Lovecraft adaptation “The Color out of Space”: From a picture book to a stage event

Almost 100 years later, the Berlin comic artist Andreas Hartung has turned the horror story into a cross-media live performance, which will premiere on April 23rd at 7:30 p.m. at the Babylon cinema in Berlin.

“I always wanted to adapt this story because it fascinates me atmospherically and dramatically,” says Hartung. “Very is really very scary – and at the same time deeply human: this slow loss of life…” The artist, who was born in Berlin in 1976, worked on the five-part comic silent film project together with the underground music ensemble “The Dunwich Orchestra” for around ten years.

In between, Hartung and the musicians performed individual parts of it live, including at the International Comic Salon Erlangen. Now the entire work can be seen for the first time. And possibly for the last time for the time being: “We will only do it in this form once,” says the illustrator. “It’s all really, really expensive.”

In addition to his work as an illustrator and comic artist, Hartung has made a name for himself over the past 20 years as editor of the independent magazine “Epidermophytie” and as the initiator of several comic group projects. He has also written articles for the Tagesspiegel comic pages about the work of colleagues such as Mikael Ross and Lukas Jüliger.

At the center of “The Color out of Space” are 758 DIN A3 drawings that Andreas Hartung created with charcoal pencil and watercolors and reworked digitally. They visualize the gradual decay of nature as a result of extraterrestrial intervention. “The Dunwich Orchestra” contributes an atmospheric drone sound to this sequence of images, which according to the announcement can be classified as “Appalachian Doom Blues”.

The performance completely dispenses with text and dialogue: “The story is told solely through drawing, rhythm and sound,” says the announcement. “Slowness is not a stylistic device, but an attitude: in five chapters, the gradual change in nature is followed in detail and almost contemplatively.”

“It started as a picture book without words,” says Hartung, remembering the beginnings of the project. “Every page a picture.” When the first part was finished, he was very satisfied with the result. But he also realized that the end result would be a 300-page, wordless picture book for adults: “No publisher will publish that for you.”

He came up with the idea of ​​combining his pictures with music. At that time he had just met guitarist Daniel Tschernow, who had a passion for handmade, raw music. This led to a collaboration. Over time, bassist Bennet Gamrad, synthesizer sound designer Paul Bertin and drummer Johannes Hehemann joined and formed “The Dunwich Orchestra”.

“One of the defining characteristics of the project is its monumental economic senselessness,” says Hartung looking back. “We have been working for over ten years on something that no one has asked for and which is also extremely limited in its commercial exploitation.”

When asked why one does something like that, the artist answers: “For me, the starting point is almost always a euphoric tingling in my stomach and a tingling, gurgling feeling that it has to be done like that now because it should exist.”

In this respect, his adaptation of “The Color out of Space” is also a kind of alternative to works of art that are increasingly being created today with the help of artificial intelligence: “AI-created products in the creative field are about the shortest path to profitability,” says Hartung. “This is 100% economic rationality.”

At the end of the ten-year project, however, he is enjoying “this irrational madness that has produced something that no one needs, that no one can use, but that has nevertheless taken on a solid form and has value.” This is “like a defiant self-assurance.”