Nightmare 11 - 'Where are the Inhabitants of Earth?' - An astronaut discovers the Necronomicon in space, and returns to Earth trying to make sense of the profane text, only to find it in ruins. Nightmare 9 - 'The Skull Forest of Old Earth' is the proper beginning of Skywald/Hewetson's use of the Mythos, as it marks the start of the 'Shoggoth Saga.' Long before the dawn of humanity, human-like colonists come from Uranus to settle the primeval Earth, but fall prey to the shoggoths - the shoggoths in this case being hairy, ape-like, cannibalistic humanoids prone to wanton rapine and destruction. Nightmare 7 - Lovecraft's famous couplet helps introduce the tale 'The Nameless City' (not a Lovecraft adaptation). Using these and the issues I own, I'm going to give an overview of the Lovecraftian material that Skywald published.

Lovecraft' in From the Tomb, and 'The Cthulhu Mythos: Skywald's Shoggoths and the Legacy of H. and the expensive but hefty Skywald! The Complete Illustrated History of the Horror-Mood, both of which contain lengthy and detailed articles by Peter Normanton - 'The Essential Horror: Skywald Comics and the Legacy of H. Now, even completionist comics nut that I am I don't own all of the Skywald Lovecraft-reference issues, but I do own many, and I also own two good reference works: From the Tomb #9 (2002) a high-quality British fanzine devoted to horror, pre-Code comics, etc. Skywald sort of straddled the middle ground between the mainstream horror comic magazines and the underground comix of the day, with plentiful female nudity and gruesome cannibal scenes, but no actual sex and in many cases more mature storylines. Not straight-up adaptations like Warren occasionally put out, but original stories with Lovecraftian names and elements, quotations, even the occasional article on the Old Gent. Skywald Publications was a black-and-white comics magazine publisher during the 1970s that specialized in horror comics, a competitor to Warren Publications (which had begun to decline with the departure of Archie Goodwin) which attempted a more literary mode of storytelling - and part of that in their publications Nightmare, Scream and Psycho under writer and editor Alan Hewetson was to include references to and elements of Lovecraft.

I was fairly critical of New Critical Essays on Lovecraft, but I was impressed with some of the scholarship, particularly the research on Lovecraft in the comics (yes, yes, I said the essays weren't complete, but they did do the work, so they get props for that) it was in fact where I first heard of Skywald and their Lovecraftian comics.

Skywald! by Alan Hewetson