Me

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I’m Jan . Growing older yeah, but but refusing to  grow up.

I always have spent many hours reading and collecting things. Stones, fossils, sugar bags, coins… you know. In the late fifties or early sixties, Ivanhoe was on TV. The sword fighting medieval knight. Not everybody had a TV back then in our village, but we had one. There were other TV series for kids in those days, but this Ivanhoe was something else. 

He was my first hero. He was in my dreams. He was with me at school. I often had to stay late after school when the other kids went to their homes. The medieval knight had kept me from schoolwork more than once. Soon me and my brother and some friends had our own army. When Saint Nicolas (sort of Santa Claus) arrived that year he gave us two iron bucklers our father had made. One in the form of the Ivanhoe buckler, complete with red bird on it, and a round one. The round one was for me. My brother was Ivanhoe and I was Gurth,  the second man. Not exactly a fair deal because I was older, but hey, that’s just how it was.

Later other heroes followed. The Avengers, the Prisoner… I wasn’t interested in girls back then.

When I left basic school I went to a school that should open the doors to an aviation career, but I blew that completely in the first and only year I attended that school. The next year I found myself learning a trade. Like carpenter, blacksmith or car mechanic. I liked that school (although I finally ended up in a quite different corner). It was in Amsterdam. My first steps alone in that big city. Here I met the music of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash and that music is still with me.

I always liked to read stories. There was a second hands comic book shop near that school. And there they sold copies of Heavy Metal, Magnus the robot fighter and years later art books from artists like Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. From then on the stones and fossils and coins had to make place for these books of art. Every artist who paints or in any other way puts women on paper or on canvas, on calendars or in (strip) books, can be part of this collection of painted beauties.

I made this website out of frustration over the way they ended the Xena Warrior Princess series. It was a real shock to learn they killed her. Imaginary heroes usually live on forever. My first thought  was to make a site about her. For the warrior. Some sort of shrine. But there are already so many Xena websites. And so many good ones. It's almost impossible to come up with something new in that area. So I decided to do the next best thing. Build a shrine for all heroines who only exist in artwork on paper, films or games. 

There are many sites about fantasy heroines and heroes. Most of these sites are specialized in one or a small number of characters who are connected by publisher or by the universe they live in. If you want to know much about a certain character, search the internet for it. These sites usually can give you much more info about the character than my site does. This is just a place for them to meet. 

My favourite girls are the Lara Croft type adventurers and the Xena type warriors. Many of them are from European origin, at least their creators are. But I also include the American supergirls. They're imaginary heroines too so they belong here. 

Finally, thank you artists of the world who create these characters,  paint them and bringing them to life  in books, games or film.