A couple of days ago I wrote about “Beyond the Past” and said I hadn’t found any Mythos comics since Dr. Styx in 1945. Well, it turns out I missed a good one. “The Black Arts” appeared in Weird Fantasy #14 (July-August 1950). This is an EC Comic written by Harry Harrison and penciled by Wally Wood and inked by Harrison. This is the same Harry Harrison who would go on to write The Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld. He started in the comics but moved into writing. Wally Wood is of course a legend, who experimented with Sword & Sorcery comics in the 1960s long before Marvel Comics.
Luther Martin is a milksop of a man and he is in love with a beautiful woman who works at the library,
On of one his stalking trips he accidentally trips on a book and breaks a panel in a shelf. An old book falls out onto the floor.
That book is, of course, The Necronomicon, The Secret Art of Black Magic. Luther steals the book by slipping it into his coat.
He takes the book home and reads its obscene pages. He finds a section on love philters. Our hero decides to try it. He has to collect several disgusting ingredients: “A lock of hair from a corpse…a handful of moss scraped from the tombstone of a fair maiden dead from the anguishes of a lost love…a sprinkling of dust from a house haunted by the dead, shunned by the living…some possession of the loved one, to be burned…” Luther does all of this, robbing a grave, visiting a derelict house and stealing the girl’s handkerchief.
Luther tests it on a cat first. The animal falls instantly for him. Next he has to find a way to get the potion into his girl. It’s a rainy day so he offers to go across the street and get her lunch, which includes a cup of hot tea. He puts the philter in her drink. Nothing seems to happen. Luther is disappointed.
Luther buys a paper. The headline tells of robbed graves. He studys The Necronomicon to see where he went wrong. He finds a passage that warns the love potion should not be mixed with “Thea Sensis” or tea. The drinker of such a mixture would become a terrible clawed beast that robs graves. Luther gets his just deserts….
Admittedly, a more fun comic than “Beyond the Past” but almost nothing from Lovecraft except the name of the book. (Which never had a subtitle or pages in easy to read English!) HPL wasn’t interested in anything as lowly as a love potion. The monster mentioned at the end, of which we only see the hand, sounds like ghoul. Harry Harrison is having a little fun but not much more. This could have been told without any Lovecraft at all.
And if we hadn’t learned our lesson from “The Black Arts” remember your J. Sheridan Le Fanu and his phantom monkey, avoid tea and drink coffee instead…
