Creation Story
Marvel in 2015 had the same problem every legacy publisher always has: the universe was full. Every slot was taken. Every name was a legacy holder. Brand-new characters that actually stuck were rare, and the ones that did were mostly variants on existing titles. Spider-Gwen worked because the Spider-Man market had room. Kamala Khan worked because Ms. Marvel was a vacated mantle. Anything starting from zero was a hard sell.
Brandon Montclare and Amy Reeder pitched a hard sell. A nine-year-old Black girl from the Lower East Side. No legacy mantle. No teen-superhero archetype to borrow from. The hook was that she’d be paired with Jack Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur, the literal 1978 character, dragged into Earth-616 through a dimensional accident. Not a remake. Not a reimagining. The actual Kirby dinosaur. That detail mattered more than it sounds, because it gave the book a Marvel-history claim it wouldn’t have had with a generic T. rex sidekick.
Natacha Bustos drew the interiors. Her style was nothing like what Marvel was shipping that month. Looser, kid-paced, more European-comics in its rhythm. Lunella’s design (compact, goggles, helmet hair) read clean against the panel layouts in a way that signaled the book wasn’t trying to compete with the standard cape titles. Reeder covered the early issues. The package was specific and intentional and didn’t really look like anything else on the new-release rack in late 2015.
The book ran 47 issues across nearly four years. It stayed niche the entire run. That’s a feature, not a bug. It meant the same writers and the same artist held tone for the full arc, which is rare for a modern Marvel ongoing. The character got the IQ ranking, the Inhuman gene, the body-swap arc with Devil, the Champions cameo, and the slow accumulation of crossover appearances that turn a niche book into a fixture. By the time the title ended in 2019, Lunella was a permanent piece of the Marvel toy box.
Then 2023 happened. Disney+ launched the animated series. Diamond White voiced Lunella, Tatyana Ali played Adria, Fred Tatasciore voiced Devil. The show ran two seasons and ended up being one of the strongest Disney/Marvel animated projects of its era. Tay Money’s theme song spent enough time in heavy rotation that kids who’d never read a Marvel comic could sing it back. The animated series did what the comic run had spent four years not doing: pushed Lunella into the Marvel-mainstream consciousness.
First Appearance, First Cover, First Solo Title: Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #1
The book hit shelves November 25, 2015, with a February 2016 cover date. 32 pages. Cover price was $3.99, which was the standard Marvel #1 price for the era. The cover is Amy Reeder: Lunella in goggles, hand outstretched, the red T. rex looming behind her. The composition is deliberately not a fight scene. There’s no villain on the cover. It’s a girl and her dinosaur, and the visual language is closer to a YA book jacket than a typical Marvel #1, which made it stand out on a rack mostly full of Secret Wars tie-ins.
Print run was modest. Marvel didn’t market the book as a tentpole. There was no variant-cover frenzy beyond the standard Marvel ratio incentives, no “blank sketch cover” gimmick, no big retailer-incentive treatment. It launched quietly and earned its audience issue by issue.
The story opens in the Lower East Side. Lunella is in fourth grade at P.S. 20, hiding her IQ from her teachers and her classmates because she’s already figured out that being the smartest kid in the room is socially expensive. She’s working on a project at home: a Kree omni-wave projector she’s reverse-engineered from notes. The thing accidentally pulls a hostile tribe of Killer-Folk through a dimensional rift, with Devil Dinosaur in pursuit. Devil ends up bonded to her. The Killer-Folk become her first recurring antagonists. Most of the original creative team’s intentions for the book are visible inside the first 22 pages.
Two more details that matter for the collector framing. First, the issue is also the first appearance of Lunella’s mom Adria Lafayette, who becomes a major supporting character through the run and is voiced by Tatyana Ali in the animated series. Second, the issue resurfaces Devil Dinosaur in Marvel canon for the first time since the 1970s. Most collectors don’t think of MGDD #1 as a Devil Dinosaur key, but technically it is. The 1978 Kirby Devil Dinosaur #1 is the original first appearance; the 2015 issue is the first canonical Earth-616 reappearance.
For collectors, MGDD #1 has been the slow-building modern key it deserves to be. The print run is small enough that high-grade survival is reasonable but not abundant. The animated series in 2023 reset the demand curve. A CGC 9.8 first print sat in the $40 to $80 range for most of 2017 to 2022, and roughly tripled in the year after the show launched. It’s still cheap by absolute measure, which is part of why it’s one of the more interesting modern Marvel keys to think about: a character with real cultural traction, a creative team that delivered on the original premise, and a debut book that hasn’t yet been priced like the obvious modern keys around it.
