#cthuloid

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Justin C Key's "The World Wasn't Ready For You"

On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. That night, I'll be in person at LA's Book Soup for the launch of Justin C Key's "The World Wasn’t Ready for You." On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

The World Wasn't Ready For You is Justin C Key's first book. It's a short story collection, from a major publisher. This is basically unheard of. Big publishers rarely publish collections, and when they do, it's almost always after a string of extremely successful novels:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-world-wasnt-ready-for-you-justin-c-key?variant=41016598036514

Yes, there are exceptions. Ted Chiang. Kelly Link.

And now, Justin C Key. To be in such company is, as they say, a big fucking deal.

I can't say I'm surprised. Key was my student at the Clarion West writing workshop – a year full of standout writers among whom Key was still a standout. I was immensely impressed with his work then, and when I found out that he was also an MD and a father, a young man juggling an unimaginably intense work and family schedule and still producing this polished, scary, precise work, I knew he could have great things ahead of him.

But to be honest, I wasn't sure he would write. Key was so obviously brilliant and competent, and had such an important dayjob, that I could easily have imagined him deciding that making up stories was fun, but that it was not nearly so rewarding as his other vocations.

I was wrong – and right. In the years since Clarion, Key's work has acquired a kind of medical precision. When Key stabs you, the knife slides right between your ribs and goes straight into the big arteries of your heart, slicing you so quickly that you hardly notice until you are slain.

These are all horror stories, though some of them are science fiction too, and more to the point, they'r Black horror stories. In his afterword, Key writes about his early fascination with horror, the catharsis he felt in watching nightmares unspool on screen or off the page. And then, he writes, came the dawning recognition that the Black characters in these stories were always there as cannon-fodder, often nameless, usually picked off early.

These stories represent Key's long rumination on the conjunction of Blackness and horror. Of course, that gets back to racism, in the way that, say, Jordan Peele's work does, or in the manner of NK Jemisin's post-Lovecraft Cthuloid tales:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/09/the-old-crow-is-getting-slow/#i-love-ny

But "Black horror" isn't merely parables about racism. In the deft hands of these writers – and now, Key – the stories are horror in which Blackness is a fact, sometimes a central one, and that fact is ever a complication, limiting how the characters move through space, interact with authority, and relate to one another.

The eight stories – mostly long – in The World Wasn't Ready For You deal with parenting, health, prison, corruption, and art – and they do so through hauntings and body horror and tension wound so tight you want to scream.

This is a brilliant and auspicious beginning from a brilliant and auspicious writer.

Key's book launches at LA's Book Soup on September 22, and I'll be there with him as interlocutor. I couldn't be more honored by this, and I hope you'll come out and see us:

https://www.booksoup.com/event/justin-c-key

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/19/justin-c-key/#clarion-west-2015

[loiterer87]

So I had a go at some more fully digital art. Still not convinced it's my thing, but again, any experimentation is worth exploring. Started trying to do something more in my normal style ended up turning it into an animation style reminiscent of the old 90's Spider-man cartoon. Kinda pleased with the shading, the background... not so much.

Anyway, Astonishing Spider-Man vs. the weird Cthuloid Doc Ock, I created! Because why not?

[monsters-conquer-the-world]

Separating the Art from the Ectoplasm

The Ghostbusters are called in to deal with one of the most famous and thematically-appropriate ghosts: the restless spirit of the massively influential innovator of literary horror, H.P. Lovecraft.

EXT. THE QUAD, MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY - NIGHT

The gaseous, glowing ghost of H.P. LOVECRAFT looms over all four Ghostbusters, stretching and twisting to impossible proportions, tentacles and antennae slithering out of him like growing shadows. A dry, howling, unnatural wind swirls through the Quad.

LOVECRAFT: CHATTERING INTERBREEDERS! FOUL, GUFFAWING APES! I WILL CLEANSE--

VENKMAN: Yeesh, who knew Poe was such a dick?

Ray stifles a chuckle and Venkman gives him a wink. All four Ghostbusters know this tactic and fan out accordingly. The four goofballs cut a surprisingly heroic silhouette as they calmly and carefully strafe the ghost. They box in the undead author with short, controlled bursts of their particle beams. "Controlled" is being generous, they're just barely not burning down the Dining Hall, but they are doing their best with crazy firehose-lasers.

LOVECRAFT: POE?! THAT MEWLING QUIM?! THAT DREARY, INSIPID, BIG-HEADED LITTLE--

RAY: What?

LOVECRAFT: I AH.. What?

RAY: I can barely follow what you're saying. Why do you talk like this?

VENKMAN: Well he's, olde tymey, right?

LOVECRAFT: INDEED, FOOLISH, THOUGHTLESS BLATHERERS! I AM FROM AEONS BEFORE. ANCIENT, FORGOTTEN AEONS MOLDERING BEYOND THE VEIL THAT--

Winston, with his cigarette bouncing in his mouth, starts laughing upROARIOUSLY AT Lovecraft. It is obviously fake and sarcastic and over the top and that just makes it funnier and more awesome. He does start genuinely cracking himself up. Lovecraft huffily stops vamping.

LOVECRAFT: WHAT'S SO FUCKING FUNNY?

WINSTON: Ancient aeons? You died in 1937!

LOVECRAFT: SO?

WINSTON: Nobody talked like that in the 1920s, ya weird dork!

VENKMAN: Yikes, nerd alert!

LOVECRAFT: FUCK YOU GUYS!

Lovecraft freaks out and launches an all-out attack focused on Winston and Venkman. They brace themselves as reality itself warps around them. Shadows and the ground itself twist and undulate, transforming into gnarled claws and chittering, grasping shadow creatures. They do their best to stay cool and stay breathing. Egon throws Lovecraft off-balance by hosing him down with a few hundred gallons of positively-charged slime.

LOVECRAFT: WHAT THE HELLARRGHGLGLGHRLHRLGBLKJARLBR--

Egon hammers one last slime-bomb right down Lovecraft's gasping ghost gullet. RAY does a "cha-ching" gesture to the sky before just BARELY blasting a slavering CTHULOID away from VENKMAN.

RAY: I knew this batch of slime would respond well to Judas Priest!

Lovecraft spins his now-massive, spectral form and stretches into the sky above. Egon and Ray begin to have their minds bombarded with psychedelic, eldritch perceptions of reality. Venkman and Winston's version of reality is even further along into madness, once-normal buildings now shimmering and fracturing off at impossible angles.

EGON: Whoa.

Winston coughs and struggles against the oozing, skittering masses of tentacles and centipedes climbing his body. Venkman is even further along, already up to his knees in eldritch muck, blasting Lovecraft. Winston gathers his breath.

WINSTON (hoarse and having his consciousness slowly splinter into different dimensions): I can't believe... I'm gonna get killed by... the poor man's... Robert E. Howard...

LOVECRAFT: ARARRRHALKAHALRHALR

VENKMAN (up to his shoulders in black slime, eyeballs, and teeth, chuckles anyway): N-Nerd alert.

From out of the warping, swirling dimensions of madness now inhabiting the Quad of Miskatonic University come two arcing jets of positronic energy. With Winston and Venkman unable to buy them any more time, Ray and Egon stumble through churning waves of earth and cobblestone to finally flank the core of the snarling deceased author.

RAY (not breaking eye-contact or beam contact with Lovecraft): This is 6, Z!

Winston does his best to flex his tentacle into an appreciative thumbs up. Ray grows a third eye in response.

LOVECRAFT (snarling and writhing as he is trying to break free of Egon and Ray's confinement streams): FINE, I'LL ASK, 6 WHAT?

EGON: It's the 6th time we've caught a ghost--

RAY: --because Winston minored in Literature!

LOVECRAFT: WAIT WHAT

Ray stomps the foot pedal on the ghost trap, sucking Lovecraft down in a cone of brilliant white light and crackling muons. With the ghost safely locked away in the trap, all four Ghostbusters are able to perceive normal reality once again--buildings, the earth, reality itself all snap back into shape. A shape that does also now include a lot of ghost AND Ghostbuster-induced structural damage to the immediate area. Said damage includes the ashen, neutralized ectoplasmic cocoons almost completely encasing the still-delirious and recovering Winston and Venkman.

WINSTON: I even like a lot of the stuff he wrote... but he was just such an... absolute turd of a man.

VENKMAN: Agreed. Also, was he seriously talking shit about Edgar Allen Poe?

WINSTON: Like he sucks... and he has bad taste?

VENKMAN (pouting exaggeratedly): Yeah, yuck, tough night!! Tough night, Egon! EGON!?

RAY (chiseling Winston out of the hardened eldritch and collecting flakes of it in a vial): Yeah, even as a casual fan this was (sighs) incredibly disappointing. Maybe it was something else that just took his form? Hopefully we can learn more from these samples...

VENKMAN: EGOOOOONN!!

EGON (hollering from over by the car, placing a call on a cell phone he invented): I am putting in an order with Golden Wall right now!

VENKMAN, WINSTON, RAY (in unison and excitedly but also haggard and weakly): Yay.

EGON: AND I AM MAKING IT A DOUBLE ORDER!

VENKMAN, WINSTON, RAY (in unison and excitedly but not quite as haggard and weakly): Yaay! (The down-to-the-nub cigarette finally falls out of Winston's mouth)

RAY (under his breath): And beers.

VENKMAN: AND BEERS, EGON!!

Long shot of Egon on the phone. He thoughtfully considers the loopy hollering of his colleagues.

EGON: Peter, I do not think they have beers. Yes this is for pick-up.

Roll credits

[banemcdeath-blog]

Today, I shall reveal a darker thought that maybe coffee is the cause of or maybe I have been touched by insanity.

Just a recap:

I believe this dark evil Yahwehova god is nasty indeed. Jesus Christ is a dark sorcerer traversing many dimensions to entrap, imprison, and enslave mankind destroying his willpower, his freedom, knowledge of truth, and perverting the Justice and true nature of all creation. While he is away, his sorcerous twin clone the Holy Spirit is manifested as a force to ensure it entraps and lures more souls into slavery. The force known as Satan/Lucifer is but another tool of the dark god Yahweh/Jehova (yahwehova). As GOD enjoyed the smell of burnt flesh sacrifice offering in the OT, it surely will love the smell and taste of an eternal hell bbq of millions (or billion upon trillions of parallel multidimensional onmniversal realities exist).

We “sin” or don’t appease “GOD” and it devours our essence forever in hell. We become slaves as its sorcerous avatar Jesus Christ buys our wages of sin. As slaves we are locked away in this huge cube Heaven it is creating made of gold and gems and sounds like a huge living machine perhaps manufactured by the mega robot-archangel METATRON. Designing the tesseract hypercube Heaven is GOD’s last creation sone say and will house all the host of Heaven. Likely, more war machines to conquer not just this world but all worlds, galaxies, and universes.

Mankind may be the last stand against this tyrannical megalomaniac narcissistic dark evil god. And mankind is losing as the candle is burnt from both ends of this “sin” vs “surrender” paradox.

Can the entire host of undead angels (for they do not live as we nor are they dead) and creatures this god controls as well as the demons and devils it has at its disposal from the fires of hell (separate from its lake of eternal bbq fire) be defeated?

Maybe…. It only takes one insane hobo to thwart this cosmic plan. Maybe the omniverse needs to be destroyed. The “Holy Trinity” and its dark secular spirit empire must be destroyed. The religious fools caught the attention of these cthuloid entities and they plan to feed upon mankind and destroy our world.

Man should submit to no one. We strive to be ever free of any shackle including ones by other men.

(Quoted notations revealed through songs)

“ We are free as the wind

We have fought, we have sinned

In glory and pain

Our stand will remain

Mighty swords are held high

Hear the roaring from the sky

Heaven's turning red

By the blood of the dead

Fighting on the battlefield in search for the Golden Land

Riding side by side for freedom, the brotherhood of men

We are sending out a warning to every warrior in town

Gather your sword, and weapons, war is shaking the ground

Soldiers gather weapons to defend what's left of the town

Darkness wrounds us everywhere, we have to protect the crown

Treatening shadows getting closer now, the end feels so near

Fight for honour, fight for freedom, face your fear

Raise your shields and fight till you die

Fight till your enemies draw their last breath

Raise your swords, high in the sky

Riding the storm, let them face death

“The battle is near, we have to find a way

to save us from this evil lord of death.

We rise from the ashes, like a phoenix we fly high.

Spread our wings and fight for freedom 'till the day we die.

The eternal flames still burn inside our hearts with pride and joy.

That is something you can never kill or destroy.”

[chronivore]

Cthuloid Bestiary

[ranarh]

Bowler Hat Monster

For roleplaying publishers Sons of the Singularity. The task was to use a strict palette and art deco style - I chose to be inspired by figures of Edgar Degas - to paint a shambling monster of the Cthuloid mythos in the sewers. Wouldn't wanna meet this guys, not even on a sunny day.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/singularity-sons/the-blessed-and-the-blasphemous

[nixiesart]

this one has been in my files for a few days, I love all things Lovecraftian.

[senotsuri]

Cthuloid can yawn... But it looks like a cat yawning.

[threeravenspublishing]

Need a new book to snuggle up with this All Hallow's Eve? Check out It Came From The Trailer Park this weekend!

Need a new book to snuggle up with this All Hallow’s Eve? Check out It Came From The Trailer Park this weekend!

That’s right, Releasing this weekend on Halloween, IT CAME FROM THE TRAILER PARK is sure to please. Do you love sparkly vampires? Well too bad, because you won’t find a single one of those fancy-dancy bloodsuckers anywhere in this collection! It Came From The Trailer Park began as a fun idea to revisit the Classic Horror and Old-School Creature Feature genres with a hefty helping of B-rate…

[lagomorphflix]

The dance floor is getting busy as everybody gets ready for a new decade, and Jackal finishes breakdancing in the traditional fashion. #bossfightstudio #kaijubash #bigmonsterbigyear #newyearseve2020 #morbius #jackal #gamorreanguard #cthuloid #godzilla #marvellegends #starwarsblackseries #neca #hasbro #shmonsterarts #actionfigures #toyartistry https://www.instagram.com/p/B6w3SNzA-qR/?igshid=1bidtbbyrbvrg

[bigvroman]

#Inktober Day 11: #Zen Cultist #Zenyatta is pretty done with your shit. #bigvroman #bigvart #sketch #drawing #paper #ink #pen #pigma #lovecraft #cthulhu #cthuloid #overwatch #cultist #halloween #healer

[travelling-my-little-pony]

Sweetie Belle the mermaid is posing with an airline meal on a LAN air flight to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). That was an omlette, the yellow thing she’s next to, we decided it was from an egg laid by Cthulhu.

[pickmansvinyls]

After a small handful of requests over the past few weeks, I pulled out the mold for the most recent Cthulhu idol from last year. Gonna be pulling a small handful of variants soon, so if you want a sorta neat one off Cthulhu Idol, there will be a Very small number available soon. I tend to shy away from realistic Lovecraft relics these days because @the_cryptocurium has it More than covered. I know there’s room for multiple artists to cover things like this, but why cover something that’s being done Perfectly already? We DO have a few Lovecraftian things planned in the near future in more of our own style... but realistic, as described in the stories, Lovecraftian relics? @the_cryptocurium is the pace to go for that. #cthulhu #lovecraft #hplovecraft #mythos #lovecraftcountry #thecallofcthulhu #greatoldones #eldergods #resin #resinempire #horror #monster #cthuloid #artist #madness #cthulhuftagn #arttoy #toyart #pickmansvinyls #glowinthedark https://www.instagram.com/p/Bufm8dXHTms/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=sd7sek9jph5h

[tetocajugar]

Más de 400 páginas de horrores #cthuloides #lallamadadecthulhu #cthulhu #juegosderol #rpg #jdr #roleplayinggame #rolgames https://www.instagram.com/p/Bys8FyjoUZY/?igshid=1y16umyfs7alz

[follyknight]

≻─── ⋆✩ Ahoy Everyone!! ✩⋆ ───≺

I'm Folly, and I'm an Eldritch, Cthuloid Vtuber over on Twitch! I'm a variety streamer and Pokemon shiny hunter! I like games that make me laugh or send my brain to the void while we chat, but that doesn't mean I shy away from spooky games! (I mean... look at me lol)

I'm also a self-taught 3D artist, focusing on sculpting! I often stream my progress, so please come by some time! 🐙💚

💚 My Twitch!︶꒷꒦‧₊˚⊹ 💕 My Highlights Youtube!︶꒷꒦‧₊˚⊹ 💚 My VODs Channel!꒷꒦‧₊˚⊹ 💕 My TikTok!︶꒷꒦‧₊˚⊹ 💚 My Carrd with more links!꒷꒦‧₊˚⊹

Hope to see you around!!

[maxwell-grant]

Jumping off from my previous question/suggestion, might I please ask if there are any superheroes you think would make fine Pulp Villains and any Supervillains you think would make convincing Pulp Heroes?

I'm gonna go ahead and remark that I'd personally suggest to anyone who's trying to create pulp characters inspired by superheroes (which would be probably about 90% of you who may want to do that sort of thing) to flip the script around a little. As in, don't try to create pulp analogues to the Justice League/Avengers upfront, but play around with some of the lesser-known icons and filter those through your idea of what “pulp” means (which is gonna be quite different than my own or anyone else’s). 

I’m not gonna really mention characters I’ve already talked about before like Vandal Savage or Namor, instead I’ll pick new ones and see what can be highlighted about them.

Regarding “Superheroes who could make fine/convincing Pulp Villains”, even though he’s a character I've read basically nothing on, Martian Manhunter definitely leaped out to me as an obvious option. He’s a Sci-Fi Superman who takes the first half of the name to an extreme that borders on comical, except he’s not a square-jawed white man, he’s a 1.000 year old green alien from Mars with shapeshifting powers who can look as monstrous as the artist desires. He’s the product of an advanced civilization and genetic modification, and on top of the Flying Brick powerset and shapeshifting, he also has incredibly powerful and extensive telepathic abilities, he can become invisible, phaze through matter, use telekinesis and other weird abilities. A lot of pulp stories closer to sci-fi were based around the idea of taking one of these abilities and extrapolating horrific consequences for them, and J’onn has those by the dozens. He also has an extremely mundane weakness that would allow him to be beaten by Macready with a blowtorch if that’s where the story ended.

He was also a law enforcement officer from Mars who became a police detective and it’s even right there in his name, and again, I have never read anything he’s in (I should probably pick the Orlando mini), I know he’s for all intents and purposes a generally nice man who tends to job a lot in crossovers and cartoons, but the idea of taking all those great vast and horrifying alien powers, combining all of them into a single character who also happens to be the last survivor of a doomed planet (and one who actually lived through it’s collapse), and then making that character a former cop trying to resume his work on Earth? 

That is a Pulp Supervillain begging to happen, and a particularly horrifying one at that. And hey, speaking of The Thing-

Now, Plastic Man’s potential for horror has already been explored quite a bit in some of the darker DC continuities like Injustice and DCeased, and it’s quite funny seeing a lot of these turn Plastic Man into The Thing because there were quite a handful of Wold Newton pages that ran with the idea that Macready from the original story was Doc Savage, and that the secret chemicals that Eel O’Brian was hit by that gave him his powers were actually samples of The Thing contained in one of Savage’s labs. Regardless, the idea of a former street crook suddenly gaining bizarre shapeshifting abilities that allow him to reign terror on his gangster associates could make for a great premise as a pulp crime story that veers into horror as the gangsters gradually figure out what is Eel O’Brian’s deal, and then the story can take a more tragic turn.

The thing about Jack Cole’s Plastic Man that modern takes on the character neglect is that, while Plas was a lively roguish anti-hero (arguably the first of it’s kind in comics), he’s still for intents and purposes “the straight man” (HA, right, Plastic Man being “straight”). He’s the relatively sane hero who plays off Woozy’s wackier misadventures and the imaginative madness that Jack Cole paints his adventures with, and it makes for an interesting contrast considering Plastic Man is already a weird character, having to ramp up the strangeness of the world around him so that he still remains the sane man. There are ways to twist this into something quite horrifying, even tragic for Plastic Man as he either struggles to maintain coherency, or embraces the shifting chaos the world’s spiraling into for better or worse (and definitely for the worse towards those on the receiving end of his vengeance, or even his humor).

Now, onto the flipside, regarding Supervillains that could become Pulp Heroes -

Normally I’d not mention the Batman villains here, because I already have a lot to talk about in regards to them as is, they comprise some of my favorite comic characters, but I pretty much have to make an exception for Two-Face in this topic, as not only a pretty obvious option but one with even case studies to prove it, as not only do we have The Black Bat, a 1930s costumed pulp hero with an identical origin story and several other conceptual overlaps with Batman, as well as The Whisperer, a young hotshot police commissioner who dresses up as a disfigured vigilante to kill criminals without consequence (and who’s somehow less of a maniacal asshole in his secret identity than in his regular one), but it turns out that there actually was a 1910s pulp hero called The Two-Faced Man:

Crewe was created by “Varick Vanardy,” the pseudonym of Frederic van Rensselaer Dey (Nick Carter, Doctor Quartz), and appeared in three short stories and two novels and short story collections from 1914 to 1919, beginning with “That Man Crew” (The Cavalier, Jan. 24, 1914). 

Crewe is “The Two-Faced Man.” 

He is in his forties and has gray hair and a “sharply cut and handsome profile—until one caught a view of the other side of his face and saw the almost hideous blemish that nearly covered it, and which graduated in corrugated irregularity from a delicate pink to repulsive purple.” 

Crewe is two-faced in another way. Crewe is a saloon owner in below Washington Square. But he has another identity: Birge Moreau, portraitist and socialite hanger-on. Crewe uses both his identities to solve crimes as an amateur detective.

The only person to know about both of Crewe’s identities is a police inspector who is also Crewe’s friend and who Crewe helps in pressing cases - The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heores by Jess Nevins

And speaking of obvious picks for Supervillains turned Pulp Heroes,

Assuming I even need to make a case for Kraven the Hunter other than just presenting this cropped panel from Squirrel Girl and in particular the art painted on the Kra-Van, or even just telling you to read Squirrel Girl and it’s take on “The Unhuntable Sergei” (I had no idea most of the people saying “Kraven’s arc in Squirrel Girl is as good if not better than Kraven’s Last Hunt” weren’t actually joking in the slightest and I speak as someone who has Kraven among their absolute favorite Marvel characters, it had no right being that good), I’m going to quote the brilliant Rogue’s Review from The Mindless Ones that lays down in painstaking detail why Kraven could make a killer protagonist in that horrifically over-the-top pulp fashion

One thing that strikes me writing this, is how well Kraven could hold his own comic. There’s always room for a book spotlighting a ruthless, hardcore, gentleman bastard, and Kraven’s raison d’etre makes him supremely versatile, so well suited to any genre, any environment. It’s odd that more writers haven’t jumped on the fact that in a universe where off-world travel is possible – indeed, common – a hunter like Kraven would have a field day. 

I can just imagine the opening scene – herds of weird cthuloid bat creatures grazing in the gloomy green nitrogen fields, bathed in lethal, bone splintering fog, when, suddenly, LIGHT! from above and an unholy bellowing: “CTHGRGN fthgrgnARAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHGN!”

They look up in fear and then they start to run – ploughing into and over each other, tentacles flailing, as from the space-ship’s docking bay Kraven silently plummets, barely dressed for the cold, a glowing knife smothered in elder signs jammed between his teeth. 

You should have seen him one night previous, sipping alien tokay around the Captain’s table with the other guests, discussing the morning’s hunt; and the way he insulted the Skrull dignitary by forgetting himself and accidentally sporting his favourite piece of formal wear: his boiling unstable dinner-jacket of many colours, fashioned from the hide of one of the Ambassador’s super kinsmen.

Whoops!

Midway through Kraven explaining how the best way to irreparably damage a symbiote is to wait until its bonded with you and then seriously maim yourself, the Skrull decided it might be a good idea to simmer down, while his beautiful Inhuman lover hung on every word.

The deeper I get into this the more convinced I am that the MU’s hunter-killer extraordinaire wouldn’t limit himself to bloody planet Earth. And neither would he limit himself to this dimension, or universe or timeline. The guy’d be just as at home leaping, sword raised, onto the back of a T-Rex in the Savage Land, as he would be ploughing through werewolves in the graveyards of Arkham or tracking a howling Demon across Mephistopheles’ realm. 

He’d work perfectly in all these environments because he has a damn good reason to be casting a bloody swathe through them: wherever there’s big game, you’ll find Kraven.

The next choice I guess is an oddball, but not that much of an oddball if you know already what is my main frame of reference towards Marvel

I don’t think people appreciate enough that the main reason Shuma-Gorath has anything resembling a fanbase has nothing whatsoever to do with the comics he was in, but entirely because, when Capcom designers had a list of Marvel characters to pick from to work on Marvel Super Heroes, they took a look at the diet Cthulhu and went “gimme THAT one”, and then went all-in in giving the alien squid monster a funky personality along with a great stage and music and animations and all that great fighting game character stuff, and now he’s maybe the most popular Dr Strange villain along with Dormammu and Mordo, despite having ZERO film appearences or major showings in comic sagas.

Capcom's designers redefined Shuma-Gorath from a nebulous cosmic evil into a comically smug cartoon bastard who can rant about devouring all dimensions and souls horrifically while also cracking poses and zingers like “How do you expect to win a fight with only two arms?” and having dinners with Dhalsim or hosting Japanese game shows in his endings, and it kills me that none of this ever made it’s way into any depictions of the character outside of MvC. 

So that’s kinda what I’d go with. I’d take Capcom’s Shuma-Gorath, depower him a bit obviously from his canonical power, and run with the premise of his MvC3 ending where he decides that, well, if he's the unlikely savior of this pathetic planet and these wretched human dogs like him so much, and he’s clearly having a much better time here among them than he ever had drifting among the stars cealessly consuming life, then maybe he can take a break from all that eldritch business and keep up hosting the Super Monster Awesome Hour and maybe fight whatever PITIFUL villains think can take HIS planet. I mean, he’ll probably still end up destroying the planet by the end, but why not give this hero business a try?

Just until he gets his full powers back of course. 

I mean you can’t deny he DOES look pretty good in that bowtie, surely The Great Shuma-Gorath wouldn’t be so unmerciful as to deny these vile wastes of flesh something good to look at in their brief and miserable lives.