Long John

I had so much fun drawing the Corner Box Challenge that I couldn’t stop thinking about others I could have drawn. So, instead of pining for what could have been, I just went ahead and did one.

While drawing another character from the X-Men universe was not accidental, drawing another character in the original X-costume was. This character is Illyana Rasputin, also known as Magik, who is a character most well-known from her time in the very first X-Men spinoff book, The New Mutants, which hoped to bring back the idea of superhero teens that the flagship book had left behind. In that book the characters were wearing versions of the original costumes the X-Men wore when the book started in the early ’60s.

I actually have not read much New Mutants, but those characters have become deep threads in the lore of the X-Men, so becoming familiar with them was inevitable. I know that Illyana’s story is a bit of a tragic one, often serving as a foil or plot point for her more famous brother, Piotr Rasputin aka Colossus, but has since become a beloved and unique character.

I was most impressed with the interpretation of the character in the woefully underappreciated film, The New Mutants, where she was expertly played by the now ridiculously famous Anya Taylor-Joy, where they caught her manic and tragic nature admirably.

Also, as a matter of detail, canonically, when Magik summons her soulsword she also manifested a demonically armored left arm. Even with that knowledge, I made her right arm armored because I wanted to prominently feature it in the image without flipping it horizontally. I was able to further justify the choice–aside from the obvious point that none of this is real–was that in the movie they armored her right arm instead of her left, as well.

I don’t know how many more of these I have in me (there’s at least one more corner box that I find intriguing), but it is a rare art challenge that I have quite enjoyed tackling (this and the 6 Fan Arts have been the only premises I’ve found inspiring enough to participate in).