Olympic Mascots Wenlock And Mandeville Star In Their Own Incomprehensible Comic Strip

If you've been watching the Olympics as obsessively as I have, you may already be familiar with Wenlock and Mandeville, the adorable mascots for the London games that also happen to be terrifying Lovecraftian Cyclopean horrors. Not content with whatever sinister plans they have for the real world, Wenlock and Mandeville have now invaded comics, courtesy of Britain's weekly The Beano and cartoonist Nigel Parkinson, and the end results are... well, they're just weird.

Check out their debut strip and its creeping existential dread after the jump!

For a closer look, you can download a free PDF of Wenlock and Mandeville's debut strip from The Beano itself.

Not to knock Parkinson (a veteran cartoonist who's been working at The Beano for more than 30 years), but the Wenlock & Mandeville strip feels less like a cheery introduction of these two characters for children, and more like something crafted by aliens who didn't quite have a handle on how human beings interacted with each other. The permanent furrow of Wenlock's one gigantic eye that makes him look like he's constantly angry and/or plotting, and blunt statements like "I'm not confident about swimming" and "This will help you" don't exactly make them seem less like otherworldly monstrosities.

Of course, while London's misshapen monoliths to the Elder Gods are more than a little creepy, it's not like we here in the good ol' USA did much better when we had to think up a mascot. Back when Atlanta hosted the Summer Games in 1996, our bright idea basically boiled down to "a blobby Sonic the Hedgehog."

To be fair, though, Izzy's shoes are still pretty awesome even if he does look like he should be on the side of a van advertising local plumbing services. Really, if they wanted a mascot for Atlanta in 1996, they should've just gone with Outkast. What better representation of the city could there possibly be?

But while a blob in hi-tops and a pair of horrors from the stars might be equally dubious in terms of mascotry, nobody -- but nobody -- comes close to the awesomeness that got dropped on us for Vancouver 2010: