Francisco said his ideas emerged from a dream after he watched documentaries on Mesoamerica, which includes stories about the plight of the Olmecs, Aztecs, and Mayans.
"I remember now the inspiration for the symbolism I put into his costume that you see on the necklace, because it's out now. You actually see my design. That's an original design. It's not copied from anywhere," Francisco told Looper in an exclusive interview. "It was taken from a dream. I was dreaming about, 'How am I going to represent Namor? He's life and death, and they say he gives lives? What kind of god do they see in him?' The feathered serpent — Kukulkan — is the one I was thinking of."
From there, Francisco said it was a matter of taking the inspiration of Kukulkan and imbuing it with technology to make Namor an even greater threat to Wakanda.
"I was thinking, 'How do I put technology together with the folklore and the gods into what Namor is, and the civilization underneath?'" Francisco recalled. "I came up with a bunch of ideas to show it and the relationship with the ocean and with the animals, and these different, crazy ideas that they actually started using.'"