++

The Ancient Greeks tended to cheat either by showing only a profile of a cyclops or by leaving in two eyeless sockets and placing the one big eye centered in its forehead.

••

One of the odder things about various renditions of Cyclopean creatures is that artists tend to want to make the single eye BIGGER than a single normal eye. There doesn't seem to be much consideration given to how much of a brain there is behind that eye. Truth to tell, I had to consciously guide my own hand in making the eye in the sketch above smaller than instinct wanted it to be.

I think people tend to forget, sometimes, that eyes are spheres, and there is much more to them than what we see.

••

One of my favorite space opera movies from the Fifties is an unremarkable little film called WORLD WITHOUT END. It tells the story of a groups of four astronauts whose ship is accidentally accelerated to impossible speeds, and who then find themselves thousands of years in Earth's future.

This is, of course, post nuclear armageddon, and the World is now populated, at least in part, with "mutants" -- basically Hollywood style cavemen with ugly faces. One of our heroes ends up in single combat with the leader of the mutants, and before the fight begins one the other astronauts points out that the mutant has only one eye, so "no depth perception". I think I was in my early teens the first time I saw this one, and that stuck with me.

The movie is worth a look for STAR TREK fans. The production design on the underground city of the non-mutants is very reminiscent of TOS. (The rest of the movie looks a bit like it was drawn by Wally Wood for EC!)

JB's cyclops here looks like a beatnik! Maynard G. Krebs!!!