Call of Cthulhu Fridays: The Sundered Veil

(above image is fan art for this story found online)

OK, with scheduling conflicts and so much going on right now, I won’t be running any of my game stuff for the group for a few weeks (I don’t do my main 1st edition campaign if anyone is missing, and the alternatives I do also depend on who is there). I’m going to let regular player Ben do his D&D next week for those of us available.

But without actually GM’ing, I lose a little inspiration for my blogging (so you have an idea what will happened if my group falls apart). So I thought that at least for Fridays I would keep myself inspired, and hopeful that I will get to do a CoC campaign for my group at some point, that I would do regular homage’s to stuff related to Lovecraft, which I have been reading a lot of stuff on lately.

OK, so recently I have been rereading the first two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Graphic novels, and then some. In them, Allan Moore shows an even bigger love of the Wold-Newton stuff than Phillip Jose Farmer himself! It seems like almost all of literary fiction exists in the world he has set up. Forget the laughable Sean Connery film (shame it was one of his last) based on The League, I think Moore’s LEG is one of the greatest triumphs of modern comic/lit genres. The amount of stuff from fiction created since the dawn of man that he has included is just astounding. Entire books have been written to act as a guide to the people and places he references.

In the back of the Volume 2 series (the one where the Martians from War of the Worlds meet resistance from Captain Nemo and the rest of the league), there is a text story (with some artwork) that tells a tale about an astral team-up with Allan Quartemain, John Carter of Mars, Randolph Carter from Lovecraft’s dreamlands cycle, and the Time Traveler from H.G. Wells.

Wow, who could even imagine such a teaming? The weirdo/genius mind of Allan Moore, that’s who. To add to the level of geek cool, here Randolph Carter is a great nephew of John Carter, who of course views his future dreamer nephew as a bit of a wuss.

At the start of the story, Allan Quartermain visits an old mystic friend looking to partake of the Taduki drug from his adventures in King Solomon’s Mines and other places. Passing out and going into a metaphysical trance, Quartermain enters the astral realm. Here his disembodies spirits encounters two other such souls. One is John Carter, his spirit body in transition from earth to his soon to be new home on the Red Planet. Also in spiritual transition is Randolph Carter, the grandnephew of John. As the three wonder the purpose of their meeting, H.G. Wells unnamed Time Traveler and his wondrous machine shows up. The Time Traveler tells them that fate has brought them to him, and they are to help him defeat forces of the Cthulhu Mythos. Awesome.

The quartet is soon attacked from nowhere by motley, primitive beasts that the Time Traveler curiously describes as being known both as Morlocks and Mi-Go. Escaping on the time machine, the group travels to the material world of the far future. It is the sphinx from the Eloi time, but even further into the future than that, when that once lush area is now a desert in a dying earth. Apparently the Time Traveler has made this lasting far flung structure his home base in the battle against the Old Ones. After explaining the problem of ancient Godlike creatures invading the mortal realm, both the Carters realize that they are not bound to any realm and are actually forms destined to other places, so they fade away. John goes to Mars to win Dejah Thoris and begins his adventurers there, and Randolph heads off for his adventures to Unknown Kadath.

Things go from bad to worse when Quartermain is possessed by Ithaqua the Windwalker, and returns to the mortal realm. The Time Traveler is left to his further adventures in the time stream, and Quartermain manages to become free of his possession in the earthly realm. Broken by the loss of his Taduki drug, Quartermain heads off to the Middle East to become an opium addict for awhile before he joins the League.

This team up is amazing, really. To me as a fan of all of them; Lovecraft, HG Wells, and Edgar Rice, this really blew me away. If this sounds good to you, I recommend you get your hands on either the comic issues, or better yet the graphic novels. The story is several pages long in small print, so you for sure get a lot of meat for such a short adventure.

Oh, for extra awesome, the comic book portion of the book begins on Mars, where John Carter, Gulliver of Mars, and other literary Mars figures and creatures gather to fight off the Mollusks from War of the Worlds. Too much cool, man!

John Carter of Mars and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

There is quite a bit of John Carter of Mars fandom going on around the blogs, but I haven’t seen this little bit of a gem talked about.

I was rummaging through some of my comics last night, and came across volume 2 of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and was reminded that John Carter shows up in the opening pages of the story. It is way cool. As shown in the pages above, the Green Martians are present, but most interesting is the appearance of characters from other fiction about Mars. Edwin Lester Arnold’s Lieutenant Gulliver of Mars makes an appearance. First written in 1905, Arnold’s Gulliver had many things in common with John Carter (both were soldiers, and both were transported to Mars from Earth by magic/super-science), and began the Sword and Planet genre.

Both John Carter and Gulliver, aware of each other’s existence on the planet and obviously having met before, come together to face the Martians of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds. Not truly Martian natives, but invaders from some other planet who came to attack mars after scrying info about the Humans on Mars with The Crystal egg from the book of that name by Wells, the Wells Martians are losing their war against Carter, Gulliver, and the natives (which even includes the Sorns from C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet). With Carter and his armies closing in, the invaders are driven off of Mars, and off they go to Earth to struggle against the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

This has to be the most interesting John Carter appearance outside of his own books (He had some team-ups with Tarzan in a Marvel Comics mini-series in the 90’s that were pretty cool), and it places him firmly in the Wold Newton family tree as created by Phillip Jose Farmer. If you are unfamiliar with Wold Newton, it basically is a theory that all pulp heroes are related in some way, and at the very least exist in the same shared universe.

Carter’s appearance is fairly brief, but if you are a fan of Barsoom you should try and pick up this nifty little item (get the graphic novel compilation and save a few bucks).