Moonstar RemiX

I don’t know how Dani could NOT be anyone’s favorite in the initial New Mutants lineup. Rebellious but loyal, tough but sensitive, confident but haunted– she was so kick-ass. Favorite Dani panel? It’s gotta be one of the earlier issues where she tries on a bikini and thinks about how sexy she is. That really threw me for a loop.

It has taken me FOREVER to draw her because not only did I want to do her justice, but I was constantly fighting with myself over the offensive-ness factor of the bow and arrow imagery.

Then I thought, why am I questioning this when I gave the Japanese character a Katana and the black character a semi-automatic firearm? Sometimes the accessory’s coolness factor overrides the derivativeness/ racist-ness of it– haha. The compromise was to draw her with a bow and make the arrows real and not psionic, despite how cool my teenage self thought psi-arrows were.

On a related note, as cool as I think Dust’s sexy form-fitting burqa looks, I refuse to draw her because of the inherent contradiction of a sexy form-fitting burqa.