Oklahoma native Larry Latham moves from cartoons to Web comic

MATTHEW PRICE, Features Editor Comments 1
Published: September 1, 2009

If you watched cartoons in the 1980s, odds are you were exposed to the work of Tulsa’s Larry Latham. The 1975 University of Oklahoma graduate is an Emmy nominee, working on shows including "DuckTales,” "Smurfs,” "TaleSpin” and "Super Friends.”

Another detail from Larry Latham’s "Lovecraft is missing.”

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"I worked on a wide diversity of stuff,” Latham said. "When I started at Hanna-Barbera, the first show I worked on was the ‘Godzilla Power Hour,’ with Doug Wildey, one of the greats of comic books, and Dave Stevens of ‘The Rocketeer.’”

Now returned to Oklahoma from Los Angeles, Latham creates the Web comic "Lovecraft is Missing.”

Latham says he’s always been a fan of author H.P. Lovecraft and was even part of the group that helped raise money to provide a grave marker for the author. He’s turning that love into a mystery comic that takes the premise: What if Lovecraft’s stories were real?

New "Lovecraft is Missing” pages go up every Friday at lovecraftismissing.com.

While Lovecraft’s Cthulhu tales are horror classics, Lovecraft has a science-fictional basis, Latham said.

"One of his key precepts is that this stuff isn’t supernatural, it’s alien,” Latham said. "It’s so advanced, it appears to be magic.”

Latham first developed "Lovecraft is Missing” as a CD-ROM game in 1994. But after the crash of the CD-ROM market, the concept went back on the shelf. It was under development as an animated series in the late 1990s by Film Roman, but after some creative differences, the rights reverted to Latham.

After first pitching the project as a graphic novel, Latham in 2008 began working to bring his story to the Internet as a Web comic. Eric Lee, co-creator of the Web comic Boodachitaville, helped Latham learn some of the tricks of the Web comic trade.

Latham’s comic fandom goes way back, as he was a founding member of the Oklahoma Alliance of Fans, a pioneering comic fan club that began in the late 1960s.

"We moved a lot when I was a kid. About every 18 months, my dad just had to move. And yet we stayed within Oklahoma City, Tulsa, once we moved down to a little town called Wewoka,” Latham said. "But pretty much every year I was going to a new school. And I got real comfortable, made good friends, but I didn’t keep friends because we didn’t stay around. And comic books were, they were my friends. I read a lot, I loved reading, and wanted to be a comic book artist.”

And now, Latham has achieved that childhood dream.