When I first designed Mabel, I was playing a lot of Magic the Gathering, and I had decided to illustrate an entire commander deck (100 cards) and then print them out to be used as proxies. The character that Mabel was originally going to be was the card Stoneforge Mystic, the badass that let’s you pull super cool equipment cards out of your deck.

If you’re not familiar with Magic the Gathering, there’s a lot of really neat equipment cards that let you do crazy stuff, but some of those equipment cards are pretty iconic. The 10 swords… I mean, really just 5 of them, but there are 10 that are pretty epic.

So, back to the story… Mabel was drawn to be a Stoneforge Mystic proxy, and so instead of just Mabel, I decided to draw Mabel with each of the 10 swords. I’ll post what I’ve done, all in good time.

Her character design changed a lot over time, initially having mouse ears, and some other stuff that’s gone away over time.

Here’s Mabel, in one of the first illustrations I did, featuring my design for the Sword of Truth and Justice.