could likewise draw a great deal of inspiration from this supplement for bringing the Golden Age of Comics into HPL-vania via whichever set of rules you prefer for demented Noir-ish romps into spectral weirdness and occult horror. (I'm still waiting for the official retro-style Hammer Horror RPG...)
Not every tome, folio or book discovered in an investigation need be some moldy old grimoire...and just as was mentioned towards the bottom of the previous post regarding madness-inducing/insanity-inspired works of comics-genius and some obscure, long defunct but possibly reviving comic book publisher specializing in putting out grimoirically-derived four-color fantasies for the kiddies...the mixture of HPL and Comics is a heady cocktail that is just dripping with bizarre gobs of inspiration and untapped, here-to-fore mostly unexplored potential.
Superheroes are the contemporary embodiment and pop culture expression of mythological figures. Co-mingling them with a manufactured/synthetic mythology such as Lovecraft's opens the door to a host of other methods of re-imaging these trope-heavy characters as long forgotten or often suppressed/censored aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos or even more interestingly, it gets the imaginal ball rolling a bit and gets one to wonder how such characters might fit into other milieus and time periods. Roll back the faux-contemporary veneer, scrape off the 30s-40s Noir fashions or the Roaring Twenties bombast and take things back a few more decades, past the War to End All wars, past the Civil War, past the Whisky Rebellion and the American Revolution, down the dusty corridors of history, and these characters can easily be made to fit, more or less just about as they are, especially the Black Terror, who makes a great Dread Pirate archetype despite being a nominal good guy. Of course once you step past the founding of the United States, someone like Fighting Yank needs to be revised, possibly as a loyal-royal British patriot, or French, German or Algonquin. That's when things like this get truly fascinating. What would a patriotic superhero who served Imperial Rome have been like? Or Carthage? Was Vercingetorix a superhero? If not, what would he have been like as one? A lot of this territory has been superficially explored in various What-If stories, Elseworlds, alternate time-line tales, and all that, and of course quite a few historical figures have been incorporated into various superheroes' back-stories, lineages, or even family trees (as with the Wold Newton stuff).
The notion of mythic superheroes goes back, way back to Beowulf and Gilgamesh--very likely even before them. Back when Mr. Gygax was penning the first of the Little Brown Books, he plugged-in the title Superhero for any Fighting Man who reached a total of 120,000 experience points (Men and Magic, p.16). Implicit in the suggestions outlined by the great and mighty Big G himself in that particular root/core tome of RPG-goodness is the notion that one was not to just take inspiration from John CarterWarlord of Mars, Conanthe Barbarian or the other mentioned heroes, superheroes really, but one's characters were to aspire to become like unto those models and templates, those archetypes and mythic forebears. Your Fighting Man (Magic User, Cleric, etc. ) was supposed to evolve into something wonderful, special, unique and intriguing in their own way, through the steady accumulation of merit, minions, material, and magic as codified by the experience point system.
So, aside from Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers, Arthur, Bran Mak Morn, Achilles, and the rest, sometimes it is fun, and occasionally illuminating to de-volve popular characters to what they might have been way back when, to figure out what it would be like to have a Travis Morgan-type character develop in the midst of your Pseudo-Medieval setting, or to develop your own take on the time-wornhonored trope of a Robin Hood-style figure, like R. A. Salvatore's Highwayman, for instance. It's not exactly rocket science, unless you're re-inventing Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, but even then, it can be quite fun and rewarding to mix-and-match various obvious superheroes with the expectations of other genres and to develop analogous versions of Zorro, Sinbad, Sherlock Holmes, etc. that are more than just a knock-off or cheap imitation. Reed Richards may be the smartest man in the Marvel universe, but who is the smartest guy in your setting? Hercules is the strongest hero, according to some, but who epitomizes power in your setting? Are there different kinds of strength that are exemplified besides raw, brute force? Even Tolkien played this game--look at Aragorn, really look at the guy; he's one of the last descendents of a prehistoric culture destroyed in a great Atlantis-style cataclysm, raised with responsibility and honor ground into his head at every turn, burdened from birth with a sense of destiny, I mean Destiny, and the heir of a forgotten lineage of mythic beings who were orders of magnitude beyond piddly, normal humanity. He's over seventy years old when the War for the Ring begins. He's closer to Superman or Doc Savage than he is to any piss-ant faux-medieval groundskeeper.
In summary, what I'm suggesting is that instead of ripping off and plunking down established characters in your setting ala the old Giants In The Earth feature from the way back days of Dragon magazine, take a look at those characters that you find interesting and spend some time developing your own version of how someone like that might have developed in your world. Instead of borrowing Tarzan, you might invent your own Zembla, or perhaps you'd prefer to try your hand at a fresh take on Lee Falk'sPhantom. (Here's a hint: the first Ghost Who Walks didn't have matching .45's, so yours wouldn't necessarily require them either...perhaps matching cutlasses, crossbows, or a matched set of tribal throwing irons would be a better fit...that's up to you, after all...) Who says that Jungle Lords all need to live in Africa, let alone be only 'Jungle' Lords; why not vengeful Tundra Lords (reindeer-riding Schwarz-Peter-style badasses) or Ladies of the Fertile River Valleys (Think Babylon)? Don't even get me started on why most of them seem to always be magic mighty white guys...but then the world is probably not ready for a female kobold superhero...though yours might be...
. It's cheap. Take that however you will...
, which is definitely one of their best offerings to date. Like Gemma Files of 
, for instance. It's not exactly rocket science, unless you're re-inventing