Dorkin & Dyer Dredge Lovecraft For All-Ages Calla Cthulhu

All-ages books are always to be commended. They are one of the most valuable commodities for the comic book community because they bring in new readers, and help shape them into lifelong fans. They are the saviors of sequential reading through pictures! But making an all-ages book can be challenging, given the subject matter. Some subjects are more difficult than others to wrestle with if you are trying to write for a general audience.

Enter two veterans in the comics community who are more than qualified when it comes to taking the horrible and making it homogenized. But rather than falling back on time-honored go-to subjects like werewolves, ghosts, and vampires, they instead went into the heart of what their daughter liked in literature.

Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer wanted to write a Lovecraftian horror story for their daughter, as they saw a lack of such material on the book shelves. So off they went to dredge up the insanity of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and turned it into the Calla Cthulhu series for Dark Horse Comics.

When asked how they were able sanitize something as toxic as Lovecraft, Dyer offered “I don’t think it’s really a question of sanitizing it so much as just looking at it from a different point of view.”

“It’s an adventure,” Dorkin adds. “But even if you’re a Cthulhu purist, you’ll see that this is not like you can win. It’s not like Call of Cthulhu. You don’t bring a bunch of shotguns out in the game and just win. These people do have certain powers. This is a different playing field.”

An all-ages adventure? Yes. Something that could be made into a cartoon that follows on the heels of My Little Pony? Absolutely not. The main character, Calla, is raised in the Cthulhu family without any knowledge of her own connection.

Twists, turns, and horrific rollercoaster fun are in store for anyone who flips through Calla Cthulhu. Check out the above exclusive interview with Dorkin and Dyer, and look for Dark Horse’s collected edition of Calla Cthulhu TP (APR170060) at a comic shop near you!