“Ctulu Fhtagn”
A comic strip rises from the sea! Quick, read it with your eyes before you go insane.
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A comic strip rises from the sea! Quick, read it with your eyes before you go insane.
Grammarnazi emerging from the sea? Well, I know it’s about pronunciation, if you know what I mean ^_^
Even though I say “ka-THOO-lu” I feel like Lovecraft would shame me for attempting to pronounce it. I imagine the closest a human could get would be “CLUE-LOO” with lots of gargling and horror between each letter.
Yup!
That’s me for sure! :P
Not right. Wikipedia actually has a wonderful and well written bit for the readers that didn’t know otherwise: “Cthulhu has also been spelled as Tulu, Clulu, Clooloo, Cthulu, Cthullu, C’thulhu, Cighulu, Cathulu, C’thlu, Kathulu, Kutulu, Kthulhu, Q’thulu, K’tulu, Kthulhut, Kutu, Kulhu, Kutunluu, Ktulu, Cuitiliú, Thu Thu,[2] and in many other ways. It is often preceded by the epithet Great, Dead, or Dread.
Lovecraft transcribed the pronunciation of Cthulhu as “Khlûl’-hloo” (IPA: [ˈχɬʊl.ɬuË] ?).[3] S. T. Joshi points out, however, that Lovecraft gave several differing pronunciations on different occasions.[4] According to Lovecraft, this is merely the closest that the human vocal apparatus can come to reproducing the syllables of an alien language.[5] Long after Lovecraft’s death, the pronunciation /kəˈθuËluË/ kÉ™-thoo-loo became common, and the game Call of Cthulhu endorsed it.”
“Wikipedia: the comic” just isn’t any fun. Lacks drawings, and fun.
Yes, I read that article as well. It wasn’t that funny.
I remember playing that Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG in high school! That was in the early/mid 90’s. I guess I could say I was into Cthulhu before he got popular! His earlier stuff *is* way better, though. ;)
@Alex uh….. yea…. I too wonder where the guy with glasses is this week
Clever!
I think that one of the ways a comic (or a humorous phrase) can be clever is when it makes a joke out of something out-of-the-ordinary that people normally don’t think of, or would never think of turning into a joke.
For example, the difficulty of the “Cthulhu” pronunciation is something we’ve all encountered, yet we tend to ignore once we think we understand it. It’s no big deal — it’s just an obstacle we surmount and we move on, almost forgetting we ever had that problem. But this cartoon focuses on this very problem, and makes a joke out of it.
(It’s even better that it is a non-offensive joke, so the focus of the joke can be placed squarely on the obstacle itself, instead of on demeaning a fellow human being.
On the other hand, Cthulhu might be offended…)
Absolutely. I think the gag originated from reading all the different spellings of “Cthulhu” on the internet, from people who were TRYING to get it right. So having Cthulhu himself appearing to correct their spelling (and not necessarily pronounciation) was the amusing part for me. But then again, I drew cultists and not internet nerds, and the word HAS been spelled several different ways anyway (as part of Lovecraft’s stories). Both these points works against the joke, I agree. Still, the most widely know version is “Cthulhu” – which I wanted to point out with the comic.
Technically Cthulhu should probably shout “It’s!” in the fourth panel, but with the part replaced by garbled almost intelligible text. I’m not sure it would be any funnier, though.
More fundamentally, Cthulu doesn’t do eternal torment… The highest blessing of his followers is “may you be eaten first”….