Young Hercules Unofficial Magazine Covers
Young Hercules Magazine
The cover stories are:
The Sons of Zeus
"Am I the Only Normal One?"
Ten Simple Ways to Handle The Strife and Discord in your Life
From Hydras to Hair Spray
How to Defeat Monsters And Still Make it to the Prom on Time
Father's Day Gift Ideas
What to Get the Dad that Rules the Universe
Making the Most of Your Divine Protection Order
The 3 Stooges:
Being Moe isn't All Bad!
(Guess Who's Larry and Curly!)
...(Or Should that be Shemp?)
Young Iolaus Magazine
The cover stories are:
Bringing Up Baby
A Single Parent's Guide To Raising a Basilisk
How I Stopped Stealing Goods And Started Stealing Hearts
Memoirs of a Young Cadet
Oh, Deer!
How to Cope With Having Two Left Hooves
Tour Dates!
Find Out if Iolaus is Coming to a Village Near You!
"It's a Gift"
Techniques for Sniffing Out Girls
What to do When You Hear the Words:
"Get the Little Guy!"
Young Jason Magazine
The cover stories are:
It's Good to be the King
How to Rule a Kingdom And Still Find Time for Fun!
Sounding Authoritative
Even When Your Voice Cracks
101 Uses for Corinthian Leather
Ten Best Ways
To Get Out of Arranged Marriages
Fish and Feta Popovers!
King Jason's Favorite Recipes Inside!
Contest!
Win Jason's Shirt!
(He hardly ever wears it anyway)
Ares Magazine
The cover stories are:
Making Bad Look SO Good!
10 Ways To Torment Your Half-Mortal Brother
Without Actually Killing Him
Daddy's Little Princess?
Speculations on Ares and Xena
Keeping Your Head Held High
Even When Your Little Brother Can Kick Your Butt
Contest!
Take My Nephew, Please!
Win a Day Kicking Strife Around!
Strife Magazine
The cover stories are:
Strife's Guide To Brown-Nosing
Top Ten Ways To
Piss-Off Ares
The Best Remedies
For Lightning Burns
Making The Most
Of the Crumbs Brushed Your Way
Fashion Tips
Making a Statement with Safety-Pins
No-No's: Step Away From the Be-Dazzler Please!
How To Impress Girls
With a Winning Giggle
Explanation
This piece of autographed fan art was created by Ebay user xenahercmerch, who wrote:
I had a fan website called Arachne's Cave during 1998-2000 that now no longer exists. For fun, I created fictitious magazine covers starring various characters from Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and Young Hercules. I based the design of the fictitious magazine covers on the real Topps magazine covers of the Xena: Warrior Princess, Official Magazine. I figured, Xena had her own magazine, why not the other characters?
I used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to design and create the covers.
The first "Unofficial Magazine" I created was for Joxer: The Mighty. The second cover I created was Iolaus: Golden Hunter. I contacted the president of the Michael Hurst (Iolaus) fan club and what we did was run a contest where people could send in their own ideas for what should appear as magazine article titles on the cover. I picked the winners, used their winning ideas on the cover, sent copies of the covers to the fan club president, who then sent them on to Michal Hurst, who autographed them and sent them back to the fan club president, who sent them back to me, and I then sent the autographed covers to all the winners. I kept one autographed cover for myself.
I kept on making more covers for more characters and ran monthly contests. I sent all the winners copies of the covers as their prize.
I was able to collect a number of other autographed art covers in a number of ways.
One winner of the Autolycus: King of Thieves contest took a copy of the cover to a convention that Bruce Campbell appeared at and got it autographed for me. Bruce wound up contacting me by email and asked me to send him copies of his cover. What a compliment! :)
Over the next few years I continued to run monthly contests and was fortunate enough to get a few more of the celebrities to participate in the contests. Robert Trebor, who I contacted via his Palindromes website, agreed to choose the contest winning captions himself and sign the covers for the winners for his character, Salmoneous: SuperSalesman and Love Doctor. Joel Tobeck, who I contacted via his fan club president, also judged and autographed the Strife: Godling of War Special Memorial Edition cover for the contest winners (this was after poor Stife's death on the show, hence the "Memorial"). Joel was also wanting to do another cover for his Deimos character, but unfortunately, there were no Creation Entertainment photos of Deimos.
I was able to get some of the covers autographed at conventions. I had sent Renee O'Conner two copies of her character's cover, Gabrielle: Warrior Sidekick, just so that she could get a few laughs. Unexpectedly, she wound up autographing them and sending them back to me! I sent Kevin Sorbo a copy of his cover, Hercules: Half Man, Half God, All Hunk, and he sent me back a very nice letter thanking me.
At one convention, I gave Kevin Smith a notebook containing all the covers that I had created to that point. I later found out through someone who had attended a convention and had spoken to one of the celebrities (I don't recall who) that this notebook of covers had made the rounds on the set of Xena - they were passing it around for everyone to read! How cool is that? ;)
I don't own the rights to the photos. I have never sold any of these artwork covers, I have only given them away.
I wound up creating 26 "Unofficial Magazine" covers in all. Even Argo got his own cover! LOL
If you'd like to see all of the covers, look in my Photobucket album here: http://photobucket.com/TheUnofficialMagazineCovers