Ligottian Works on DeviantART

While lacking the enormous artistic following H.P. Lovecraft has generated, Thomas Ligotti maintains his own entourage of aesthetic marionettes. As with Lovecraftian art, great works of Ligottiana sometimes turn up in unlikely places. DeviantART yields several meager, but fine results for Thomas Ligotti. It appears that two artists in particular have reproduced Ligotti competently using photography and comics.



The artist who goes by deaddeaddeaddead has photographed the very depths of unyielding desolation. The gallery features several productions dedicated to both Ligotti and the author's musical associate, David Tibet, of Current 93 fame. Two of the best are reproduced above, cunningly entitled "Sideshow" and "No More Worlds Like This" respectively. The hazy-edged black and white filter is the perfect atmospheric lens for viewing a Ligottian world. Which, according to the writer himself (uber-pessimist that he is), is the most awful and truest form of this world. And while this world--the Ligottian world--can be captured in virtually any gloomy corner, deaddeaddeaddead's selection of traditional Ligottian haunts shows calculation. The hungry shadows and the puppets are at their worst (or their best?) in half-forgotten, decaying environs like old sheds, carnivals, and gas stations. The horror presented in Ligotti's fiction, as is well known to his readers, represents an uncontained multiverse of existential fright from which there is no escape. These images conjure the same feel. And that really counts for something!


Next, a surprisingly whimsical take on Thomas Ligotti's fiction. This comic strip called "The Eldritch Museum" comes from Tillinghast23 (Eric York). By all accounts, this artist is a longstanding, well schooled, and aesthetically adept delver in the weird. His DeviantART gallery is well worth examining not just for this shard of Ligottiana, but for almost-funnies like this one and other illustrations inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, and others.

Anyone who's encountered Ligotti's frequent and disturbing use of puppets and mannikins can appreciate this comic. As though almost taking a page directly from Mr. Ligotti's story, "Mad Night of Atonement," York has graphically portrayed one of the ultimate revelations in the Ligotti canon: the malignant supremacy of puppetry. Forbidden delight, top horror, and sin all rolled into one--the author's myriad literary messages symbolized by the facsimile person have seldom been as clear as suggested by this short sketch.

-Grim Blogger