Sensitive Cyclops

If you’re doodling a monster there is one quick way to ensure the viewer knows it’s a genuine out-of-the-subconscious monstrous creation and not just a badly drawn crocodile. Give your creature only one eye. Much of the animal life on earth tends towards symmetry in the arrangement of sense organs. A one-eyed life form seems to contradict some fundamental principle, causing unease. The viewer knows this beast is built to a completely different design than the rest of us. An entirely different form of life that sees the world in a wholly different manner. It is an alien. It is a monster.


Ray Harryhausen’s Cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, 1958.

All the one-eyed creatures of today are probably descended from the Cyclops, one of the cast of the ancient Greek myths. It is a lumbering giant that is outwitted by Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. This image of the Cyclops as brutal, dumb and fond of violence has been its stereotype ever since. The Cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad could not even speak, it just lurched about and roared. I can think of only one exception to this sort of Cyclops in art, this painting by Odilon Redon.


The Cyclops. Oil on cardboard mounted on panel, 64 × 51 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Holland. Painted sometime between 1898 and 1900.

What kind of Cyclops is this? Peeking shyly at a sleeping figure in what feels like a misty Garden of Eden. One does not feel the sleeping figure is in any danger. This Cyclops just wants a friend. A constant problem for those attempting to depict the Cyclops is what to do with its nose? The artist sometimes plants the eye in the middle of the forehead, retaining a normal human nose with two weird patches of skin either side. Or they forcefully squash the nose down, like in the movie version above. Redon avoids the problem by simply withholding the nose. He makes his Cyclops a smooth faced creature, not some warped aberration. This helps make it seem childlike, innocent as a lamb. Painting the creature without a nose sidesteps blunt questions of anatomy. Such questions would ruin the soft magic of the image. This Cyclops is made seem even more harmless by the absence of its right shoulder. Where does the far shoulder go? It is just about feasible that it is curved out of view. It matters little, the effect is to make this Cyclops seem dainty and meek. This is Odilon Redon's vision of the Cyclops, at home in a dreamscape.

Monster Monks

It has been a while since we’ve had a Japanese monster, so here’s one now. David Maybury of Children’s Books Ireland drew my attention to this modern take on an ancient spectre, it is the first image below. The beast is the Umibōzu. Or if you prefer 海坊主, a name that combines the character for sea with the character for Buddhist monk.


The illustrator is Shigeru Mizuki and the image is from the Yōkai Jiten, an encyclopaedia of traditional monsters published in 1981.

These spirits live in the sea and if you happen to come close to one your best defence is to look away and pretend not to see it. The Umibōzu are peaceable enough if you don’t hassle them. The worst thing you can do is try and chat with one. That will result in it sinking you and your vessel.

Some say the Umibōzu are drowned holy men, they have the shaven heads of a monk and when seen at sea they often appear to be praying. I read that they are sometimes described as having serpentine limbs like tentacles. These limbs, their big eyes and smooth heads make me wonder if the idea of the Umibōzu may be based on sightings of the Giant Squid. Such squid are rarely seen near the surface but this rarity might have made their appearances all the more frightening.


I got this image of a Giant Squid from here.


This well-known 19th century image of the Umibōzu was created by the wood block artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Dead or Alive

Newfoundland is in North-East Canada. I have a friend from there and he recently sent me a copy of this poster. It could be found pinned up in Newfoundland towns in the 1980s.


Wanted! Big squid.

It was a serious attempt by a biologist called Frederick Aldrich to gather samples of the giant squid, Architeuthis dux. The chances of a live squid trashing around a coastline like in this picture are pretty slim, although it does make for an exciting poster. It was more likely that Newfoundlanders would find giant squid corpses or parts of corpses washed up on shore. A while ago on this blog I wrote about a different kind of big squid, the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni. We knew about that creature for decades before one was seen alive or even in one piece. That was because parts of its distinctive tentacles were occasionally washed up on beaches, biologists looked at them and knew that there had to be an undiscovered species out there.

Newfoundland has a long history with the giant squid. In 1873 the first complete specimen of a giant squid ever seen came ashore there and was photographed in the bathtub of the local reverend.


Giant squid found in Newfoundland in 1873, hung above the bathtub.

In the 1870’s many giant squid washed up on the shores of Newfoundland. No one knows why those years were a particularly busy time for strandings but many scientists believe that they happen in regular cycles and are therefore predictable. The length of time between mass strandings is not known, but Frederick Aldrich suggested it might be 90 years. Aldrich correctly predicted another group of strandings that occurred in the 1960s.

In both the 1870s and the 1960s most of the beached squid were dead by the time they were discovered. There was one massive exception. One giant squid was struggling in the shallows when fishermen came across it in 1878. I assume this discovery is the scene illustrated in the poster. They managed to hook the dying beast with a grapnel and stopped it from washing back out to sea. They measured it at seven metres or about twenty feet long. It might have been the biggest giant squid ever captured. We don’t know for sure because then, unfortunately, the fishermen chopped the creature up. They used it for dog food. Frederick Aldrich may have been worrying about this possibility when he offered a reward.