I Will Eat Your Eyes

Cross-posted to this and to my deviantART.

La Llorona is a Mexican bogeyman who often takes the form of a faceless woman. She appears in my novel as a peripheral villain, one of the family of bogeymen under the leadership of El Cucuy, the red-eyed boy. Her name means something like "the weeper," and she is so called because she always manifests as a crying woman.

According to one version of her legend, La Llorona was a young woman who became pregnant out of wedlock. When her lover abandoned her, she took revenge on him by drowning her twin children in a nearby lake. After she did so, remorse overcame her, and she threw herself into the same lake that had taken her children. But she was a haunted soul, and could not die; instead, she rose from the grave a restless ghost, and soon dragged her faithless lover down to join her in the depths. Now she walks abroad, dressed in white rags, eternally weeping and wailing her misery. If she catches a child, she will snatch it away forever, perhaps seeking to replace the ones she killed. Because she's cursed, her face has been destroyed: various legends give her either a horse's face or a gaping skull.

I was inspired by a sort of Rob Liefield style while drawing this, which explains La Llorona's ridiculous hair. In one scene in the story, the bogeymen are descending towards the rooftops as they prepare to execute their plan, and I wanted to show her hair and rags flowing upwards towards the viewer--hence my looking to Liefield, who always had ridiculously windblown hair. I don't know whether I succeeded, but I sure enjoyed drawing this.