I’m very grateful for this opportunity to practice editing (originally I planned a storyline of 28 installments, but now I was forced to squeeze in a satisfying conclusion in 10 pages – much better and much more convincing! At least if you’re a Lovecraft fan…). Hopefully people who haven’t read Goldenbird before will appreciate this short story and come here for more.

“Nyarlathotep” has everything – 1920′s pseudoscience, Lovecraft, puppies, fashion, egyptomania, tentacles, sexy men with big mustaches and/or big noses. Love it or lose your mind.

Not again!

In every story and every chapter there are some pet scenes that I dream of drawing, that I have figured out in my head long before I came up with the story that they are embedded in. To be honest, I’m more interested in scenes and situations than story lines or single pictures. The challenge is to bring up the patience and skills necessary to get the reader to the right point in the right way. This is one of the scenes I have been waiting for.

Click the category “Nyarlathotep” for the whole story from the beginning.

Now it’s getting interesting. Yes, that’s a trapezohedron – in French, intriguingly called “antidiamant”. To be true to my source of inspiration, it properly ought to consist of bizarre non-Euclidean angles. Geometry – the only field of mathematics that I was ever any good at. (Note the past tense – nowadays I just hate using any kind of ruler.)

In the end it doesn’t matter – this crystal is an illustration of an abstract concept, not a scientific/magical device as such.

The Nyarlathotep storyline archives are here.

I didn’t mean to disappear for a month, but I need to earn my living, you know!

The Nyarlathotep archives are here.

Falco’s little medal looks like this. I usually draw all my religious trivia from the Catholic Encyclopedia, 1911 edition. He probably received it as a gift from the Daughters of Charity, working in the slums of Paris.

Even though this strip is focused on the inner life of Reverend Mr. Peregrini, I managed to squeeze in Mochi twice. And there was much rejoicing…

This was a tough one – because of Nyarly’s technobabble. There are other items that I would like to introduce, but the tuning fork did an impromptu entrance. He would of course have more effective oscillators for more sinister purposes.

As usual, the Nyarlathotep archives are here.

Mochi tells the nasty man to “shut up” in Japanese.

The debate here reflects my annoyance with old adventure stories, where ancient African civilizations almost invariably were led by white people, and intelligence was measured by European beauty standards. Of course, such sentiments can be found in Lovecraft’s tales, but he relished in disrupting his own Anglo-Saxon purity ideal – nobody was safe, anybody could degenerate into a Dagon-worshipping fish monster or a cannibalistic ghoul. How much of his virulent racism was added for horrific effect, and how much was based on genuine convictions? HPL was a bit of a troll sometimes.

New to the Nyarlathotep storyline? Go to the Archives.

The full quote is found in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (originally published as Träume eines Geistersehers, 1766) by Immanuel Kant, available through Wikisource.

Kant expresses – with his dry sense of humour, but not without a certain Lovecrafty ominousness – the sceptic’s opinion in the very next chapter: “while I have not made insanity to be the cause of an imagined communion with spirits, I have yet connected the two by considering insanity as the natural consequence of such communion”.

The practical philosopher concludes with a concession to the faithful, as well as the faithless:

Human reason was not given strong enough wings to part clouds so high above us, clouds which withhold from our eyes the secrets of the other world. The curious who inquire about it so anxiously may receive the simple but very natural reply, that it would be best for them to please have patience until they get there. But as our fate in the other world probably depends very much on the manner in which we have conducted our office in the present world, I conclude with the words with which Voltaire, after so many sophistries, lets his honest Candide conclude: “Let us look after our happiness, go into the garden, and work.”

Men! What can I say? We’ve all been there. And he gets what he wants, anyway, because LOOK at that NOSE.

In other news, Google celebrates Galileo’s telescope, German archaeologists are digging up a mysterious African civilization, and my sister’s hard-boiled action-drama-sliceoflife-comic Eva can be pre-ordered (in Swedish).

Okay, there’s the teddybear. I wonder if they had to buy a ticket for it, too. Why did I introduce it in the first place…

I have been reading a big fat Swedish book from 1920 called Elektriciteten by E. Andréen and H. Holst. Some of the illustrations were used on the previous page. I must say that I don’t understand much of it (slept through most physics lessons at school) but what I understand seems exciting. Other fun books are Martin Gardner’s Relativity for the Million from 1962 and William Bonnor’s The Mystery of the Expanding Universe from 1964. What I like about the older books is the emphasis on alternative theories that have since been abandoned – of course the truth is always more astonishing than fiction, but the powers of human imagination should not be underestimated.