Rhapsodies

Today’s sketch I had down on the list as Merrow, the irish name for mermaids, which I thought would allow me to circumvent all of the romantic connotations going around, but then I looked them up to refresh my memory and found that they are some of the more benign examples and I was doing them a disservice.

So today’s monster is the mermaid, that’s right Mermaids! If you know your folklore they tempt people into drowning and cause shipwrecks. As for the Disney version…. Ariel may be a sweetheart but the ones in Peter Pan are happy little sociopaths who gleefully plan to drown Wendy!

For me one of the scariest way to present them is to show them resting against the side of a boat. Since you only see the top half you mistake them for a real woman and since you are beguiled by that charming smile you don’t ask the question of why someone would be swimming this far out in the water… or this late at night… of course by the time you realize this you’re close enough for her to grab you and pull you down into the water. This was shown wonderfully in Pirate’s of the Caribbean: on Stranger Tides, and suggested in The Rum Diary, but unfortunately a little too subtle for a single image. Anyway here’s a few of them heading for the boat planning to do that.