Who are you and what do you do? My name is Jack Eggers, and I happen to be the living god Ammon Ra (it’s mostly a title, don’t let it throw you:). Being the living god Ammon Ra doesn’t pull in the kind of cash you’d expect, so for the last few years I’ve worked in call centers scheduling state-funded medical transportation and utility notification.
Where do you live? For the last 12 years I’ve lived in Portland, Oregon. I’m half convinced Portland is a kind of wildlife refuge for, errrrr, artists like myself.
Where did the idea for the Mininomicon come from? Making inappropriate use of office supplies, I tried to make a pocket-sized edition of the Necronomicon (of course). For some reason it just didn’t seem small and cute enough, and I noticed that folding a standard sheet of paper in half over and over resulted in tiny leaves with the same proportions as the original sheet. A half sheet of paper so reduced and stacked up looked uncannily like a tiny book…
As a comic illustrator the idea of tiny eldritch artwork and spells called me to fill in all the tiny pages. I made the original Mininomicon for a friend to wear to the 2014 H.P. Lovecraft film fest in Portland.
Afterwards I posted photos of it to the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society Facebook page. The response really surprised me, with requests and commissions, so I spent a couple months prototyping ways to make quality tiny tomes that I would be proud to offer to fellow cultists (um, rather, enthusiasts…). Things like quality letterpress printing and paper-thin skive leather made it all tantalizingly attainable.
Does the miniature size of the book make the spells inside any less evil? The magic (magics? magicks?) is still quite potent and potentially insanity inducing (no attempt at interpreting the script should be made – down that path lay only madness) but it’s a lot like the radium painted on old clock faces – it should be of such a low level that only the workers binding the books should be in any danger (…that would explain so much…)
We know you sprinkled some humor into the pages; give us some examples of the easter eggs we might find and some back story to them. Tentacles show up a great deal in the ancient parchments, so naturally you can find the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the Mininomicon. There’s also something that looks a lot like the Darwin fish with a tiny line of evolution images that begin in the water and end with the unlucky (fortunate, I mean fortunate!) human grabbed by ravenous tentacles. There’s also a Jackalope, and a betentacled Hello Cthulhu (the ultimate cosmic horror). HPL, Cthulhu and an Elder Thing make appearances as well. There’s a four-dimensional hypercube page to help speed up the madness. There’s something that seemingly bears some resemblance to Marmaduke, causing our translators to suspect that the “50 names of Marduk” often featured in reprinted Necronomicons may, in fact, be a mistranslation.
Which two Lovecraft monsters would you want to see do battle? How do you see the fight playing out? Cthulhu and Dagon are the big contenders in my mind. Dagon is an actual Elder God mentioned by name in the bible (I know, right?! hint, that fishy symbol you can see on the backs of so many cars is a LOT older than 2000 years…). Cthulhu’s got space friends so I worry that Dagon might not be victorious in that encounter.
What else do you make by hand? Apart from the occasional costume appliance (Alien chestburster or space age Egyptian headdress…) I’m mostly an illustrator with comic book leanings. There are a few leather-bound items I’m working on like the carbonite-frozen Han Solo notebook. For the last year I’ve also been working on trying to make Necronomicon prayer flags.
Where can we find more of your work and goods? I’m featuring some Mininomicons in my Etsy shop, Small Magic Bindery (www.etsy.com/shop/SmallMagicBindery). My site www.ammonra.org features my old comics and art (lots of warning pages for the NSFW stuff) on embarrassingly outdated web pages. Or Facebook on /thelivinggodammonra and /smallmagicbindery. I’ll also have a great many Mininomicons at the upcoming 2015 CthulhuCon in Portland, April 25-26: http://cthulhucon.com/cthulhucon-pdx
