Meatmoth

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From the moment that I read Kameron Hurley’s science-fiction novel ‘The Stars are Legion’ (popularly known as ‘Lesbians in Space’), I knew that I wanted to illustrate one particular scene. The protagonist Zan, is dropped into a kind of discard pile of organic remnants at the bottom of the living world-ship that she inhabits, and left to be consumed by the ‘recycler monsters’ that live there. The monsters are four-armed, one-eyed ogres that eat matter – including living people – and excrete useful organic material for making new components or creatures. There are several such monsters, but the one that Zan encounters is called Meatmoth.

My first attempt used a Genesis figure as a starting point, together with the Four Arms product that I’ve used in a few other images. I couldn't get quite the look that I was aiming for, however -- the figure didn’t really hold up -- so I started again. This time, I used a Genesis 8 figure, and applied various morphs to distort it. Because there’s no Four Arms for Genesis 8, I simply duplicated the figure and moved the arms slightly. Because of the camera angle that I ended up using, it’s not really possible to tell that the figure has four arms, but technically it does.

Incidentally, Meatmoth should probably be female like everything else in the world, but this was based on a male figure. I guess when you’re a forty-foot-tall four-armed one-eyed people-eating monster, notions such as ‘male’ and ‘female’ can be a bit fluid.

Meatmoth didn’t come out exactly the way that I pictured it. For one thing, it looks a little bit like ALF. On the other hand, it’s certainly fairly horrifying. To encounter this creature and know with certainty that it intends to eat you – because that’s its job – would be distressing, to say the least.