A new comic book called Arcane Secrets by Angel A. Svoboda (Amigo Comics) got me thinking that there aren’t many Lovecraftian comedies out there. In fact, did HPL ever write any comedy? The only example I can think of was the parody tale, “The Battle That Ended the Century,” a long in-joke for his friends he wrote with R.H. Barlow in 1934. And that’s about it. And this is why Arcane Secrets is so unusual. Does cosmic terror lend itself to comedy?
Funny horror got its start on the radio with I Love a Mystery (1938-1944) (which would inspire Scooby Doo 25 years later). In the movies, there was The Ghostbreakers (1940) with Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard, the Abbott & Costello horror series (beginning 1948), and later, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin remaking The Ghostbreakers in Scared Stiff (1953). Charles Addams brought a ghoulish smile with his cartoons in The New Yorker (1956), of all places. These became the television show, The Addams Family (1964-1966), and its clone The Munsters (also 1964-1966). And Scooby and the gang showed up in 1969. But none of these are Mythos. What was the first?
Read the rest:
