The Yellow Sign

Above, a work in progress sketch from my next comic book — an adaptation of Richard W. Chamber’s story, “The Yellow Sign.” I’ve really been struggling with how to adapt this story to comic book form… last night, after struggling with it for a couple of days, I finally got my written outline blocked out into pages in order to get the pacing right and to try to make the flow of the panels (hopefully) communicate the disintegration of hope and sanity being experienced by the characters. I’m a long way off from finished (a couple of different versions of this sketch is about as far as I have gotten on the actual artwork), but the part I struggle with most (translating the story into panels) is at least done in a rough state.

“The Yellow Sign” is a short story from Chamber’s collection, “The King in Yellow.” Lovecraft apparently loved “The King in Yellow” and it is easy to see that HPL got a number of his recurring horror themes from the book. Several of the stories in “The King in Yellow” make reference to a play (also called “The King in Yellow”) which deals with a mysterious masked ruler from an ancient city named Carcosa. If you watched season 1 of the “True Detective” TV show, you may have caught some references to it.

I hope to have this done so I can sell copies at Gencon 2019 in August. Assuming I manage to finish it, I will have produced a total of 4 horror comics at that point… Dagon, The People of the Pit, The Mother of Toads and this one. Eventually I hope to publish a compendium that will include all of my classic horror comics.