Super Sketch Saturday: Maria (Patreon)

Upon doing some reading on how to portray disabled characters, I discovered that a common problem is that creators will come up with a super powered caveats that effectively eliminate their disability. For instance, the way Dare Devil is often portray his super-powered senses so completely compensate for his blindness that he's practically speaking not blind at all. Clearly this is something I have to consider with Chloe's character going forward.

The reason why I bring this up now is about Jane's cousin, Maria. She's a character I've been sketching for years but haven't quite been able to work into the comic thus far. Maria had no arms but instead had a large jellyflesh scarf with a giant hand at each end of it. The effect of this is that she had two big super arms that could stretch or wrap around her opponents, but might strangle her if she had to do a pull up. I thought it might be more interesting to try some different things out with the scarf that might be a little less conveniently useful. 

I started this page thinking I'd reduce the scarf to one arm. But, after a little while I had a really wild idea, I replaced her scarf with a big ol' snake. Having a snake for a arm is better than no arms, but it looks creepy and is no good at typing, plus it can tie into the whole snake cultists that Maria's cousin has been shown working for. There's also the visual fun of having a snake do arm emotes. So when Maria does make it in the comic there are good odds that she'll have a pet helper snake.