The better half has a habit of picking up graphic novels on Kickstarter to give me for Christmas and this tasty looking volume leapt out to be read first. It looks good, the artwork of Adam Fyda clearly the best aspect of the book; but it's simply not long enough to do more than scratch the surface of its subject matter, especially as it over-ambitiously tries to do two things rather than just one.

The word prominently missing from the title is because this isn't an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness', so famously not yet filmed by Guillermo del Toro; it's a sequel to it. Therefore, Fyda, the writer as well as the illustrator, obviously wanted just a little delineation from the original as he sends a new expedition to the Antarctic, in search of answers about the one that Lovecraft wrote about in his 1936 novella.

This serves as the second of the two things, the first being that, even though this is truly a sequel, it's also a kind of adaptation of the original, merely retelling the story of that expedition within a framing device, the leader of the new expedition reading about the old in records and a diary that has been mysteriously thrust into his hands before leaving shore. Now, each of those things could have done a lot better had the book been dedicated to them, but it's split in twain, so each suffers the consequences.

The positive side is that some readers who stumble on this graphic novel won't have read the 1936 novella, so may not know what it's about. Lovecraft sent Dr. William Dyer of Miskatonic University to Antarctica in 1930, where he and his colleagues discover geological anomalies, ancient ruins and a vast mountain range that turns out to be an impossibly old city, formerly populated by the Elder Things long before we emerged from the oceans. Of course, horrific things happen, the expedition turns into a disaster and Dyer makes it back to Arkham to warn the next expedition not to sail. And so maybe new readers unfamiliar with the original will pick up its story in flashback here so better understand the sequel.

The negative side is that, even if that's the case, it'll mostly highlight how the sequel is massively similar to the original. The new expedition, presumably the one that Dyer fails to stop last time, is sent out, under the leadership of Howard Pym, presumably a nod to the title character in the only novel Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote, 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym', which was a big influence on Lovecraft as he wrote 'At the Mountains of Madness'. It's now 1932 and Pym, rather inevitably, finds all the same things that Dyer found, even if the horrific things that happen may not quite be identical. The expedition turns into a disaster and Pym makes it back to... well, he doesn't strictly warn the Soviets not to mount an expedition in 1959 but you see the parallels.

Of course, it's very possible that Fyda structured his story this way precisely so that we could never miss those parallels. There's a deeper still parallel in that, for no apparent reason, both of these expeditions feature a sidekick called Danforth who survives but goes mad from what he saw. Are we supposed to assume that the graduate student in the original novella is the same character as the grizzled sailor here or that the name is just a knowing homage, a wink and a nod to readers who came in with foreknowledge?

The point is that it probably wasn't a very good decision to devote two halves of the book to telling what amounts to the same story with different characters. That's on Fyda. What's arguably not on him is the other fundamental problem the book has, which is that it's just too small for the setting. Antarctica is insanely large and it must have felt larger still back in 1930 when Lovecraft's original expedition got there because it was still largely unmapped territory. The mountains mentioned in the title are insanely large too, taller than the Himalayas. Yet this volume only measures ten and a half by six and a half inches. The art needed more.

Now, I do know that Fyda Kickstarted this book, because that's how the better half found it, and I see that the campaign did very well. It was aiming at £3,000 and raised £39,838. That suggests that they could have tried for a larger format, which would have been a real boon to this artwork. I own 'Dan Dare' and 'Trigan Empire' books that measure fourteen by ten inches in their Hawk editions, far more suitable for this sort of material.

After all, Fyda has said that what initially drew him to this story were the  "vast, empty spaces". He imagined "huge snow-covered mountains and a small plane, lost in this space". Just as he ditched a word for the title of this book, I assume he ditched the word "almost" from that quote, because we need to see the plane but only just. The larger the image, the smaller it's going to seem in relation to it. Talking of assuming, I assume that he originally aimed for this book to be seen in much larger form because the text is tiny and I couldn't make it out without my reading glasses.

And so, I think, this is a missed opportunity. Fyda's art is wonderful and well-suited to this story. It's just that the whole thing needed to be bigger. The format should have been bigger to serve the art and the story should have been bigger to give it substance. Instead, it serves as an introduction. ~~ Hal C F Astell