H.P. Lovecraft’s the Shadow Out of Time (Manga)

From the modern horror master Gou Tanabe, comes the manga adaptation of H.P Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time. First published in 1936 in the legendary pulp magazine Astounding Stories, this is the complete story in one volume with tip-in title page in metallic gold ink and eight pages in color!

Professor Peaslee of Miskatonic University has been acting very strange--could he be out of his mind? No...his mind is out of him!

Just because one lives in Arkham--just because one teaches there at Miskatonic University--it doesn’t mean one has any interest in the occult--in the abnormal. That was always the view of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a respectable professor of political economy. Until that one Thursday in 1908, when Professor Peaslee suddenly began to see in front of him not his students in their lecture hall, but strange shapes inhabiting a grotesque chamber. He collapsed unconscious, and when he awoke, he was strange...very strange.

Seemingly unable to recall his identity, the mind inside the body of Nathaniel Peaslee was oddly uninterested in the person he had been. The psychologists were baffled as he sought not to recover his old memory, but to obsessively study the world around him, travelling to distant lands, reading occult books, disturbing others with his odd perspectives on time and existence. He alienated and frightened people--his friends, his wife, even most of his children, except for his youngest son, who believed that one day Nathaniel Peaslee would come back.

And then, in 1913, Professor Peaslee did come back, with no memory of his strange sabbatical, but deeply disturbed by the dreams and visions it left him with. His search for the past five years gone missing from his life will lead Peaslee to other cases of lost identity resembling his...and eventually to an ancient city in the Australian desert--from where a long-vanished race still casts their shadow out of time.

Gou Tanabe was born in 1975 in Tokyo. As a child, he became a fan of yokai (supernatural creatures from Japanese tradition) when his father bought him Shigeru Mizuki’s classic manga GeGeGe no Kitaro, and by junior high he was already designing his own demons in sketchbooks. An encounter with the work of creature modeler Yasushi Nirasawa in Hobby Japan magazine started Tanabe’s interest in horror movies and the special effects behind them as well.

Tanabe began his professional manga career with a short stint working as an assistant, but made his solo debut in 2003 with Sunakichi, published in Comic Beam magazine; the story won the magazine’s New Faces Award, and Tanabe would soon become associated with Comic Beam, which began to regularly feature his Lovecraft manga staring in 2007 with an adaptation of the short story ＂The Outsider.＂

In addition to receiving nominations for three Eisner Awards and two Harvey Awards to date, Gou Tanabe has received critical acclaim in France, winning the prestigious Best Series award in 2020 at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, as well as in his native Japan with a Jury Selection Award at the 2018 Japan Media Arts Festival.