sex and Cthulhu? Yawn!

I saw recently there is a new Lovecraftian comic book coming out, but it was immediately clear from the preview art that this is one of those stories that feel the need to add sex to the mix - some of the covers for the comic are positively pornographic! (interested parties can look for The Girl Who Was Cthulhu in their local comic shop - you may need to wear dark sunglasses when doing so)

I suppose it's no longer a 'recent' trend to do this with HPL or his concepts - writers have been dragging the Elder Gods down into the world of earthy/Earthly sexuality since the days of New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. This new comic though seems to tie into a more recent theory in some quarters, that because of the apparent absence of sex from HPL's tales, this is really a sign that not only is sex present in sublimated form somewhere in the tales but that in fact the tales are therefore really all about sex.

With literary theory you can of course 'prove' anything - the 'death of the author' and the embracing of reader interpretation allows for that. Still, I have to wonder about the mental gymnastics involved in stating with confidence that sex is constantly present despite its actual absence. The sex and gender-swapping of 'The Thing on the Doorstep' for example would easily lend itself to a deeper discussion of sexuality (and indeed Alan Moore, in his Lovecraftian comic series Providence, broaches that and much else) - and the reader quite naturally wonders about it. But HPL did not - he could have very easily have put that in but chose not to, if he was even aware of that side of things.

It's not as if there is a dearth of subject matter when one 'extracts' sex from the stories, or from interpretation. Haven't people enough to be getting on with without wanting to see sexual metaphors in every slithering monstrosity that lurks in HPL's fiction?

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