The last item under our metaphorical microscope for Kus! week is Mini Kus! #49, one of the more curious entries in a series that justly prides itself on curiosity and eclecticism, Martin Lacko’s MS Paint-rendered adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “purple prose” horror classic, The Call Of Cthulhu.

At first glance, this deliberately crude Cliffs Notes-on-crack truncation of a seminal text may seem irreverent in the extreme — Lovecraft and brevity don’t go together naturally, after all — but a closer examination reveals it to be anything but : by boiling the story down to its indivisible components, playing up its inherent absurdity, and completely neutering its forced “dark grandeur” before replacing it with a kind of (forgive the contradiction) light-hearted cynicism, it actually shows how endlessly inventive Lovecraft’s core ideas are under any circumstances.

Besides, for those of us interested in a dense and thoughtful consideration in comics…