Tylenol Zine Steve Powers AKA Espo 2004

This one’s a bit of odd ball in that it’s a “zine” that for the first and maybe last time in history came with a corporate marketing tie in.

In 2003 Tylenol was looking to bolster its declining youth demographic. And of course, what do kids love more than extreme sports? Well zines of course!

Jokes aside Tylenol was somehow convinced create a campaign aligning themselves with cool kid stuff including extreme sports, street art and indie comics.

The legendary Beautiful Losers street art exhibition was making waves in the art world. And Tylenol wanted in. They created this zine with the one of the exhibitions artists Steve Powers (Espo) and a set of vinyl dolls based on a Ron Rege comic. Other known collaborations included comics by Jakie Gendel and Photos by Alex Klein although those last two seemed to have disappeared from the internet entirely

Seen here the Espo zine (which was also 3-D for some reason ) and 3 out of Ron Rege’s 4Vinyl’s dolls manufactured by Critterbox pictured here actually pretty fun. Their connection to the product however is awkward at best.

It will come as no surprise the collaborations didn’t last very long, particularly the artists tie ins. If Anyone has any information on any additional collateral that came out of the of this campaign, we would love to hear from you.