Robert E Howard & Peter Kuper (Dodd, Mead & Co 1984)
 ISBN: 0-396-08370-6
This quirky little tour-de-force reprints Howard’s ‘The Beast from the Abyss’; an essay on the value and nature of cats, originally published in The Howard Collector in 1971, but with each page created as a design and illustration exercise by seminal creator and cutting edge comics pioneer Peter Kuper.
The combination of Howard’s terse, dark prose style with the iconoclastic and left-field sensibilities of Kuper presented here in the form of 49 stark and hysterical lino-cut (think wood-cuts but without the splinters) prints make this a frankly startling addition to the plethora of cat’n’cartoon books out there. I just wish this one still was. Still, it would be a fairly inexpensive book to reprint…
An absolute hoot from two artists not usually noted for a broad sense of humour.
Text © 1971 Glenn Lord. Illustrations © 1984 Peter Kuper.