Who's Out There?

Before midnight strikes and this Tentacle Tuesday waves us a teary goodbye, I shall endeavour to demonstrate that octopuses are vicious, grabby little miscreants who, in their quest for food and fun, don’t discriminate between species!

Oh, what the hell, I’ll just give three examples.

Here’s an octopus attacking a duck (to be more precise, a super duck, which is nevertheless gastronomically similar to its plainer cousin):

And here’s one attacking a gorilla… err, sorry, ape.

It’s perhaps worth mentioning that French auteur Pierre Boulle wrote “La planète des singes” in 1963; the latter was translated as “Monkey Planet” in the UK and as “Planet of the Apes” in the US. (For once I’m with the Americans; “ape” sounds considerably more threatening than the childish “monkey”.) Marvel put out both a magazine (29 issues) and a comic book (12 issues) in the 70s – though frankly, there are so many comic tie-ins for this franchise, that I have nor the knowledge nor the desire to figure out what’s what or when or by who it was published. I’ll stick with the “tentacles, girl in bikini, pretty art” bit, though.

And here’s our last scene for today, an octopus attacking a bear. Actually, on the cover it’s unclear whether it’s attacking or protecting the bear, but having read the story, I can assure you that the pink cephalopod has bear meat on its mind.

Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact was a Catholic comic book series distributed in parochial schools from 1946 to 1972… surprisingly, it’s often lots of fun, and occasionally within its pages one stumbles onto the work of a well-known artist like Murphy Anderson.

So whatever anthropomorphic species you may be, remember, don’t get your tuchus too close to the grabby tentacle of a hungry cephalopod!

~ ds