Hello. It's been a while, hasn't it? There was that whole Covid thing for a couple of years, and other stuff. I've been busy on other writing projects - mainly tabletop roleplaying game adventures and the 80s incarnation of the 7TV miniatures game - so I've had little to no bandwidth left for sharing whimsical musings, savage comic reviews or the like here. My apologies.
I've pinned a lot of my self-esteem to 'getting shit written and published', but my work has largely disappeared into Development Hell - for reasons beyond my control - these last 3 or 4 years, so I'm at a bit of a low ebb. It's hard to keep writing and designing and creating stuff when it's all gathering digital dust at various publishing houses.
Aaaaaanyway, I've decided to break my duck with a pretty diagram that I created yesterday (instead of doing my Real Job), for all the film/book/comic/sci-fi/horror/infographic nerds. It can't just be me, can it?
I was inspired by a recent post on the excellent Nightmare Man group on Facebook, wherein top contributor Tristan Sargent wrote another of his articles linking the various versions of the movie The Thing to its book origin (John W Campbell's Who Goes There?) to H P Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness (written two years before Campbell's story) and several Doctor Who stories involving Ice Warriors and Krynoids.
In the post's comments thread I joked about drawing a diagram to link all the inspirations and connections together, like one of those Rock Family Trees they used to do on BBC. Coz you know how much I like doing those sorts of things. Like I did with Alan Moore's Providence comic, and the plot of Robert Altman's Short Cuts.
So I scribbled some notes down, fired up Visio and knocked up an infographic that tracks some of the influences, forerunners, coincidences, homages, rip-offs and sequels of Howard Hawks' 1951 sci-fi classic.
I've used a colour-coded key of my own devising to track some of the common tropes like Polar Setting, Human Assimilation and Suspended Animation. Hence the term tropogram, which I have just invented.
By no means accurate or compete, I hope it's of some interest. I enjoyed putting it together.
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