I came across Hannes Bok’s illustration for H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and this got me thinking, “Is this the very first interpretation of a Deep One?” The illustration appeared in January 1942, eleven years after the story was written and five after HPL’s death.
With a little digging I found out that the story had been written at the end of 1931, after a second visit to Newburyport, MA. The tale was submitted by August Derleth, not HPL, and rejected by Farnsworth Wright, not because of its content, but because of its problematic size. It was too long to offer in one issue but too hard to cut into two sections. Derleth would offer it to Dorothy McIlwraith in 1941 and it would appear in an abridged version.
So, Deep Ones in Weird Tales at last. And what does McIlwraith do? She doesn’t even put them on the cover. The Gretta cover shows an Arab man grasping at a woman holding a box of jewels. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t correspond to any of the stories! But wait, Canada to the rescue! The Canadian edition (usually maligned by collectors) does the cover right with two deep ones carrying a guy into the water.
Just to be accurate, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” did appear in print before 1942. It was published in a small run booklet with a cover by Frank Utpatel. The image on this booklet is hard to decipher and I don’t think it features a deep one. I’m not sure if it had interior art but I suspect not.
I also wondered if Lovecraft himself had drawn them, as he had with Cthulhu and the Elder Things, but not that I can find. Clark Ashton Smith might also have done some unpublished doodle or sculpture but I haven’t found that either. So as far as I can tell Bok and the Canadian artist, Edmond Good, share the honor of the first Deep Ones.
There was one other instance where Canadian and US covers varied on a Mythos story. This was for August Derleth’s “Trail of Cthulhu” (March 1944) in the US and (July 1944) in Canada. The US cover is by John Giunta and the Canadian one is unknown. Both show Shrewsbury riding on a byakhee, and whether you prefer Giunta colorful and cartoony one or the more realistic looking Canadian cover is a matter of taste. Hey, wait, these are probably the first images of byakhees ever! Just thought of that.
So I suppose it’s only fair to feature a few more initial monster appearances from HPL himself.
“The Colour Out of Space” (Amazing Stories, September 1927) was the story HPL sold to Hugo Gernsback. Hugo was so slow in paying Lovecraft branded him “Hugo the Rat” and didn’t sell him any more tales. It features “The Colour”, an energy from space that sucks the life out of everything around it. Scenes from this story inspired the opening of The Blob and “The Lonely Death of Jordy Verrrill” in Creepshow. This illo was drawn by Virgil Finlay.
“Pickman’s Model” (Weird Tales, October 1927) features the first rending of a ghoul, though HPL did create reanimate dead earlier in “Herbert West: Reanimator” (Weird Tales, March 1942). Artwok for that story was drawn by future SF writer, Damon Knight.
Lovecraft didn’t invent ghouls but he did have his own brand of them, hyena-headed, taking his inspiration from Edward Lucas White’s “Amina”. The first artist to draw the dog-headed ghoul was Hugh Rankin. His version looks more lizard-like.
“The Call of Cthulhu” (Weird Tales, February 1928) features HPL’s most famous creation, Cthulhu. Unlike most of his monsters, HPL actually was the first to draw him in a sketch in 1934. When Hugh Rankin got to do this one he chose to draw the naked cult worshippers instead of what they worship.
“The Dunwich Horror” (Weird Tales, April 1929) again featured Hugh Rankin trying to capture the obsess nature of Wilbur Whateley’s brother. He largely fails, making the mass too hard to interrupt.
“At the Mountains of Madness” (Astounding, February-April, 1936) saw HPL selling his work to F. Orlin Tremaine at Astounding, a Science Fiction magazine. The two stories he bought are some of HPL’s more SF pieces. “At the Mountains of Madness” featured several good illos of Old Ones and Shoggoths. Lovecraft also drew the Old Ones first.
The second story, “Shadow Out of Time” (Astounding, June 1936) featured the Great Race of Yith both on the cover and inside. Lovecraft wrote several revisions or collaborations for WT including the inferior “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” (Weird Tales, February 1938) which features an unnamed squidgy in the artwork by Virgil Findlay.
