Kickstarter Comic Review: The Thing on the Doorstep
Simon Birks & company deliver a captivating Lovecraft Adaptation.
I’m an unabashed Lovecraft nerd, and there’s rarely a shortage of Lovecraft adaptations or interpretations or, occasionally, bastardizations in comics form on Kickstarter. Fortunately, soon after I first began this The Comic$ Crowd project back in early September, I discovered Blue Fox Comics’ and Simon Birks’ adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, The Thing on the Doorstep, first published in prose form in Weird Tales in 1933. The Kickstarter page for the graphic novel easily sold the concept and demonstrated the quality of the forthcoming work (I missed out on the three previous campaigns for the individual issues). Willi Roberts’ art, inside and out, was on full display and truly sold this project on a visual level.
Here’s the basic summary I wrote up back in September:
I was impressed enough to back the campaign myself, and I selected the PDF edition of the 120-page graphic novel. At nearly 54, my eyes appreciate the backlit screen of an iPad for the optimal comics reading experience. Digital fulfillment happened a full month early, and I was excited to download the PDF to the Books app and dig in. It was not a fast read. This story and the art that tells it are beefy. There’s a lot to appreciate and digest here.
Before I read the graphic novel, however, I revisited the original Lovecraft story via a reading on YouTube, a really excellent version by HorrorBabble, and reacquainted myself with his distinctive, descriptive style of first-person narration, often with little actual dialogue and an extremely small cast. I enjoyed the audio version of the original prose, as I am wont to do, and it really whet my appetite for the comic.
What Birks, Roberts, et al., did is build out 120 fully realized pages of sequential art from a prose tale told on YouTube in 1 hour and 15 minutes. They added cast, manifesting a wife and child with agency alongside the narrator turned protagonist. This move not only reinforced the actions and decisions of the protagonist, but it also raised the stakes of those actions and decisions for all involved, as there are more lives at stake than just the lone actor of the short story. You can’t help but give a damn about these new characters as the story unfolds, particularly Clara, protagonist Daniel’s wife, as she takes matters into her own hands at critical moments when he can’t.
The graphic and sequential storytelling is imaginative and effective. We trek across years and, ultimately, decades of an endearing friendship between confident family man Daniel and his seemingly socially lost compadre Edward, and this is accomplished via expert pacing that meaningfully captures major changes in their respective lives, each time in just a few pages.
There is exquisitely thoughtful use of sequential timing only possible in comics to demonstrate changes in faces and postures spanning seconds and hours without using a single word. Just colors and subtle shifts in form and shape that inform our brains of what’s transpiring as our eyes move right-to-left and top-to-bottom across the page. Truly excellent stuff.
If you enjoy Lovecraft or gothic horror or existential horror or just amazing comics, go get a copy of The Thing on the Doorstep and enjoy it for yourself. Birks and crew nail the building sense of dread necessary for this story to work, and they capitalize on it in more ways than even Lovecraft by developing a larger world around the two main players. Highly recommended. What a joy to read.
Have a great week!
Kevin