Tanabe’s keen eye and sense of space make the barren continent and the profane corruption hiding inside it come crawling to life from the dark recesses of nightmares. Every panel demonstrates meticulous craftsmanship and research, at once heavy on the ink while painting a clear picture of desperate men being consumed by dread.
The art of Madness is so finely detailed that it wouldn’t be surprising to learn Tanabe made the expedition to Antarctica himself to gather reference material. The Hound was shortlisted for the prestigious Tezuka Award in Japan, and the English translation was nominated for an Eisner Award in the US. His work only began publication in English in 2017, when Dark Horse released his Lovecraft adaptation The Hound and Other Stories. Tanabe isn’t yet a household name in the West. There are a number of names mentioned before getting into the story, but they’re all quickly overshadowed by one American readers are least likely to have heard of: Gou Tanabe. Madness opens with evocative images of the Antarctic landscape, some quotations from Edgar Allan Poe, a bit of history on the original story’s release, and a superfluous namedrop of Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro, whose Lovecraft film adaptation has languished in pre-production hell for years. At the Mountains of Madness is a direct manga adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s longer stories, a novella about an Antarctic expedition that stumbles upon the paranormal. Even today, he tends to be known more for his broad ideas than his actual works.
In his time, Lovecraft was a minor figure in the writing world who never quite matched up to his literary idols, falling into relative obscurity after his death before receiving reappraisal in a time better receptive of his aesthetics, if not his politics. From traditional pen-and-paper RPGs to harem anime, Lovecraft’s atmospheric settings and cosmic creatures have seeped into every medium imaginable. Lovecraft and his highly xenophobic and racist views, the influence of his work is hard to escape. However you feel about horror writer H.P.
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