Disney Queens: Rapunzel

Yeah, yeah, I know Rapunzel's hair got lopped off at the end of "Tangled" and it turned brown, but hey, what's Rapunzel without her long hair? Beside, I kind of think that after spending her entire life living with insanely long hair, she'd gotten used to it. It did prove pretty useful, after all. So I figured over the decades she let it grow out again, and maybe even enough of the magic remained to allow it to grow just a bit longer than the average girl. And the brown hair? Also not very Rapunzel-y. In my little imagination it faded and turned white as she aged at a relatively young age (maybe by 40 or 50).

And so beloved a queen was she that the citizens still sent up lanterns on her birthday. Although, after spending years as a princess and ultimately a ruling monarch, I wonder if she ever felt like she just traded one isolating tower for another?

Disney Queens:
Since every other illustrator living and working in the western spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy has created some sort of variant on those ubiquitous Disney Princesses, I finally decided to give it a go myself. The trouble was, thinking of an angle that hadn't already been tried. And believe me, I've looked. There are princess EVERY out there, good, bad, and ugly. Somewhat inspired by Clair Hummel's fantastic "historically accurate princess" series— shoomlah.deviantart.com/galler… —I began to wonder what the future held for these sweet, diaphanous ingénue. If they're princesses NOW, that means that someday they would conceivably inherit a thrown as well as the weighty mantle of responsibility that comes with governing an entire kingdom. Decades down the road, what kind of women, what kind of leaders would they grown into?