FEASTER FROM THE STARS

FEASTER FROM THE STARS

 "His earlier stay in the city—a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to occult and forbidden lore as he—had ended amidst death and flame, and it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his home in Milwaukee."

"During that first winter he produced five of his best-known short stories—“The Burrower Beneath”, “The Stairs in the Crypt”, “Shaggai”, “In the Vale of Pnath”, and “The Feaster from the Stars”—and painted seven canvases; studies of nameless, unhuman monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Haunter Of the Dark

"A reddish glow filled the corner by the window- a bloody glow. Slowly but surely the dim outlines of a Presence came into view; the blood filled outlines of that unseen shambler from the stars. It was red and dripping' an immensity of pulsing, moving jelly' a scarlet blob with myriad tentacular trunks that waved and waved. There were suckers on the tips of the appendages, and these were opening and closing with ghoulish lust... The thing was bloated and obscene' a headless, faceless, eyeless bulk with the ravenous maw and titanic talons of a starborn monster. The human blood on which it had fed revealed the hitherto invisible outlines of the feaster. It was not as sight for sane eyes to see."

Robert Bloch, The Shambler From the Stars

INVISIBLE DAEMON

INVISIBLE DAEMON

"That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise."

H.P. Lovecraft, Nemesis

"It was in vain that I begged of some of the men to come near and convince themselves by touch of the existence in that room of a living being which was invisible."

"As well as we could make out by passing our hands over the creature’s form, its outlines and lineaments were human.  There was a mouth; a round, smooth head without hair; a nose, which, however, was little elevated above the cheeks;"

"It was shaped like a man—­distorted, uncouth, and horrible, but still a man.  It was small, not over four feet and some inches in height, and its limbs revealed a muscular development that was unparalleled.  Its face surpassed in hideousness anything I had ever seen.  Gustav Dore, or Callot, or Tony Johannot, never conceived anything so horrible.  There is a face in one of the latter’s illustrations to Un Voyage ou il vous plaira, which somewhat approaches the countenance of this creature, but does not equal it.  It was the physiognomy of what I should fancy a ghoul might be.  It looked as if it was capable of feeding on human flesh."

Fitz-James O'Brien, What Was It?

News...

Hey guys. I wanna thank everyone who purchased/tried to purchase a copy of the second edition of Illustro Obscurum Volume IV last week. I just wanted to touch base with you all and inform you of a set back. Everyone's copies of the zine will be going out a few days late because I got doored while riding my bike this morning and broke the middle finger of mt drawing hand. I'm still waiting to see a doctor and have it set so I don't know how long it'll take to heal. Fortunately, they're all packed up and basically ready to go, I just don't know when I'll get to the post office. Sorry for the delay.

SINGULAR BEETLE

SINGULAR BEETLE

"And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Cats Of Ulthar

FABULOUS CREATURE

FABULOUS CREATURE

"Especially was it unwise to rave of the living things that might haunt such a place; of creatures half of the jungle and half of the impiously aged city—fabulous creatures which even a Pliny might describe with scepticism;"

H.P. Lovecraft, Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

"westward from these [the Troglodytoi of the Red Sea coast of Africa] there are some people without necks, having eyes in their shoulders."

Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia

"These beings, though they were bipeds, and were not quite so unheard-of in their anatomic structure as the entity which Eibon had met by the lake, were nevertheless sufficiently unusual; for their head and bodies were apparently combined in one, and their ears, eyes, nostrils, mouths, and certain other organs of doubtful use were all arranged in a somewhat unconventional grouping on their chests and abdomens. They were wholly naked, and were rather dark in color, with no trace of hair on any part of their bodies."

"His knowledge of the customs, manners, ideas, and beliefs of the Bhlemphroims soon became extensive; but he found it a source of disillusionment as well as of illumination."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Door To Saturn 

 

AMPHIBIOUS HUMAN

AMPHIBIOUS HUMAN

"128-Individual, by some strange process, retraces the path of evolution and becomes amphibious."

H.P. Lovecraft, Commonplace Book

News....

Hey guys! I know there wasn't a full week of monsters and the three that I did post were redrawings, but I wanted to give you something before the inevitable zine posting lull. The second edition of Illustro Obscurum Volume IV and the first edition of Illustro Obscurum Volume V will go on sale in the next two weeks. 

So officially, the Second Edition of Illustro Obscurum Volume IV goes on sale next Friday May 24th at 11am EST.  That means a lot of prep and assembly. Which also means no time for monsters.

I thought I'd give you another process post though so you can see what goes into making these guys.

 

This first pic is just to show what the pages look like when I get them from the printer.

This next shot shows how I tear them. There are guides on every page and if I'm careful I can stack up to six pages and tear them all at once without any mishaps.

Folding is the similar, where, if I'm careful, I can fold four pages at once without any errors or faulty creasing (also thanks to Sal from Peasant Magik for the second hand bone folder!). This is way trickier because the thicker the stack the harder it is to get a good crease throughout all the pages, plus the outside page may get weird damage from pressing so hard.

Then the final step (for the interior pages at least) is to assemble them in the proper order. If you know A Nightmare On Elm Street 3 at all, you can tell it took me about the length of the movie to finish prepping and assembling only 15 copies. 

I'll be getting the covers for these this week which will lead to more prep, assembly, stapling and taping.  Wish me luck! 

And don't forget the Second Edition of Illustro Obscurum Volume IV goes on sale next Friday May 24th at 11am EST. 

WORM PERSON

WORM PERSON

"Amid these hushed throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by elbows that seemed preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and stomachs that seemed abnormally pulpy;"

"It was a silent, shocking descent, and I observed after a horrible interval that the walls and steps were changing in nature, as if chiselled out of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that the myriad footfalls made no sound and set up no echoes."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Festival

 

 

DAGON

DAGON
"Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then."
H.P. Lovecraft, Dagon

"It was called, she said, "The Esoteric Order of Dagon", and was undoubtedly a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a century before, at a time when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren."

"'All in the band of the faithful - Order o' Dagon - an' the children shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all come from onct ... Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga - '"
H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth

"Dagon his name, sea-monster, upward man
And downward fish; yet had his temple high"
John Milton, Paradise Lost

HECATE

HECATE
"Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

 "Torch-bearing Hekate holy daughter of great-bosomed Nyx."
Bacchylides, The Poems and Fragments

"He (Odysseus) shall pour on the shore offerings for thee, unhappy one, fearing the anger of the three-necked goddess (Hekate), for that he shall hurl the first stone at thy (Hekabe's) stoning and begin the dark sacrifice to Haides."
Lycophron, The Alexandra

O three-formed (triformis) Hecate, and ye gods by whose divinity Jason swore to me ... I have yet curse more dire to call down on my husband – may he live."
Lucius Annaeus Senecca, Medea

"In appearance she was frightful, and serpents hung hissing around her shoulders."
Lewis Spence, An Encyclopedia Of Occultism

"Some people claimed that Hecate stood 100 feet tall and roamed the countryside with a pack of wild hounds."
Mysteries Of the Unknown-Witches and Witchcraft

"Hecate was a pagan moon-goddess so powerful that fear of her cruel ways extended even into Christian times. Keeper of the keys to hell, she was called the Mother Of Witches and the Queen Of Ghosts."
The Enchanted World, Night Creatures

 

News...

A few updates for you guys. There won't be any posts this week because I'm working onsome new monsters as you can see below! I've also been working on the second edition of Volume IV and the first edition of Volume V.

Not only that but I spent this weekend visiting locations from the original Friday the 13th in Blairstown NJ!

Left: Annie from Friday the 13th arriving in Blairstown NJ on her way to Camp Crystal Lake.
Right: Mike from Saturday the 4th arriving in Blairston NJ on his way to Camp Crystal Lake.

 

There will be some crazy updates next week, most of which will be Illustro Obscurum related and then hopefully, in two week's there'll be a weeks worth of monsters to post.

YOG-SOTHOTH

YOG-SOTHOTH

“Imagination called up the shocking form of fabulous Yog-Sothoth — only a congeries of iridescent globes, yet stupendous in its malign suggestiveness.”
H. P. Lovecraft, The Horror in the Museum

“Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.”

H. P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror

“...great globes of light massing toward the opening, and not alone these, but the breaking apart of the nearest globes, and the protoplasmic flesh that flowed blackly outward to join together and form that eldritch, hideous horror from outer space, that spawn of the blankness of primal time, that tentacled amorphous monster which was the lurker at the threshold, whose mask was as a congeries of iridescent globes, the noxious Yog-Sothoth, who froths as primal slime in nuclear chaos beyond the nethermost 

outposts of space and time!”

H.P. Lovecraft & August Derleth, The Lurker At the Threshold

MARTIN'S BEACH HORROR

MARTIN'S BEACH HORROR

"The object was some fifty feet in length, of roughly cylindrical shape, and about ten feet in diameter. It was unmistakably a gilled fish in its major affiliations; but with certain curious modifications such as rudimentary forelegs and six-toed feet in place of pectoral fins, which prompted the widest speculation. Its extraordinary mouth, its thick and scaly hide, and its single, deep-set eye were wonders scarcely less remarkable than its colossal dimensions;"
H.P. Lovecraft & Sonia H. Greene, The Horror At Martin's Beach

CLAWING FIEND

CLAWING FIEND

"Ghastly shades of bygone gladness, 
Clawing fiends of future sadness."

H.P. Lovecraft, Cycle Of Verse