The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

The artifacts researched as part of the Mignola Exhibits tend to reflect Hellboy creator Mike Mignola’s own fascination with Lambshead’s cabinet. Mignola says he first remembers reading about Lambshead “in a comic when I was nine—it was one of those two-page spreads they used to fill space, with a title like ‘Strange but True.’ It might’ve been a Tales from the Crypt.”

The images of such iconic Lambshead pieces as the Clockroach were originally intended for an abandoned Mignola project titled Subsequently Lost at Sea, which would have been a detailed illustrated chronicle of, as Mignola puts it, “important stuff that got lost at sea.” The book would have reached back as far as the Romans with their “often unreliable galleys.” Mignola feels the results “would’ve been as important to the study of all kinds of crap lost at sea as Alasdair Gray’s Book of Prefaces is to the study of the English language.”

The pieces documented herein were initially lost at sea in the spring of 2003, following an urgent directive from Lambshead that rescinded the museum loans on the Clockroach, Roboticus mask, Shamalung, and Pulvadmonitor.

Lambshead’s directive sent the exhibits to the Museum of Further Study in Jakarta, Indonesia, all by circuitous routes. Roboticus and Shamalung left via the HMS Dorsal Fin of God, which disappeared seventy miles west of the Canary Islands. The USS Jeraboam II, carrying the Clockroach, was captured by pirates off the coast of Somalia, led by, as the BBC put it, “What looked like someone’s Greek great-grandmother with a knife in her teeth,” who managed to elude U.S. and British naval units during a heavy storm. The Baalbek, flying the Libyan flag and carrying a twice-hermetically sealed Pulvadmonitor, vanished off the Horn of Africa. (Some—specifically, Caitlín R. Kiernan—have suggested that the route of the freighters and the points at which they disappeared form a complex message from Lambshead “to parties unknown,” if we could only interpret it.)

By then, the good doctor’s heart had finally given out and his heirs countermanded his orders, an act that seemed to have no agency. However, astoundingly enough, Roboticus, Shamalung, and the Pulvadmonitor (babbling incoherently) turned up at Lord Balfoy’s Antiques on London’s Portobello Road two years later, selling for fifty pounds apiece. The artifacts were turned over to the Museum of Intangible Arts and Objects in Saragossa, Spain, where experts eventually confirmed that all three pieces now met “all of our requirements regarding Immateriality, Intangibility, Elusiveness, and the Ephemeral.” When the objects were returned to their respective museums, the attendants therein seemed united behind Billy Quirt—thirty-year velvet-rope veteran of Imperial War exhibits—in believing that the artifacts are “a bloody lot more and a bloody lot less than they were before they went traveling.”

The predicament does underscore one reason Mignola abandoned the book: “Too much stuff eventually washes up. Sometimes just when you’d like it to stay lost. I’d rather just draw stuff that’s always there, like monsters.”

Addison Howell and the Clockroach

Documented by Cherie Priest

Museum Name and Location: The Stackpole Museum of Prototypical Industry; Port Angeles, Washington

Name of Exhibit: Pioneer Myths and Lore in Peninsular Victoriana

Category information

Creator: Addison Sobiesky Howell (alleged); American, born 1828 in Chicago, Illnois. Died 1899 in Humptulips, Washington

Title: “Clockroach,” built 1878(?)

Medium: Mixed, primarily steel, cast iron, rubber tubing, and glass

Source: Donated in 1953 by the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle, Washington, at cost of transportation—and a gentleman’s agreement with regards to subsequent restoration and display

Accession number: 1953.99

Exhibit Introduction Panel: Pioneer Myths and Lore in Peninsular Victoriana

The Olympic Peninsula has long been home to a number of Native American tribes, including the Hoh, Makah, and the Quileute; but it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that it became settled by white homesteaders. Primarily, these homesteaders were farmers and loggers, lured by the Homestead Act of 1862 and the promise of a temperate climate.

Though much can be said about the Native traditions and myths, this exhibit focuses on the rural homesteaders and their inevitable bedtime or campfire stories—some of which were regarded with a seriousness that borders on the charmingly naïve or dangerously optimistic, as evidenced by the items on display.

Highlights of the collection include: