From Under no circumstances, I have discovered Chris's Invincible Super-Blog, which is full of bizarre comic book summaries, giant robots, and now, a ghostly octopus.
I also note that the ghostly octopus is horribly malformed. What is its beak doing there? Aaaaaaaaaah! It's hideous!
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What's it's beak doing there?
The cartoonist's roots are showing. That's not a malformed octopus---it's Tweety's demon spawn.
Wow, hey! I didn't even notice the tweety resemblance until you mentioned it. Yikes. Lock away your putty-tats.
I think that that cartoonist was anthropomorphizing that octopus, putting its mouth where one would expect it to be on a human face -- an octopus's body looks vaguely like a human head.
You can ask this about a lot of science fiction, especially movies -- why are aliens usually tetrapods? Mostly because their creators are. "We" could be complex amorphous blobs, or thinking sea cucumbers, somewhere else, assuming we'd evolve at all somewhere else.
I have to confess my favorite cartoon is "Spongebob Squarepants." Stephen Hillenburg taught marine biology, and you can catch references to marine science especially in the early episodes -- like when Spongebob goes into the air, he wears a "helmet" full of water so he can "breathe."
Well, a cartoonist combined Hello Kitty and Cthulhu, so maybe this is a combination of Tweety and Cthulhu.
By all means check out the rest of the part of the site that's linked - in particular, the parts that deal with Metal Men. This was one of my favorite comics much earlier in life, and the character/thing/etc. "Chemo" had a significant influence on me (the Pyrex battery jar of sulfuric acid that I had earlier, courtesy of my father, along with my actual chemistry set, containing real chemicals, doubtless fed into that...).
I think the aliens in War of the Worlds were described to have beaks. Maybe the artist was looking into the literary canon for inspiration?
What is its beak doing there?
It's there for the same reason all the animals in "Madagascar" had both their eyes on the front of their heads. I considered writing in to them to point out this meant they'd drawn a carnivorous zebra, but the bleak tides of despair overwhelmed me.
At least this one has its mouth in more or less the right spot, even if it's a little... large for its tiny tentacles: http://www.poormojo.org/pmjadaily/archives/006697.php
And, err, it's a squid instead.
Cartoons and animations often make biological mistakes. Recently Roger Ebert published a letter in his "Ask the Movie Answer Man" that was making fun of the fact that in the trailer for the upcoming animated film "Barnyard", cows (with obvious udders) were voiced by male actors and were presumably meant to be male characters. And of course, this isn't the first time gender in non-human animals has been confused in movies; in the film "Antz", the Woody Allen voiced character was a worker ant and yet was presumably male.
Comic book artists can be amazingly ignorant of science, for all the "sci-fi" comics they do. The recent interview of Neal Adams on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe demonstrates that quite amply -- Adams believes that the continents moved apart because the Earth is growing.
Check out the bottom of his home page for details. He makes Hoagland look sensible.
http://www.nealadams.com/
Well, that's the "Expanding Earth" explanation for mid-ocean ridges and continental drift. Google on that quoted phrase, there's a lot of it out there. It's from some Christian sect, their way of explaining those funny midocean ridges.