With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash-gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody ... Unclean and suffering from suppuration of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption. In Ojibwe, Eastern Cree, Westmain Swampy Cree, Naskapi, and Innu lore, wendigos are often described as giants that are many times larger than human beings, a characteristic absent from myths in other Algonquian cultures. Whenever a wendigo ate another person, it would grow in proportion to the meal it had just eaten, so it could never be full. Therefore, wendigos are portrayed as simultaneously gluttonous and extremely thin due to starvation. The wendigo is seen as the embodiment of gluttony, greed, and excess: never satisfied after killing and consuming one person, they are constantly searching for new victims. A wendigo need not lose the humans powers of cognition or speech and in some depictions may clearly communicate with its prospective victims or even threaten or taunt them.
These works set the template for later portrayals in popular culture, at times even replacing the Native American lore. In an early short story by Thomas Pynchon, "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" (first published in 1959), the plot centers around a character developing Wendigo syndrome and going on a killing spree. A character inspired by the wendigo appears in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by the writer Steve Englehart and artist Herb Trimpe, the monster is the result of a curse that afflicts those who commit acts of cannibalism. It first appeared in The Incredible Hulk #162 (April 1973), and again in the October 1974 issue.Without explicitly using the term, the 1995 novel Solar Storms by Chickasaw author and poet Linda K. Hogan both explored the mythology of the wendigo and used the creatures as a device to interrogate issues of independence, spirituality, and politics, an individuals relationship to the family, and as a metaphor for corporate voracity, exploitation, and power viewed as a form of cannibalism. Other creatures based on the legend, or named for it, appear in various films and television shows, including Dark Was the Night and Ravenous. Television series include Teen Wolf, Supernatural, Blood Ties, Charmed, Grimm, and Hannibal, where an FBI profiler has recurring dreams or visions of a wendigo that symbolizes the titular cannibalistic serial killer. A wendigo appears in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic "Hearths Warming Eve" under the pun title of "Windigo", and in the DuckTales Christmas special, "Last Christmas!