"Three hideous creatures soar through the clouds about 100 feet overhead. Their bodies are oval balls of matted black fur about 5 feet wide dominated by a single, bulging 4-foot-wide eyeball. The eyeball is black with a blood-red pupil that continually leaks bluish fluid. Leathery bat wings, each 5 feet long, extend from their bodies. Each wing ends in three razor-sharp talons. An 8-foot rat’s tail hangs limply below. These are eyewings, evil servitors of Artha, scouting the city for victims."
Rick Swan, Dragonlance: Dragon Magic
After my last set of D&D inspired monsters I put out a call looking for a copy of the 1st edition of Deities & Demigods. I love Erol Otus' illustrations and I wanted to see the Nehwon, Melnibonéan & Cthulhu Mythos stuff. An angel in the form of Skinner sent me not only Deities & Demigods but the Monstrous Manual folder! The Monstrous Manual is a bit of a weird one. It's got a ton of monsters but the artwork is starting to get more professional and therefore less fun to reinterpret.
The eyewing first appeared in Dragon Lance supplement Dragon Magic from 1989 but it's only mentioned. It's not until the Monstrous Compendium that we get the first illustration by Mark Nelson. My favorite thing about this description is how judgmental it is. They're not creatures that are attacking an unknown species in their land, these guys are assholes! They were born with a bad attitude.
I suspect the acid tears of the eyewing are a riff on the centaur's poisonous blood.
The Inuit shaman Anarqáq’s drawings for Knud Rasmussen of Issitôq (1921).
While they eyewing may not be directly influenced by mythology it certainly did influence a bunch of of video games. There's a flying eye in Phantasy Star (oddly named Owl Bear), Ahriman in Final Fantasy, AdventureQuest has something unoriginally named Flying Eye, Team Fortress 2 has Monoculus and the Bilocyte in Zelda (though this does have a body but is essentially an eye with wings).
I'm sure there's more I missed. Let me know if you can think of any mythological influence.
Also worth noting is a part of this description that's often misinterpreted by illustrators. It's the eyewing's distinctive eye! The actual description is a "black eyeball with a blood red pupil". Most people draw it as a black sclera (the white part of our eyes) with a red iris and a black pupil. I think it’s an important distinction because I imagine the fluid filling the eye is blood!
Special thanks to Andrew Reichart for help with research!
The Eyewing might have been based on the Obb from Gamma World. The Obb is an intelligent bat-like mutant fungus with a large eye that can blast radiation, bat-wings and a pair of clawed appendages. Much like how Star Frontiers races were rehashed for the Spelljammer setting, I have seen GW mutants crop-up in D&D products.
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