The next ep I illustrated for the Xena virtual season was The Battle of Amphipolis. I very much liked this story, & it ended up influencing my current project, a Xena webcomic, Rock of Ages. Xena reunites with her brother Toris in season 7, both wrestling with guilt over the death of their mother, burned as a witch years ago.

There’s a lot of flashbacks to Xena’s teen years predating the warlord attack that would come to define her. I thought her psychological portrait connected the dots in her story, from the pilot to AFIN. This inspired me to take a similar approach with Eve.

My drawing skills aren’t as sharp in this ep, so I’ll only post a few. I had begun to spend more time researching, since my knowledge of the show at this time (21 years ago) was mostly seasons 4-6, since that’s when I began watching.

The 1st Xena dvd wasn’t released until 2002, after I’d left the vs, so I depended on vhs tapes of select eps, & relied a lot on Whoosh & the many screenshot libraries that existed back then. This vs ep was based on Death Mask, a season 1 ep, not popular with the fandom so difficult to find.

The drawing above is a teenage #Xena bickering with her mom, Cyrene. I really liked these scenes, & I think they very likely inspired my portrayal of Salmoneus’s difficulties with his daughter in my upcoming project.