A very happy birthday to one of my greatest inspirations, weird horror writer and frequent user of the word unnameable, Howard Philips Lovecraft! In honour of this auspicious day, I have chosen to launch this new web-comic. Though, in fact, this little project has been in silent development for quite a long time now.

If you’ve seen me at a comic convention over the past few months and commented on my Cthulhu Taking Tea print, I may have said to you that I was considering making a web-comic based on the character in the piece. The truth is, I’ve been considering and developing the idea since as early as the Fall of 2014.

At the time I was working on my graphic novel, Chadhiyana: In the Company of Shadows, which was then publishing as a weekly web-comic (on chadhiyana.com). I had two publishers interested and was likely going to go with one of them (and eventually did—Chadhiyana #1 published last month by Rosarium Publishing). This meant the web-comic was going to cease to exist as it went on to become a standard comic.

I was ecstatic, of course, but I was going to miss the steady, instantaneous flow of published work a weekly web-comic provided. With the intense effort I was already putting into Chadhiyana and the increased time I need to put into it now with a publisher behind it, I knew I couldn’t marry myself to something that was going to be a huge investment of my time. That was when I remembered the tentacle-moustached Cthulhu from my Cthulhu Taking Tea piece and thought up a simple formula with which to frame a comic around him.

For those who don’t know, I’m a long-time fan of Lovecraft’s work (despite his less endearing beliefs). In fact, a lot of how I began my professional career revolved around my own Lovecraft-inspired work.

My Lovecraftian painting, The Horror Beyond the Door, got the attention of both Heavy Metal Magazine and Planet Lovecraft Magazine which lead to my work being featured in both publications; the latter also being Lovecraft-related. Before that, I was given the opportunity to design some tentacle-faced creatures which were included in my first published work as the penciler for the comic story, “Recollections of a Commander” (Comicbook Artists Guild).

Later I wrote some additional Lovecraft-esque fiction (little of which has yet been published, mostly because I changed my focus before I got them ready for publication) and created the aforementioned Cthulhu Taking Tea piece which has proved to be one of my more popular works of art. So much so, it wound up on the cover of Innsmouth Magazine: Collected Issues 5-7 (Innsmouth Free Press). So, I do have a history with Lovecraft, and people have seemed to enjoy my Lovecraftian work, over the years.

That said, this web-comic is, at this point, merely experimental. I have no desire to cease work on or jeapordise Chadhiyana. It does not take very long to draw a Gentleman Cthulhu, and in the past six months I wrote some forty-odd Gentleman Cthulhu scripts, here and there. All things considred, I’m going to do my best to get out these comics weekly—but only if time allows as Chadhiyana is my main focus.

The purpose of this site is merely to have some fun and put out some additional, regular content. As much as I love Chadhiyana (more than anything I’ve created to date, in fact), sometimes a creator needs more than one outlet, and I have a strange sense of humour which is starkly different from the other dark and serious work I typically create.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy the comic, and it’ll give you something to smile about every week. Keep checking back, and I’ll do my best to keep up my end.

Cheers!