One of my personal favorite Martian enigmas is the Blue Demon.
     
   
 
Nothing scary about this dude- in fact, sometimes he looks like a certain mischievous cartoon alien. I’ve found them in lots of places, never with any apparent negative connotations. I have no idea what they meant to the Martians. Was this another local race? Were they in fact from somewhere else, like Stitch? Were they archetypes? Dimensional visitors? Except for the round heads and blue color, they are somewhat like the green picklehead cactus spirit Mescalito… but I am probably reaching for an explanation with that association. Like I said, an enigma.

 

 
 

You met this fellow already, at the beginning of this chapter, but there is much more going on here than just a Giant Martian Tiki Head hanging out with his friends. Click on the combo for a bigger one.

R1600914_bottom half

Our Players
 There is a really wonderful tolas at the bottom. On the left, a young lady is preparing to sing (that's what it looks like). She has a little stage fright, frowns at a heckler, and gets a mixed reaction from the assembled ones to the right. I know, you won't believe that unless you see it, and I can't blame you. So I  included some options. Here is  a three panel combo:
Trying to figure out what was being depicted, it finally hit me- it's an audition! There is a head in the area between her and the other lady watching from the right who sticks out his tongue  (look right now for the little pink dot that is obviously different from the images on either side, about 2/3 of the way down) at her in the middle panel- that's why she frowns. It's an ancient Martian version of American Idol™, complete with Simon! I couldn't make up such a thing. As with any tolas, there are more than three stages, but  what can be captured this way is extremely limited, unfortunately.

Click on any of the thumbnails to see a panel separately- that can help, and it makes it much easier to view in a higher resolution graphics mode. Irfanview works quite well, so if you can't see much, blame your browser. Because of the method of capture (explained elsewhere), I couldn't give you huge versions of the stages, but that wouldn't really help anyway. Click on the thumbnail below for a full-res version of just the bottom scene, if you want to play with it yourself- a change in her smile is easy to elicit, but the other parts of the sequence are only visible when the image is zoomed out pretty small.. You will notice that you can't see anything at all unless you do zoom out.