I'm sure everything I'll say has been said before, but I'll say it anyway. Finally, a female turian! When I saw the design I, too, was shocked and a bit dismayed, but 70% of the reason I don't like the design is the artwork itself. The artists and colorists that work on it are professionals who are certainly superior to my artistic abilities, but sometimes they just draw things wrong. My main gripe is her neck.
In the picture, the back of her skull is rounded, and there is a dip in the place where the base of her skull ends and her neck begins. Turians, however, have an arched, almost snakelike neck, and their faces tend to slope forward towards the chin, giving them a distinctive raptorial profile. This design looks like someone slapped a turian mask on a bald human, but mainly because of the way she's drawn--with a flat face and a human-shaped head.
I understand what they were going for. Turians are an avian race, and male birds are visually more impressive than females. However, there are two things to consider. If we're going to make turian features analogous to Earth bird evolutionary idiosyncracies, consider that the turians are predators, and predatory birds, i. e. raptors, do not typically share the same striking sexual dimoprhism as shown in prey-birds. Indeed, if we go the earth-analogue route, females should be larger than the males, as this is seen in many raptor species, particularly eagles. Of course, these are aliens, and subject to whatever laws of evolution their creators want to subject them to.
I would be okay with larger females, too. The idea of a big hulking female badass turian makes me happy inside, but I digress.
The second thing to consider is the nature of the fringe itself. As far as the fringe goes, I'm with the folks that feel that her fringe should be present, only more discreet, and perhaps curved downward along the profile of her neck. Turian fringes look like they serve a function--the plates have been mentioned in the codex to have been an evolutionary adaption against radiation, and in addition the elongated shape could easily be used to remove excess body heat on their naturally-warm homeworld. If nothing else, it looks to be extended shielding for their necks, so it's function rather that just form.
In most cases of evolution (once again, this is all Earth-based, so it's subject to being easily dismissed) the female of the species is the better-protected. The very reason we see birds with duller plumage is because such an adaptation makes it easier for them to hide from predators. In brutal terms, males only have to live long enough to fertilize the female, but females have to live through their entire gestation as well as the rearing period for their young in order to be a successful species. It doesn't make sense to me why a female would lack an anatomical trait that is primarily protective.
Of course, this can also be dismissed by reminding us that, though turians did evolve from a primal ancestor, they have had many years to shape their evolution according to the geography of their society rather than their planet. Traits that might have been useful for survival on Palaven might not have been as successful where getting a date was concerned. Nowadays it's hip for human females to be rail-thin. Such scrawny specimens would be considered sick or weak by primal standards, but we don't adhere to them any longer. The same thing could be said for males. The media rarely depicts a well-muscled male with the proper amount of body fat. In the wild, being able to see the movement of every muscle and tendon underneath one's skin would not be a good thing.
Perhaps a long fringe is considered masculine by turian standards, and over the course of their social evolution the undesirable trait in turian females has reduced itself. One might argue that such a dramatic change couldn't come about so quickly, but that depends entirely on genetic structure. Case in point: canines. Human will has bent canines into amazingly varied shapes over the course of our interaction with them. This has primarily to do with a quirk of their DNA. Even if turians did not engage in eugenics-type social experiments, it's entirely possible that simple social preference created such a dramatic change if the price is right as far as DNA structure is concerned.
And though they do have something of a fringe, it's not enough to warrent, I think, the in-game comments about them. Why would Garrus compliment a female's fringe if it's noticeably absent? "Darling, your lack of fringe appeals to me?" And the bachelor party on Illium was intended to be comedic, but the turian member specifically compared an asari head-fringe to a turian's. He never specifically said female turians, but I don't see why he would have picked out a male-specific trait to focus on as far as asari attractiveness goes unless he prefers males, and he clearly states later on that he is displeased by the lack of female turians on Illium.
Unless, of course, he swings both ways, which is also cool, but somewhat of flimsy argument when trying to undermine the validity of his comment. Things said in-game can be retconned, of course. Video games are always works in progress, and the result of an entire team's worth of labor. There's simply so much that goes into them that sometimes details like that slip through. Perhaps that will be the case with the female turian head-fringe.
There is also the possibility of a subspecies. Though it's been stated that alien populations are more or less homogenous, we clearly saw a sub-species in Saren, and individual variance can also be considered. Just because one turian female looks this way doesn't mean they all do.
All this said, I reiterate that 70% of why I'm not sold on this design is the art. With the right curve of the neck and slope of her face, she'd look like a turian again. Properly rendered and lovingly textured by Bioware, I'm sure she'd look much better. I just feel that this interpretation makes her look very human, which I dislike. I'm all for female aliens that are just that: alien. The turian design is one of my favorites in the game. They might have been attempting to go the opposite route, but it looks to me like there was an attempt to make look more human, to perhaps protray her as a character that a human male would find attractive? I could be wholly wrong, but I'm getting that vibe here.
And we already have the asari for eye-candy. That was their primary purpose; it's even stated in the first art book that a race of desirable "green alien girls" was the original concept for them. That said, they have developed into an interesting society and, in my opinion, a pretty damn cool addition to the Mass Effect universe, but we really don't need more eye-candy. I like the fact that Bioware never intended for turians to be attractive, and yet they became one of the most popular species with the fans. It works out very well when they don't try too hard.
I do like her significantly wider hips and notiable lack of a bust. Thank goodness for that. My only remaining issue with this is--why is she barefaced? A lot of turians in the comic completely lack their facial insignias. I'm pretty sure all of the ones in the entire Redemption series completely lack them. Do the colorists just not know? C'mon, you guys, you're getting paid to do something a lot of us fans would trip over ourselves in enthusiasm to do--work on a Mass Effect comic! Please make sure you at least jive with the canon!
tl;dr: The lack of fringe doesn't jive with SCIENCE, but there are many factors to consider that could easily make it otherwise fit. Primarily, it's the way she's drawn I dislike.
I'll just hang out here in Camp Wait-n-See with the rest of y'all.
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Just some thoughts of mine on this:
