
It took a while for the DC Bombshells line to include any villains,
but the comics made them more human and complex than their normal counterparts. So like, regular Barbara Minerva: glory-hound archaeologist who forced an African tribe to put her in their ritual so she could get cheetah powers. Bombshells Barbara Minerva: orphaned as a child and sent to live with an abusive family who just wanted her for her inheritance, found out they planned to marry her to their son to make it official, so she killed him in the night and ran off to be an adventurer; however, because of the abuses she'd suffered, she has a nearly pathological hatred of seeing anyone with a happy family, especially if that family involves adoption.
Then later she gets bitten by a robot cheetah that is also an ancient god and who takes over her mind, because comics are, fundamentally, still silly.
Cheetah's pin-up theme is "safari," because colonialism was sexy in the 1940s [citation needed]. She wears sturdy boots, a short cargo skirt, and a shirt that seems tighter than her own skin. She wears a pith helmet that has a pair of goggles on top of it; if they were down over her eyes, we wouldn't be able to see her feline pupils. In Ant Lucia's design, she's biting her lip in what is supposed to be a "seductive" manner, but doesn't really work. It's to this mini's credit that it doesn't attempt to do that. Technically the bit of bra visible inside her shirt should have a cheetah print on it, but it's just brown here. Thankfully, they kept the pattern on the sash she wears, because that was specifically
designed to suggest her tail. She has a knife molded at her waist, but the only thing she's going to shoot anything with is her camera.
Just like Lil Bombshells Series 1 received a full set of repaints as "Series 1.5," there was going to be a "Series 2.5," as well. Those were cancelled, but we do have concept art of what they would have been. Variant Cheetah would have been shades of white and gray instead of yellow and tan, so I guess the idea is that she was less Cheetah and more Snow Leopard? We're not missing a lot by losing that one.
