Well, y’all knew this was coming.  One really can’t do a Dragon*Con countdown without paying homage to one of the Lovecraftian Great Old Ones.

H.P. Lovecraft created this cuddly little fellow in 1926, in the story “The Call of Cthulhu.”  Basically he is a big evil giant squid looking thinger with a doomsday cult located somewhere in the Middle East (go figure).  I can’t say much else about it because I’ve never actually made it through the story, because H.P. Lovecraft writes like this (my favorite is the Caramel Chew), but basically nerds in popular culture love him and he is used in song and funny pictures and the like.  Such as this:

This is evidently a spoof of some dumb painting that shows Jesus delivering the Constitution to America (um, no, but that’s all I’ll say since the Countdown is not the place for politics of gender/religion/race/your mom).  Obviously, when Cthulhu brings the Constitution to America a bit more blood is shed.

So that’s pretty funny.  I couldn’t pronounce that either, follows of the Cult of Cthulhu.

Also, some folks have been all: “Wow, merchandising, we’d make tons of money if we made adorable little Cthulhus, ’cause that’d be ironic!”  So we have the following:

And, of course, this little guy I got a last year’s Dragon*Con:

Aw.  Now isn’t that cute.