When I was a kid, my father had thousands of comic books in his garage. I would go out there into the garage and grab a big stack. I would read all these comics from the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. Most of the eighties at this point were in his room (I'm an 80s kid!), not in his garage, but I digress.

What I really loved about reading those stories was this glimpse into this time where everything wasn't figured out. There was mystery, and some of my favorite stories were these horror comics that didn't have the best art and honestly didn't have the best stories. What they had was this charm of telling a story where they assume the reader is going to be a little bit more emotionally invested in the story. I feel like, in many ways today, we are cynical and nothing surprises us, and nothing is something that is completely unexplainable. We just nod our head and say, "Yeah, we've seen that before," but back then, those stories were shocking to the brain.

That was me as a kid, my brain was shocked. I was wowed. As an adult, my brain was still percolating on those stories, and I wanted more. But since there really isn't more — I instead started diving into the origins, which, before they inspired comic books, was written prose.

So I have read a lot of early 1920s to 1930s fiction because that turns out to be the origin of the fiction I loved as a kid. Those stories were the ancestors of the kind of cross-platform cinematic universes that we have today. Today, the concept of telling a story, whether it be in written word, graphic novel, movie, or whatever in somebody else's world is normal, blasé even. But back then, back when Weird Tales was created in 1923, it was unique. It was new. Authors prior to that might have been more protective of their worlds (obviously many are still protective today). But then you had HP Lovecraft writing letters to other authors who were being published in this weird little magazine called Weird Tales. Weird Tales ran from 1923 to 1940 and was doing this kind of cross-pollinating of science fiction, horror, and speculative fiction stories.

The unique aspect of this magazine, for its time, was the way that occasionally authors would reference stories written by other authors. Part of that was due to their editor, Farnsworth Wright, who ran the magazine for almost the entirety of the run. He put these three authors together, curating the magazine like he was an early Feige.

Still, while he was important, I don't think this would have worked without H.P. Lovecraft. The thing about Lovecraft is that he was obsessed with writing letters. He is perhaps more known for the letters he wrote to other authors and people in general than he was for his own stories.

Which isn't to say his writing wasn't influential. For starters, we have Cthulhu: a hugely successful... I'm not sure what to call him. I don't know if you'd want to call him a franchise, but he might as well be a franchise. Not in the sense that some mega-corporation is making money off Cthulhu, but because lots of creators are making a lot of money off of Cthulhu, which is part of what makes him such an amazing contribution to the community.

Beyond what they call the Cthulhu mythos, he also contributed generally the idea of the Great Old Ones. You can see these immense beings in fiction like the kind of being that was in the first Hellboy movie, the creature in Stephen King's IT, the creature in Cloverfield, etc.

The other thing Lovecraft introduced heavily in his writings is his idea of cosmic indifference. The idea that these vast entities simply don't care whether we exist and that we are to them what ants are to us. We're aware of ants, sometimes we don't like ants, sometimes we kill ants, but we don't care about them. (I'm lying a little bit here because I absolutely love ants!) Being no more than ants to powerful vast entities is something somewhat unique compared to so much literature where vast powerful creatures are inordinately obsessed with individuals. That level of unimportance can be deeply unsettling horror for a species that throughout history tends to assume that we are the center of the universe.

The next writer in the trio is Robert Howard — another prolific writer, this one from Texas. He was the one who created Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane. To the Weird Tales multiverse more specifically, he contributed Serpent Men, the Hyborian Age, and, while I don't think he was the first, this alternative historical fiction kind of concept.

In this case, what I mean by alternative historical fiction is imagine if a previous civilization had reached the point of our technology but then that had been wiped out by disasters (or crumbling from within) — leaving humans barely surviving, but then building a new civilization on top, over and over again. That's what I think Howard really contributed, and I think it's a very cool idea.

And then we have Ashton Smith; he's probably the least well known of the three, which is not to say he didn't contribute. He definitely did. I just think most people don't really know Zothique and Hyperborea. He would pull and contribute ideas with the rest of the Weird Tales multiverse, same as Howard, perhaps more so, but Smith hasn't achieved the level of success posthumously as the other two. Having said that, one of my favorite Great Old Ones is Tsathoggua, and that's a Smith creation — there is just something about that big sleepy bat-toad thing that I really like. If you were a fan of the D&D Dark Sun campaign, then you're already familiar with the concept of Zothique, a dying Earth under a red sun (courtesy of The Dying Earth by Vance when came after Zothique).

Combined, they all contributed to this sort of Weird Tales multiverse. I mentioned Tsathoggua, a "Lovecraft" creature created by Clark Ashton Smith. Howard invented von Junzt and his Nameless Cults, which Lovecraft started referencing as if it were a real book and not just the invention of another Weird Tales author. The multiverse expanded beyond the initial three; heck, Robert Bloch (writer of Psycho, yes, that Psycho!) killed off a very thinly disguised Lovecraft in "The Shambler from the Stars" (with Lovecraft's permission). Lovecraft promptly returned the favor by killing off Robert Harrison Blake in "The Haunter of the Dark."

I kind of come back to these authors every few years, and I find that when I read it again, I discover new things I didn't appreciate during my earlier readings of the works. I recently went through every single Conan story again, in order, and I was really wowed. As I read, I kept getting excited and getting all these ideas about what I wanted to do. That reading actually prompted me to start writing again rather than focusing on my more visual artwork efforts.

I'm currently going back through Lovecraft, and finding all of the things that I missed, all of the things that I kind of glossed over when I was younger. Before, while I really felt like Lovecraft was an author who contributed a lot of really cool ideas, I had dismissed his writing as being non-specific or leaving a lot of holes. I used to feel like there wasn't enough specificity in his world building as a sort of lazy hand-waving due to how short many of his stories were (being that they were printed in a magazine). But actually, he does some intense deep world building. Read The Mountains of Madness. That book tells this massive story with honestly highly detailed world building.

To be more specific, inside the meta-story of The Mountains of Madness, you have this story about a pre-human species he calls the Elder Things. The Elder Things built their civilization on Earth first, long before humanity. Lovecraft describes how there is this epic war where Cthulhu and his star-spawn invade. The star-spawn invade our planet and they nearly drive the Elder Things to extinction. The Elder Things are driven back into the ocean... before advancing back to land a second time. They rebuild their civilization, building advanced technology including some sort of genetic engineering, because they construct a slave race, the shoggoths. This slave race rises up and helps destroy their civilization a second time. As you read this story, it feels like at any time he'll hand wave an ending, but no, he keeps going with so much detail and so much world building that there really is an immense world we could discern just about the Elder Things. By the end of the story, all I am thinking is, "What happened to the other four Elder Things? They're awake; they survived!" Well, possibly. Where are they?

What I love about the Weird Tales multiverse is that they don't solve everything. A lot of times the stories just kind of end. It's like the author decided that they told the story they wanted, and there is no reason to wrap it up with a tight little bow. They just end it, perhaps with a pun or someone gibbering in madness, but they end. And that's something that I think authors today struggle with. They feel the need to give more information, epilogues explaining what happened after, perhaps a cliffhanger building up for the following story. But maybe the world could use a little bit more mystery, just a little bit more wonder, and a bit less neat of an ending.

What we don't need to bring back is the constant, ever-present racism. That's what makes it hard to dig through these works. If you decide to dive into any of these writings, it's there. You have to kind of intentionally disregard it to get through, if you're bothered by things like that. And I am bothered by things like that, but I just think it's worth it to see the origins of so much that we take for granted today.

When I think back to that young kid with few friends who would spend literally all day reading comics and stories written decades before he was born, I'm thankful for the influence that garage full of comics had on me. I'm sad that a monsoon season destroyed most of them so I don't have anything left of them or him (my father) except memories, and part of me will always yearn for that sense of wonder I've replaced with modern cynicism more than I'd like to admit. My hope is that people look at the artwork I use on this site and get at least a bit of that wonder and curiosity I had as a kid.