with Nick Filardi
AfterShock has announced the 1920s horror/crime comic “Miskatonic” from writer Mark Sable and artist Giorgio Pontrelli. The series, which the publisher refers to as “H.P. Lovecraft meets James Ellroy,” sees a pair of investigators digging into a series of bombings in the Miskatonic Valley — also known as Lovecraft Country — at the behest of future FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
Also featuring work from colorist Pippa Bowland and letterer Thomas Mauer, “Miskatonic” aims to explore cosmic horror tropes, while also centering characters often maligned by Lovecraft and his works.
The story finds Miranda Keller, one of the first female agents in what would eventually become the Bureau of Investigation, teaming up with Tom Malone, a rare survivor of one of Lovecraft’s short stories. While J. Edgar Hoover thinks the bombings are the work of radicals, immigrants and other “undesirables,” Malone and Keller instead stumble upon a white supremacist occult conspiracy that can only be stopped by the very people that Hoover detests.
“I’m a huge Lovecraft fan that wants to celebrate what’s great about his cosmic horror while turning some of his backwards thinking on its head,” Sable said. To do so, Sable drew inspiration from some previous works that deconstruct Lovecraft, including Alan Moore’s “Providence” and “Neonomicon,” Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, the novel on which the recently premiered HBO series is based.
Much like that series, “Miskatonic” takes the racism underlying Lovecraft’s work and foregrounds it. Malone, one of the protagonists, is a character from Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook,” a short story featuring anti-immigrant diatribes that prompted Tor.com to dub it “Lovecraft’s Most Bigoted Story.”
Sable also took a cue from the works of crime writers James Ellroy and Don Winslow, by setting the events of the series against a backdrop of real events in history. For “Miskatonic,” the historical points of reference are the First Red Scare and the infamous Palmer Raids, which saw J. Edgar Hoover rising to power, while rounding up thousands of political activists, and deporting hundreds of immigrants.
“There are a lot of parallels between Lovecraft and Hoover’s period and today – a country coming out of a pandemic, about to fall into a depression and a federal government obsessed with demonizing anyone it deems subversive or alien,” Sable said. “It’s a way to explore forgotten history and let the reader draw some parallels with some of the real life horrors we’re dealing with today.”
“Miskatonic” #1 goes on sale on November 11. You can get a first look at Pontrelli’s art, as well as the cover by Jeremy Haun & Nick Filardi and variant cover by Tyler Crook, below.
