The Myth Of Maroto

I think I stumbled across this somewhat slender tome in Half-Price Books, but whenever and wherever it was I knew I was bringing it home with me on first sight. For starters I like countless others these days is seems am a Lovecraft fan. I first read "The Colour Out of Space" when I was a mere lad and "The Dunwich Horror" soon thereafter and both left their marks on my imagination. Soon I sought out more Lovecraft and rarely came away disappointed. 

Esteban Maroto too was a discovery of my youth, in the pages of Eerie magazine when his Dax stories were reprinted all together in a single volume. Stuff like that wasn't much done back then and having a saga like that drawn by a talent like that was immensely powerful. 

How this book came to be is a long and bumbling story of sorts. These three stories by Maroto presenting in pure comics form three of Lovecraft's seminal Cthul'hu myth stories were done in the late 70's but never published due to the financial collapse of the fellow who commissioned them. Their fate after that was like a homeless waif, but eventually Maroto got them back and put them together here. 

"The Nameless City" leads off and in it an explorer finds a city in the middle of the desert, but a city like none found by man before. He searches through its depths and discovers that mankind was not the only intelligent race to occupy the planet, and  that the other might still be slithering among us. 

"The Festival" tells of a man who is compelled to come to a remote village where his ancient people originate and along with others must perform a blasphemous ritual, one that threatens the world itself. 

"The Call of C'Thulhu" finishes the book and in this most famous of Lovecraft's stories we get an investigation of the mystery which an old scholar had discovered by chance and then by effort over many years. We  learn that certain people can feel old beings from beyond this world and that the barriers which hold those beings  back are weakening and they will eventually return to a world they dominated uncounted millennia before.  This is like a jigsaw puzzle and the reader like the narrator must work to assemble the pieces.

All of these are top notch Lovecraft yarns and under the magnificent hand of Esteban Maroto top notch comics as well.

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