Yesterday we caught the first glimpse of Lowenstein's new model sheet. Today we follow it up with his protege, the leader of the team, Corinne Morrigan.

Even more so than Lowenstein, I had been drawing Corinne throughout the duration of the webcomic, again and again, over about eighty pages, literally a couple of hundred times. As a result of this by the end I had a pretty clear idea of what Lo needed to look like. Corinne a little less so. Mostly it was a case of figuring out what worked and accentuating that, while offloading everything that didn't, and really bringing out what the character was about.

One of my main outcomes was for her to not be just some generic anime girl, but to immediately communicate what the character is about. Some of these visual cues were carried over from the webcomic, like the silver sneakers (a nod to Dorothy's shoes in the original version of The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz). Others, like the sensible grey skirt™, the pearls, the ponytail and her now more mousey brown hair are introduced in the most recent rewrite of StarStrikers: First Strike!. I often refer to C-Jo as "the Sloane in sneakers", which I think sums both the character and her look up quite well. Yes, she's a spoilt heiress, a goody-two shoes and almost absurdly intellectual. But at the same time, she's still an American teenage girl, and her youthful spirit and good nature needed to come through. It's also important to me that although she's smart and studious, she needs to break through the stereotypical glasses and pocket-protector image of that kind of person we always see in the media.

I started work on Corinne's model sheet last autumn, while bedridden with the flu as I recall. The process of getting the designs completed was the lengthiest of all four of the StarStrikers, and this was compounded by the fact that I was knee-deep in rewriting First Strike! while trying to pull it together. I also made the mistake of deciding that I would draw her body as a sort of blank slate so that I could swap out new outfits later, but that actually just made things harder in the long run. One of the other stumbling blocks was the combination of the ponytail and bow. It never sat right with me, and I always found myself going back to it in order to correct it, studying other anime characters and trying to figure out the best way to interweave those elements. But there's no "right way" to do it, really, it's just a case of figuring out what works for you personally as an artist, and after struggling with it for months on end, I found something I was content with. It was worth my while to go back and keep trying to fix it until I got it right. After all, I have to live with these designs in the long run.

That sums up my feelings about Corinne in general, actually. I spent far longer on her than I did on any of the other StarStrikers, but IMHO she's easily the best looking of the four, and without question my favourite. Far more than the others, to me she just about looks like a plausible character model for a real anime series. Maybe I'm biased because I C-Jo was always kinda "the favorite" of the team; daddy always liked her best, I guess you could say. But out of all the art I've done in the last seven years of StarStrikers, this model sheet is one of my proudest accomplishments.