You know those clip show episodes on TV where characters reminisce about previous events? This model sheet is a little like those, in so far as there's a little reuse of old material here, it isn't all strictly new stuff. Wait! Hear me out...

Like Sylvia, Corinne's model was designed to be hot-swappable. I knew that down the road I'd be creating many more new outfits for the girls, and although it meant a bit more work at the time, I knew it'd pay off down the road. (Incidentally, I considered doing the same thing for Darryl, but he's been wearing more or less the same thing since around 2002, so that was quickly abandoned.)

All of this is great in theory, but in practice I still found myself redrawing most of Corinne for this design - I'd say about 20% of her is carried over, mostly in the head, and even then I've redrawn a lot of it: this whole super-cutesy blushing thing she's got going on is unique to this model. Who or what she is blushing at, I have no idea. She definitely ends up red-faced at her father's party while wearing this, but only with embarrassment after what happens with the ice sculpture... and then again moments later after running into Sylvia's... well, let's just say there's never a dull moment in StarStrikers. I'm trying to give you a little context here without spoiling the first book for you.

Carlton is Corinne's father, and some of you may remember him from his appearances in the StarStrikers webcomic, where he had the unlucky distinction of being, I believe, the only regular character to never make it into the color strips - his initial appearances were all during the period where it was presented in B&W for no good reason. By the time we got back to Morrigan Manor I was in my experimentation phase of trying anything to up my workrate, so the color window passed him by completely. Still, he had enough page time to allow me plenty of practice in refining his design.

For some reason I wanted to retrace my steps with Carlton, and so I went and dug up my old sketchbook from 2000-03, which was a real trip down memory lane as it contains some of the oldest StarStrikers material around. Since Carlton 2003 only took up one half of the page, I drew his new design on the other side, and so it became a sort of "before and after" thing. None of this seemed problematic at the time. It wasn't until much, much later, when I'd redrawn and colored him digitally and positioned him next to Corinne that I saw the problem. He wasn't proportioned like a modern StarStrikers character, but more like something I would have drawn five years ago. His head was tiny and he had this incredibly lanky frame. So it was back to the drawing board. I pulled his line art apart and resized all the components to bring him in line with the other characters. These drastic alterations meant I had to color him again from scratch, but the second attempt is much better than the first so... c'est la vie.

Danny Blight is Corinne's boyfriend as of the start of StarStrikers: First Strike!. He's a character that's really snowballed over time from being an unseen plot device who only existed to break Corinne's heart, to being a notable character who appeared at the beginning of the book and did the same thing, to eventually becoming a notable figure within the Strikerverse in his own right. He seems to share his pose with Freddy from the Black Mondays, but then all my teenage boys seem to be surly, back-talking rebels so perhaps that's understandable. Also, after years of complaining about what possessed me to put Corinne in a denim jacket in the webcomic, it appears that she's lent it to Danny. It's like the cat that came back, it just won't go away!

Beatrice is the Morrigan family's head maid/cleaner. She seems to really have it in for Corinne for no reason, or perhaps for reasons that will become clear down the road. In any event, she's been undermining our poor C-Jo's confidence and self-worth for many years with her backhanded compliments and general insincerity. For this reason I've been theorizing lately that she may actually be a far greater threat to Corinne than Kitty, Serenade or the Darkspecters, that she's sort of an enemy within. But nah, she's just some mouthy old windbag. There's something about her design that I find ghoulish and unnerving, to the point where she was difficult to finish coloring. I don't know, maybe I've been working too many late nights recently, of which this is one. On an unrelated note, her squint was unintentional but I left it in because it just made her appear even more smug.

Chancellor Xa was supposed to be a secret character, a surprise of sorts, but since he'll be appearing in the prequel short story leading up to First Strike!, I figure you may as well catch a first glimpse of him here. Xa was Lo's (Lowenstein's) employer and mentor on his home planet, he's very much the elder statesman type. Initially I was going to draw him from the pencil stage up, then I realized that I already have stock vector components I use in the construction of Lowenstein, plus all the Scuttlebugs are largely similar in appearance, so he became a reworking of Lo's design.

So, so many retools, and I still have one more outfit for Corinne and two for Sylvia that I need to produce. I may even end up adapting the old art of Corinne's Porsche and the team truck as a time-saving measure, just so I can finally get around to starting on the actual art for the book. In the words of Whitney Houston, I learned from the best... I learned from you. And by "you", I mean Hasbro.