AudioShocker

Project Basement celebrates Boxing Day with another hate ceasefire, featuring:

Magik by Chris Maverick

Mav returns with his second (here's his first) PB v2 contribution! BTW, check out his webcomic, Cosmic Hellcats.

Since I drew Cable as a character I hated I wanted to also do a character I loved. And that's why I picked Magik.

The character of Illyana Rasputin worked for me on several levels. To me, she represented much of what I loved about comics in general and Marvel comics in specific. While she was blessed with fantastic powers, she was ultimately a character that I, as a teenager at the time, could relate to. In the pages of the New Mutants, Chris Claremont presented her as a teenager with every day problems while also having the additional burden of her superhero life. In addition, beyond the standard problems plaguing her New Mutant compatriots, she had the additional difficulties of being the girl ruler of the realm of Limbo.

Being a demon was a perfect allegory for the teen experience. Even among mutants, natural outcasts, Illyana felt like she was an outcast herself. She had greater responsibilities and she had a plethora of issues.

Even more fascinating is the manner in which she was woven into the shared universe. While Cable was simply dropped in as a massive retcon, Magik was a character that had been around since the induction of Colossus years earlier. When she was aged and given powers in her limited series, she already had a natural backstory, and none of this was contradicted when it was decided to give her powers and make her a member of the team. She was in many ways the perfect example of how to write to enrich a shared history rather than blatantly disregarding it.

As a character design, she was quite innovative, at least at the time. Like all the New Mutants, she wore a variant of the original X-Men training uniform, however she was a very early example of how to customize the concept without destroying it. Something very popular in uniform design of team characters today and something that makes sense in real life. If you look at any uniformed group from prep school students to military operations (both of which one could argue the X-Organization is), you'll see that in real life individuality is maintained by very subtle modifications of the core uniform. The nature of Magik's powers gave her a natural modification of the uniform in this manner while maintaining the base look. It worked on multiple levels.

Plus she's just so fun to draw.

NEXT: Hate is back!!! Plastic Man by Byron Winton!