Cullzathro Fhtagn! Magnifying the Carnivalesque in Lovecraft through the Comic Book Series Vinegar Teeth

ACADEMIA Letters Cullzathro Fhtagn! Magnifying the Carnivalesque in Lovecraft through the Comic Book Series Vinegar Teeth Nicholas Diak Vinegar Teeth is a four-issue comic book series that mixes the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft with the comedy of a buddy cop film. The story sees Vinegar Teeth, a “giant scrotum”1 looking tentacled alien becoming a cop and partnering with the drunk, down on his luck, Detective Buckle, as they thwart both criminals and an alien invasion. The world of Vinegar Teeth is grotesque and madcap: it juggles scenes of splatstick gore with the police procedural. It is a perfect example of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque. This essay will explore Vinegar Teeth’s flirtation with the carnivalesque and how it makes overt these elements found in the works of Lovecraft. First this essay will explain what Bakhtin’s carnivalesque is via Robert Stam’s Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Next it will leverage Timothy Jones’ The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture who appropriates Bakhtin’s carnivalesque as a reading mode to consume American Gothic horror literature. Finally this essay will detail how Vinegar Teeth manifests the carnivalesque elements found in Lovecraft as posited by Jones while bringing it back to the original Bakhtin definition. What is the Carnivalesque? The carnivalesque is a literary mode that was developed by Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963) and Rabelais and His World (1965).2 It draws inspiration from various 1 Troy Nixey and Damon Gentry, Vinegar Teeth (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2018), part four. Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 85. 2 Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Nicholas Diak, [email protected] Citation: Diak, N. (2021). Cullzathro Fhtagn! Magnifying the Carnivalesque in Lovecraft through the Comic Book Series Vinegar Teeth. Academia Letters, Article 948. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL948. 1 forms of “the carnival” such as “pre-Lenten revelry whose origins can be traced back to the Dionysian festivities of the Greeks and the Saturnalia of the Romans”3 to post-Revolution carnivals that Bakhtin would have witnessed4 to the carnivals practiced in Latin American.5 For Bakhtin, “the carnivalesque principle abolishes hierarchies, levels social classes, and creates another life free from conventions; rules and restrictions.”6 It is within the carnival that “all hierarchical distinctions, all barriers, all norms and prohibitions are temporarily suspended.”7 It is an escape from the normal and the everyday as roles become reversed, excess (especially with food and drink) is encouraged along with the use of vulgar language and grotesque acts. The carnivalesque is “more than a party or a festival; it is the oppositional culture of the oppressed” and “it offers a view of the official world as seen from below – not the mere disruption of etiquette but as a symbolic, anticipatory overthrow of oppressive social structures.”8 The end result is that the carnivalesque becomes a versatile literary tool, a method to entertain via the festive elements of the carnival while using its temporary rejection of borders and norms as a means to critique and parody. The Carnivalesque in Lovecraft and American Gothic Timothy Jones appropriates Bakhtin’s carnivalesque to explain the appeal of reading American Gothic texts, which includes weird authors such as Lovecraft. For Jones, American Gothic horror are “marketed and consumed as thrilling entertainments rather than as discursive venues” and more concerned with “immediate thrills over reflective, interpretive labour.”9 For Jones, American Gothic’s primary function is to entertain the reader while providing a “darkly-hued escape from [the] real.”10 Jones identifies that original Gothic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe, incorporated the carnivalesque in their works, which was later taken up by successor authors such as Lovecraft.11 He lists a few examples within Lovecraft’s work: the dark comedy and pleasing aes3 Ibid., 86. Ibid., 90. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 86. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 95. 9 Timothy Jones, The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture (Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2015), 4. 10 Ibid., 36. 11 Ibid., 72. 4 Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Nicholas Diak, [email protected] Citation: Diak, N. (2021). Cullzathro Fhtagn! Magnifying the Carnivalesque in Lovecraft through the Comic Book Series Vinegar Teeth. Academia Letters, Article 948. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL948. 2 thetics of Herbert West’s “artistry” in “Herbert West: Reanimator,”12 and the grave robbing and eerie lighting that set the atmosphere in “The Hound.” Lovecraft’s cosmic horror invites readers to escape from the everyday and accomplishes this with his bestiary of unseen horrors. Jones draws attention to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos that spreads through many of his stories as a “sham demonology”13 that: Lovecraft himself referred to […] with his tongue in his cheek, as ‘Cthulhuism’ and ‘Yog-Sothothery’. A topsy-turvy distortion of religion and worship. What these deities and practices represent hardly signifies; their import lies in their potential to facilitate a kind of escape from the real.14 However, by Jones’ own admission, his text “breaks with the Bakhtinian version of the carnival in some respects.”15 He sees Bakhtin’s carnival described as a “moment of genuine topsy-turvy and even lawlessness” while in reality it is more of a “limited period of altered behaviors rather than a genuinely chaotic eruption.”16 Jones breaks with Bakhtin in another aspect: the elements of the carnivalesque he identifies in Lovecraft seem rather subdued compared to what the carnival is capable of. There are more carnivalesque elements in Lovecraft, and Vinegar Teeth not only unearths them but is able to tie them to both the entertainment value of the carnival as posited by Jones, and back to the true revelrous escape from the real as illustrated by Bakhtin. Manifesting Lovecraft’s Carnivalesque in Vinegar Teeth Turning to Vinegar Teeth, grotesque splatstick occurs at various moments in the series, with a notorious instance in issue one when an insane Cullzathro cultist eviscerates an apprehended smuggler in Buckle’s patrol car. Buckle attempts to call the incident in on his car’s radio only to realize that the microphone he is trying to speak into is a wad of entrails. Many of the carnivalesque elements found in Vinegar Teeth, however, are present in Lovecraft’s cosmic horror. Vinegar Teeth simply calls greater attention to them. For example, overconsumption of food and alcohol are encouraged (Stam points out “omnipresent feasting”17 in Bakhtin’s carnival) due to the celebratory nature of the carnival and 12 Ibid., 78-9. Ibid., 72. 14 Ibid., 76. 15 Ibid., 4-5. 16 Ibid., 5. 17 Stam, 93. 13 Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Nicholas Diak, [email protected] Citation: Diak, N. (2021). Cullzathro Fhtagn! Magnifying the Carnivalesque in Lovecraft through the Comic Book Series Vinegar Teeth. Academia Letters, Article 948. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL948. 3 the abolishment of norms that would condemn the practice. Vinegar Teeth takes excessive eating and drinking to the furthest limit it can push. For eating, Vinegar Teeth himself is a cannibal as he devours lawbreakers throughout the series, from French-Canadian smugglers to cultists. His consumption of criminals is not frowned upon by his fellow police officers; in fact, with the accolades and promotions he receives, the practice is basically encouraged. It is only in issue three after eating the cultists that Vinegar Teeth concludes that he should not be devouring the criminal element and thus he seeks out Buckle for advice to combat this. Buckle drunkenly states that Vinegar Teeth “isn’t a bad egg”18 and later outfits the alien with a helmet to curb his eating. While Vinegar Teeth embodies the ultimate act of feasting, Buckle too engages in the practice. At the beginning of issue four, in an act of recursive regurgitation, Buckle vomits out Vinegar Teeth who in turn vomits out the Mayor of Brick City and her assistant, who each vomit out the alien parasites they consumed when they drank the contaminated water. These acts of wanton eating (and vomiting) present in Vinegar Teeth exaggerate the carnivalesque consumption practices found in Lovecraft’s work: the cats that eat the old cotter and his wife in “The Cats of Ulthar,” Wilbur Whateley’s monstrous brother being fed cattle in “The Dunwich Horror,” and the reanimated boxer eating the missing girl in “Herbert West: Reanimator.” These are not simply acts of everyday eating, which Lovecraft has shown such as describing Robert Olmstead’s lunch in The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936), but instead extreme acts of overconsumption as found in the carnival. In regards to drinking, Buckle personifies excessive alcohol consumption: in issue one he drinks from his hip flash and falls asleep while waiting for the French-Canadian smugglers; issue two shows Buckle taking a bath while drinking a beer and later on visiting a bar; issue three sees Buckle completely inebriated, complete with red puffy eyes and soiled undergarments, sharing “the good stuff”19 with Vinegar Teeth. Buckle’s alcoholism is encouraged by the story, much in the same vein as the cult film Cabin Fever (2002, Eli Roth). Buckle drinking bottled booze prevents him from drinking the contaminated city water and thus from going insane. As with overeating, the carnivalesque acts of drinking are also found in Lovecraft: Randolph Carter gets the priest Atal drunk on moon-wine in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943), Thurber consumes alcohol while recounting his encounter with Pickman in “Pickman’s Model,” and Zadok Allen, the town drunk of Innsmouth, imparts Robert Olmstead with much backstory in The Shadow over Innsmouth after being offered alcohol. Finally, Vinegar Teeth taps into the subverting of authority that is one of the core compo18 19 Nixey and Gentry, part three. Ibid. Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Nicholas Diak, [email protected] Citation: Diak, N. (2021). Cullzathro Fhtagn! Magnifying the Carnivalesque in Lovecraft through the Comic Book Series Vinegar Teeth. Academia Letters, Article 948. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL948. 4 nents of the carnivalesque. By virtue of being a buddy cop story, Vinegar Teeth pokes fun at authority, which has been taken to the extreme, due to Vinegar Teeth being what should be the most incompatible police partner: a tentacled alien. Despite having little police training (provided by the hot-headed, adversarial Buckle), Vinegar Teeth is able to rapidly raise through the ranks of the police department. Lovecraft subverts authority in his works, though not as extreme as in Vinegar Teeth. In Lovecraft’s stories, the police are ineffectual because they are unable to solve the mysteries they happen across. Despite consulting many experts, Inspector Legrasse is unable to solve the mystery of the Cthulhu idol in “The Call of Cthulhu.” The police are unable to stop the disappearances of children in both “The Horror at Red Hook” and “The Dreams in the Witch House.” Conclusion Lovecraft’s work contains elements of the carnivalesque including sequences of eating, drinking, and subverting authority. Jones identifies these elements of Lovecraft’s work and underscores their entertainment factor and escape from reality. Vinegar Teeth is derivative of Lovecraft’s work, though in a parodic sense by transmuting Lovecraft’s cosmic horror into a buddy cop comedy. In the process, Vinegar Teeth spotlights Lovecraft’s carnival elements and not only reinforces Jones’ stance that they are entertaining, but also harken back to the original Bakhtinian usage of subverting authority and not being bound by traditional norms and borders. Bibliography Jones, Timothy. The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2015. Lovecraft, H. P. “The Call of Cthulhu.” In The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, 123-157. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014. —–. “The Cats of Ulthar.” In H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction, 88-90. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2008. —–. “The Colour Out of Space.” In The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, 310-342. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014. Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Nicholas Diak, [email protected] Citation: Diak, N. (2021). Cullzathro Fhtagn! Magnifying the Carnivalesque in Lovecraft through the Comic Book Series Vinegar Teeth. Academia Letters, Article 948. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL948. 5 —–. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. In H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction, 409489. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2008. —–. “The Dreams in the Witch House.” In The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, 643-680. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014. —–. “The Dunwich Horror.” In The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, 343-387. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014. —–. “Herbert West: Reanimator.” In The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, 45-79. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014. —–. “The Horror at Red Hook.” In H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction, 314-331. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2008. —–. “Pickman’s Model.” In H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction, 380-390. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2008. Nixey, Troy and Damon Gentry. Vinegar Teeth. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2018. Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Nicholas Diak, [email protected] Citation: Diak, N. (2021). Cullzathro Fhtagn! Magnifying the Carnivalesque in Lovecraft through the Comic Book Series Vinegar Teeth. Academia Letters, Article 948. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL948. 6