As I got deeper into the so-called C'thulhu Mythos, I realized, to my delight, that the part of Massachusetts I lived in was the setting of many of HPL's stories. He often set them in fictional towns surrounded by actual towns, allowing a reader in the know to estimate where a story takes place. I'm pretty sure my home town is the setting of "The Shadow over Innsmouth," Lovecraft's most sensible and plot-profluent story. One of my friends in college liked to say I had "the Innsmouth look." I don't - my eyes are narrow, my lips thin, and my neck without folds - but you'd have to be familiar with the story to know what I mean.

Lovecraft influenced American and probably European horror (or dark fantasy, as the kids call it these days) more than anyone else in this century, maybe more than Poe. Perhaps it's not so much a case of him influencing as it is a case of him getting ripped off, as in the comic you have here. Even that's okay by HPL. He encouraged it. The other writers in the pulps did homages, pastiches, swipes, while Lovecraft was still at it himself. His humble (self-deprecating) attitude probably encouraged this. There's no way he knew that the imitations would nurture the interest in his work which exists today - a much more widespread interest than existed in his life. But I've justified the existence of our tribute more than enough now. He got his name and face on the cover, and that's as much as the old gentleman from Providence could've expected.

In his own eyes he was pursuing the very highest form of art, and was ignored because he couldn't achieve it. He thought many of his peers, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, were hacks cranking out adventure stories with no redeeming value. How he differentiated between Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, for instance, I have no idea, but he did. The creator of Conan was his trusted and esteemed correspondent, but the Tarzan creator - whose work is probably more popular and immortal than that of either HPL or REH - got only scorn.

Lovecraft's own pursuit of high art had to do with the communication of a cosmic dread that he himself felt. His chief goal was to plant that fear in the reader, to overwhelm the reader with the awe of the unknowable universe. He definitely achieved this, but I've got my doubts about this being a legitimate aim for supposed high art.

Fortunately, HPL has other fans more faithful than myself - gentlemen and ladies who appropriated his penchant for verbosity and anglicised spellings, going so far in their devotion as to believe in his fictions, when even he, by his own admission, did not. These devotees alternately insist that Lovecraft was tapping into other realms without knowing it, or that he came by this knowledge as an honest occultist, but hid it in pulp fiction to avoid persecution. He was a New Englander after all. While there's a history of occultists pulling that trick, of disguising their real beliefs as fiction or academic studies critical of occultism, I'm pretty sure Lovecraft didn't believe C'thulhu really lay in R'lyeh, dreaming. At least one person I respect has led me to consider that HPL wasn't quite as skeptical of the supernatural as he claimed to be, but I'm sure there are plenty of detailed essays about that on the internet already, so I won't add to the canon.