“The Shoggoths” at Skywald is a good reminder for someone like myself who got involved with the Cthulhu Mythos in the 1980s when Call of Cthulhu, the RPG, came out. It was easy to think we were the first ones to find the worlds of H. P. Lovecraft after the initial Pulp fans of the 1930s. (Back in those days you had to work hard to unearth the treasures of the Mythos. There wasn’t a new anthology every other month.) This simply wasn’t true. The 1960s had its infatuation with HPL as evidenced by Damon Knight’s rejection of these fans in his book review called “Ia! Yog-Sothoth! Yah Yah Yah!” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1960) and again with “The Tedious Mr. Lovecraft” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1960). The new editor, Ed Ferman, felt disgruntled fans deserved both sides of the argument and published “H. P. Lovecraft: The House and the Shadows” by J. Vernon Shea (Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1966). The truth of the matter was August Derleth and Arkham House had done a pretty good job of keeping HPL and the Cthulhu Mythos alive through all the decades after 1939.
In comics, this could be seen in Archie Goodwin’s “Island at World’s End” (Eerie #4, July 1966).
The 1970s, especially around 1973, were no different. Marvel did a few covert nods and later adaptations, which you can read about here. The underground comics had their HPL lovefests like Skull Comics #4-6. At Skywald, a black & white rival of the Warren magazines, editor Al Hewetson (sometimes working under the pseudonym of Howie Anderson) wrote a six part series that is both bizarre and terribly inaccurate. It was about ghouls and it was called “The Shoggoths”. The first comic says” Continuing the Cthulhu Mythos”.
It is probably unnecessary to explain this, but in case you don’t know: Shoggoths are slimy puddles of eyeballs that the Old Ones created in Antarctica and later were destroyed by. When the humans show up in 1930, they only find the former slaves gooping around the place. (That is certainly the worst description of “At the Mountains of Madness” or a work by Lovecraft since Damon Knight wrote his book reviews in 1960.) The creatures in the comic are obviously a version of HPL’s dog-headed ghouls from stories like “Pickman’s Model”. Why he chose to call them Shoggoths, I don’t know.
“The Skull Forest of Old Earth” (Nightmare #9, October 1972) has humans coming from Uranus to colonize the Earth. They find they are not the only ones on the planet. Their hours of standing around looking like half-dressed swimsuit models end when the Shoggoths start eating people. A baby is left behind to be raised by ape-like creatures. (There is a little Lovecraft here in that the Old Ones supposedly evolved apes to act as servants, which later became men.)
“Where Are the Inhabitants of Earth?” (Nightmare #11, February 1973) has an astronaut return to Earth after everything has been destroyed. He finds a pregnant woman who was attacked by the Shoggoths. When she delivers, the baby is revealed to be a Shoggoth. I guess they don’t just eat people.
“This Archaic Breeding Ground” (Scream #1, August 1973) is reminiscent of “Island at World’s End” with a ship landing in the Antarctic to be attacked by Lovecraftian refugees. Again we get a sense of the cross breeding of Shoggoths and humans. Hewetson works in a spaceship right out of The Thing, and why not?
“The Grotesque Green Earth” (Nightmare #15, October 1973) has three scholars looking over a map of Arkham, MA. They read a diary by an old woman who ventured into the tunnels beneath the city. She finds terrible things, that the scholars think about publishing to tell the world of the threat that is coming…in 1973!
“The Vault” (Nightmare #19, June 1974) has a title that might make you think it is based on “In the Vault”, a weak bit of grue that HPL wrote but it isn’t. The plot is closer to “The Statement of Randolph Carter” without the shuddery ending. Two men explore the Welloch gravesites in Scotland. They discover an underground city of ghouls, which they blow up with dynamite. Why Hewetson took the story to the UK I don’t know, since HPL did most of his tales in New England.
“The Scream” (Nightmare #20, August 1974) finishes the series with our intrepid investigators, now accompanied by an attractive young woman, penetrating the Shoggoth’s underground empire and a tunnel that leads to the inside of the earth. There they encounter a living mummy, which is also a Shoggoth. They destroy the monster but lose their proof. The story ends with a plea to the reader to send money to finance their return expedition to the earth’s center. Hewetson leaves the series unfinished, but in a traditional way suggesting the possibility of more. That more never happened.
Conclusion
The two opening stories of this series seemed more like Science Fiction than Lovecraftian Horror but as the series progressed we saw the more traditional settings for Cthulhu Mythos tales, with diaries, caves under the ground, Antarctica, etc. Hewetson does pull in one of the unfinished elements of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1841) for which Lovecraft (like Jules Verne) was writing a sequel. It is suggested that Pym would have discovered an interior world at the end of the book. (Not Pellucidar, but something closer to Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1865). Hewetson gave us his version of that strange place.
All issues of Nightmare, Psycho and Scream can be found for free at Archive.org and Comic Book Plus.
