One of the oddest representations of the yeti I've encountered is by Carl Barks, creator of Scrooge McDuck and the various Disney ducks' adventures in comic book form.
He created a yeti named Gu who captures Scrooge, Donald, and the nephews.
Despite rumors indicating the yeti would be fierce and cunning ("The legendary terror of the topless peaks!" as Donald so eloquently puts it), he is actually very dumb.
He has one word in his vocabulary (his name "Gu!"), and perhaps his worst crime, when he wants to try on multiple hats, he fails to remove the initial hat first - which inevitably results in a most unsettling stack of hats on top of his head.
Needless-to-say, Uncle Scrooge is unamused.
You can read the entire page where he and the ducks first encounter him here.
Multiple piercings and jewelery aside, the strangest thing about this depiction of yeti is his outfit:
What's going on?
On the back of a trading card, Barks attempts to explain why his yeti Gu looks the way he does:
"Everybody has heard of the Abominable Snowman," said Barks, "and everybody has his own fuzzy mental picture of the semi-human beast. Gu is my mental picture."
Yes, Carl, but most people people's "fuzzy mental picture" isn't so varied. They generally just see some variant of a hairy hominid, usually without clothes. And certainly without switchblades hanging from the ears.
Kudos to you for thinking outside the box.
When Carl Barks reminisced about his beloved ducks to write a 1999 poem entitled "Ode to the Disney Ducks", yeti was apparently quick to come to mind, for he began his poem with the following stanza:
They ride tall ships to the far away,
and see the long ago.
They walk where fabled people trod,
and Yetis trod the snow.
(Read the rest of Barks' ode to his creation on this in memoriam page)
If Star Wars has its Wampa, Star Trek has its Mugato, Warner Brothers has its Hugo... then Disney has its Gu.
All thanks to Carl Barks.
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