This thread was and continues to be painfully stupid.
Firstly, the notion that this image was the inspiration for the Big-Daddies and Little Sisters is ridiculous. Did anyone saying that actually read the Kotaku article? Because if so you would have seen that originally the duo looked like this:
There is absolutely no way in which Ken Levine, when brainstorming for BioShock, thought to himself "hey this sc-fi cover is neat, but it would be better if the little girl was a huge rat and the diver was a kendo fighter with a machine-gun".
Secondly, as I said before, the Big-Daddy visual design was not done by Ken Levine. Someone linked the
design progression earlier. Wells started with a design which resembled an old diving suit, then spent time looking at experimental suits which didn't all make it into production. His final design was based upon one of those experimental diving suits. Is it easier to believe that a designer would draw inspiration from old diving rigs when designing a character with the ability to walk along the ocean floor for a game set in the past, or that the whole design was lifted from a single image on the cover of an old Japanese magazine?
Maybe Nate Wells did see the image at one point, who knows; but the reaching in this thread is so fucking stupid it burns.