Here is the original art for an action-filled splash page from Topps' X:WP comic book #0. Xena looks more like Lawless than we see in later issues of comic books.
It's a great splash page, composed to give us intense action vignette's through out. There's that little vertical rectangle of Xena seeing Gab in danger even with her Gabwhacker in use. That zombie's head that Xena separates from it's body with such force it looks like it will fly up and out of the page. Xena's sword is also poised to pierce the 4th wall and enter our space. Argo is having NONE of it and there is another zombie coming through on the lower right, literally foreshadowed. Aaron Lopresti is terrific at action sequences.
And little did we know, the title is actually Xena: Lesbian Princess on this 2 page spread:
I give you the labeling in full in the photo below. This is Lopresti's handwriting. Given this was pretty early on in the show's run, I was surprised to see this on the art board. Fandom was fervently divided between those who saw the "subtext" of a lesbian relationship between Xena and Gabrielle and those who didn't. The online subtext wars were pretty intense, so much so that some fans retreated to a private email list where new members were vetted by people on the list. And, because there were several instances where men hid behind female online personas, one of the vetting rules was that you had to have met the person in the physical world. Straight men pretending to be lesbians was a bizarre thing for most of us in this nascent neophyte internet world. Geez, I digressed again. But that is the context of what popped into my head when I saw the text on the piece.
2 comments:
It's a beautiful pc of art. I have a few pages from the Dark Horse run.. and I absolutely love them.
Dark Horse hired some excellent artists. I liked some of the Topps covers especially. To be honest, I've liked the art more than the stories.
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