Multiversity of Chicago

Classic pulp yellow sky, the University of Chicago's Hull Gate looming dark, in the middle ground a woman in a red hat and coat covered with hieroglyphs, in the foreground a man in a fedora with a ticket for R'lyeh in the brim, holding up an iphone which faintly illuminates his face.

This was the first of two Chicago-themed pulp-magazine-style covers I was commissioned to do for the Chicago in 2012 World Science Fiction Convention (see "Chi-Fi" ).

This one has a noir detective theme with overtones of H.P. Lovecraft; it was meant to evoke Weird Tales, Detective Story Magazine, and other classic pulp magazines.

The story is set on the campus of the University of Chicago, at the famous Hull Gate near the biology laboratories. The hieroglyphs on the woman's coat spell out various comments on the nature of the universe in accord with H.P. Lovecraft's worldview.

A very tight deadline meant I had to paint this with acrylics, rather than my more common medium of egg tempera.