Inspiration (III)

Or, So that's where that came from!

Sometimes you can be inspired by something and not even know you've been inspired by it. I kid you not.

Not so long ago, I posted a drawing of
Medusa. In the entry, I commented on how I thought her eyes were excellent, but I didn't go into the reason why. Mainly, I suppose, because I'm not sure I understood it myself.

I might have said that it was because of Godzilla, or, more specifically, because of Gojira, Mosura, Kingu Gidorâ: Daikaijû sôkôgeki/Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. I had read (or seen, I now misremember) that the director Shusuke Kaneko had changed the design on the big lizard, making his eyes black with white irises in order to make him look a bit eviller. I tried a couple of sketches and liked the way it looked.

In fact, several of my novel villian conscept sketches have had the black on white type design. It looked right. It looked scary.

And there is a reason for this. And his name is Carrion.

Carrion, pictured here to the left, is one of Spider-man's many, many weird villians, as drawn by Jim Mooney for issue #30 of Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-man. A living corpse, full of malice and hatred. That face has haunted me since I was 6 years old. Look at those eyes, those evil, evil eyes.

And yet, until I stumbled once agan across this picture, I never once made the connection. I remember the face, the scene, hell, even what he was saying (kind of). But not those eyes.

They still gives me the creeps, you know, especially with that smile. Someone like that could do anything.

Anything at all.

It's little things like this which remind me how foolish questions like "Where do you get your ideas?" really is. Sometimes we just don't know.

Sometimes we don't want to know.