YEKUBIAN

 

YEKUBIAN

"It was a gigantic, pale-grey worm or centipede, as large around as a man and twice as long, with a disc-like, apparently eyeless, cilia-fringed head bearing a purple central orifice. It glided on its rear pairs of legs, with its fore part raised vertically—the legs, or at least two pairs of them, serving as arms. Along its spinal ridge was a curious purple comb, and a fan-shaped tail of some grey membrane ended its grotesque bulk. There was a ring of flexible red spikes around its neck, and from the twistings of these came clicking, twanging sounds in measured, deliberate rhythms."

Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merrit, C.L. Moore, The Challenge From Beyond

Here's another one where I just tightened up linework, color and rendering with a little bit of change of anatomy. The basic design is the same though. 

This creature was from a round robin story featuring the above 5 authors. Each one would write a portion and then pass it on to the next author to pick up the story. Sort of a written exquisite corpse.

The HPL wiki describes it like this: "This is actually the second of two round-robin stories named "The Challenge from Beyond", both commissioned by editor Julius Schwartz and published in the same issue of Fantasy Magazine, in September 1935. The first "Challenge" was written by Stanley G. Weinbaum, Donald Wandrei, E. E. Smith, Harl Vincent and Murray Leinster, and focuses more on science fiction, whereas the "Challenge" written by Moore, Merritt, Lovecraft, Howard and Long is more fantasy-oriented."

Of course the way it works is that there's set up, adventure and then when HPL gets in there, it's a block of text describing a disgusting alien. And there are some really good illustrations of these creeps. The original Fantasy Magazine, while it doesn't feature the yekubians, has a very cool cover by Clay Ferguson Jr. Next there's the Necronomicon Press cover by Robert H. Knox with the centipede-like creep big and bold. There's a Neconomicon Press version from 1978 with a cover by David Ireland. Then there's the Challenge From Beyond Drafts, that features the draft versions of each participants story, featuring a cover by Timothy Truman.

I also really like this version from Chaosium's Ye Booke Of Monstres from 1994. The illustrators are listed in the front of the book as Rodell Sanford, John T. Snyder & Allen Koszowski. I truly hate this. It's really hard to tell who illustrated what when the artists are credited this way. I know it's not Allen Koszowski because his style relies on pointillism and Rodell Sanford signed all his illustrations with a tiny "RDS". So I'm guessing this is John T. Snyder.

Estute followers will notice I accidentally misspelled these creatures as "yakubians" in my original post. This is funny because Yakub is a figure in the mythology of the Nation of Islam. "According to the NOI's doctrine, Yakub was a black Meccan scientist who lived 6,600 years ago and created the white race. According to the story, following his discovery of the law of attraction and repulsion, he gathered followers and began the creation of the white race through a form of selective breeding referred to as "grafting" on the island of Patmos; Yakub died at the age of 150, but his followers continued the process after his death. According to the NOI, the white race was created with an evil nature, and were destined to rule over black people for a period of 6,000 years through the practice of "tricknology," which ended in 1914. Yakub is identified with two biblical figures: the patriarch Jacob and John of Patmos from the Book of Revelation."

Yakub from Dwight York's The Holy Tablets, 1996

I find this to be a concept that would've appalled Lovecraft. HPL was a white supremacist and his ideas of race were insane. Some of his most egregious examples of this are the "horrific" reveals in Medusa's Coil, Arthur Jermyn and Shadow Over Innsmouth. These stories all portray "racial impurity" as a terrifying and repulsive prospect. So the idea that white men were created as a lab experiment by a extraordinarily intelligent black man would have driven hi insane.