The series secured the Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel award.
The Bram Stoker Award is a prestigious honour that recognises the best written works in horror and dark fantasy. Presented annually by the Horror Writers Association, this year’s award recognized the amazing horror stories and related works that came out in 2024. Gou Tanabe’s manga adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu won the award in the graphic novel category.
The Call of Cthulhu manga adaptation beats other contenders
The 2024 Bram Stoke Awards were announced during the StokerCon 2025, held between 12-15 June 2025. Zack Davidson, the translator for Gou Tanabe’s manga revealed on his Bluesky account that The Call of Cthulhu manga adaptation won the Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel award. BookRiot also confirmed the same. The official X (formerly Twitter) account of Dark Horse Comics, who publishes the manga, revealed the news in a celebratory post. The other titles who were in the running for this honour included:
- The Fox Maidens by Robin Ha (HarperCollins Children’s)
- Tender by Beth Hetland (Fantagraphics)
- Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath (Penguin Random House)
- Chrysanthemum Under The Waves by Maggie Umber (Maggie Umber)
Gou Tanabe is a manga artist mainly known for his manga adaptation of several of Howard Philips Lovecraft’s works. His adaptations of Lovecraft’s works include: At the Mountains of Madness, The Colour Out of Space, The Haunter of the Dark, The Outsider, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Out of Time, and more. Dark Horse Comics licensed The Call of Cthulhu manga and published it in July 2024. Dark Horse describes the story as:
What links together two bands of worshippers, one deep in the Arctic snows, one hidden in the bayous of Louisiana, is more than their shared practice of blood sacrifice. It is the inhuman phrase they both chant: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'yeh wgah'nagl fhtagn--"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." Now these nightmares will disturb the sanity of Francis Thurston, a young man pursuing an investigation into the cult of Cthulhu that leads to the most forsaken spot in the vast Pacific...and to Earth's supreme terror, the risen corpse-city of R'lyeh.
