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No. 18: The Gill with the Dagon Tattoo

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The Gill with the Dagon Tattoo

First | Previous | 2015-05-27 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/pomh/?comic=18

Strip by: Ian Boreham


{A book cover shows a picture of a skinny girl, somewhat like Lisbeth Salander, but with more of the "Innsmouth look", who is looking back over her shoulder, which sports a tattoo of a humanoid fish monster (Dagon). Her skin is a pale bluish-green colour, and she has gill-slits showing on her neck. She has various piercings on her face; all fishhooks. A series of spines begins among her unruly hair and continues down her back. She clutches at herself with webbed, clawed hands. There is a bookshelf beyond her.}

book title: The Gill with the Dagon Tattoo
book author: H.P Larscraft

titles on spines of books shown in bookshelf: "The Gill who Played with Hellfire", "The Gill who Played with the Shoggoth's Nest", "Lonely Planet: R'lyeh", "Män som hatar fiskkvinnor", "Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)", "A Brief History of Time", "Necronomicon", "Non-Euclidean Geometry", "Chariots of the Gods", "Tattoos", "Magick", "The Illuminati", "The Hardy Boys", "Sunny Innsmouth", "Miskatonic...", "Your Inner Deep One", "The Marsh Clan".

The author writes:

I could have gone for an easy joke and called her "Lisbeth Salamander", but that would have annoyed my fishpeople friends. Occultogenetically speaking, salamanderpeople and apepeople like us are more closely related to each other than either of us are to what we call fishpeople. And to a true cladist, we are all fishpeople anyway.

So, why did the fishpeople start coming onto land at Innsmouth anyway? One theory suggests that there was a Malchthulhsian catastrophe (named after Rev Thomas Malchthulhs, a Deep One economic thinker who proposed that with strange aeons, population growth would be exponential, and food production would be linear, causing population checks in which gibbering madness would spread, ancient cities would rise from the depths, and dead Chthulhu would stop dreaming and get on with the business of generally destroying things) at Y'ha-nthlei.

Personally, I suspect it was more likely to have been started by a Deep One frat party that got out of hand.

Drawn in Krita with text added in Inkscape.