So, what is this #Xena project about? What does it entail?
This will be a free webcomic on my blog over the course of the next year, & should begin in a few months.
In the meantime, I will be getting pages ready offline, while posting essays & work-in-progress online.
It features #Xena’s daughter, Eve, her mothers, & a host of other characters, including Salmoneus, a Hercules regular. Both characters are unusual choices for fan fiction, as they are difficult to depict. At least, they tend not to fit well with the usual fan fiction topics.
Of course, Eve is quite popular among fans in her former self: the evil Roman commander Livia. It’s her redeemed version, Eve, that’s less accessible to fans, mostly because she involves difficult concepts that didn’t have time to flourish in season 6’s hectic pace.
I love a challenge, however, and I particularly love Eve as a story subject, whose arc has always fascinated me. I’ll talk more specifically about the challenges involved, in a few weeks, & why I think Salmoneus is a good fit for this subject.
My goal is to tell a #Xena story that’s as close to canon as I can get, but more than that, I want to expand on Eve’s character in a way that feels authentic and consistent with the show. I’m hoping to present a clearer yet credible picture of her story arc.
Because the actor, Adrienne Wilkinson, is a singer/dancer, I felt a musical comedy the best way to go to really stretch the possibilities of the character. Much of the cast can also sing, & there’s been several musicals during the show’s run.
My belief is that eventually there’d be a musical featuring Eve, had the show lasted long enough. And if I’m wrong, then there should’ve been, let’s just say. I first had this idea shortly after the show ended, in 2001, when there was still realistic talk of a sequel.
In fact, an Eve spin-off was in the works, at that time, & came very, very close to happening; everyone was on board, but it fell through for the kind of trivial, logistical want-of-a-nail reasons that we are all too familiar with these days.
Like many fans at that time, I speculated what that show could’ve looked like, how it would’ve been structured, & how it would’ve kept the world of #Xena alive. An Eve spin-off is still a possibility imo, & I’ll talk more about my ideas on that in the weeks to come.
A #Xena revival is also a possibility; I’ll talk about that too, & in some ways, this project is my attempt to visualize what a “Xena: The Next Generation” would look like. Of course, I consider Eve a key part of that next generation!
Each day this week I’ll have more to say about the scope of this project, then in the coming weeks, I’ll get into the nitty-gritty of what went into my thinking behind this effort, decades in the making. Content warning: I may talk your ears off about #Xena!