Elfquest-40 years
Elfquest.
Today mark's it's 40th anniversary, and the release of the final issue of its final story. Wendy and Richard Pini have been at this story for a very long time.Wow, what a trip.
I discovered the series back in, 1995 or 1996 or so when one of my penpals from the Gargoyles fandom (before the internet people!) told me about it and it sounded like a thing. I went to comic shops and hunted down issues. Back when that was still a thing you did and when I was living on a meager allowance and it took all the money I had saved and begging my mom to help out in order to get it.
It was a different comic. A loaded giant cast of characters that lived and breathed, loved and died, giant wars, nasty villains, and even had sex! It was an "adult comic", but not because of the bit of sex or the violence, but because it treated the story like a real story, like the best novels It was a great story combined with fantastic art unlike anything I'd really seen in comics before completely different from all the superhero stuff. (manga hadn't come along yet and I hadn't discovered the likes of Conan the Barbarian yet). Suffice to say, I became a fan.
The Marvel reprints of the first series were most of what I was able to find initially (but missing a large chunk of it) along with *most* of the two sequel series, Siege at Blue Mountain and Kings of the Broken Wheel, which were in black and white. The story was in fragments, but I eventually hunted down the trades and missing back issues, and eventually even managed to find 17 of the 20 original printed issues (Which are oversized.) I followed the series after it added multiple artists and started to do multiple books at once, and then later when it become a 30 issue black and white anthology, and the handful of stories they've done over the years since. (It has not been continuous publication for 40 years.)
After moving to Canada to be with my wife, I ported many of my old books, but of all the comics I own, all the series I've read, its the one I've been rebuying the collected editions of. (Partly purely for the sake of having them in nice easy trades rather than hundreds of loose issues)
Over the least 22? 23? years, I must have read the original quest and its immediate follows up start to finish a dozen timestimes, and piecemeal I can't even count. (The later spinoffs like Shards and Hidden Years and the anthology I have read much less.)
I haven't reread it in some time, not in years. Life gets in the way after all. Of all my current friends there's really only one person who knows about the series so I never have anyone to talk to about it, but it is what it is.
I had planned to reread the whole series over the last month or so,(somewhere between 150 and 200 issues) leading up to "The Final Quest" which I actually haven't read at all as its come out the last two years, as I was sort of waiting for it to get close to the end... but I have the first three trades sitting on my shelf waiting and the digital issues for the last few waiting for me. A crazy deadline and travelling kind of got in the way of that, but I am going to binge at least a chunk of it over the next couple days while I'm a little more free than I have been.
That the series has reached it's end, that Wendy Pini after putting forty years of her life into it ha reached her natural retirement, that something I've followed for *decades* is ending? It's kind of a crazy feeling. (I can't imagine what I'll feel like when Gold Digger and One Piece finally end.) It's been a personal and important story for me for years, and that's hard to put into words and summarize.
I don't really know why I'm writing this wall or what I really want to say, but... big epics from childood don't often hit ending and anniversaries like this.
Congratulations on 40 years Elfquest. Been a hell of a ride.
Today mark's it's 40th anniversary, and the release of the final issue of its final story. Wendy and Richard Pini have been at this story for a very long time.Wow, what a trip.
I discovered the series back in, 1995 or 1996 or so when one of my penpals from the Gargoyles fandom (before the internet people!) told me about it and it sounded like a thing. I went to comic shops and hunted down issues. Back when that was still a thing you did and when I was living on a meager allowance and it took all the money I had saved and begging my mom to help out in order to get it.
It was a different comic. A loaded giant cast of characters that lived and breathed, loved and died, giant wars, nasty villains, and even had sex! It was an "adult comic", but not because of the bit of sex or the violence, but because it treated the story like a real story, like the best novels It was a great story combined with fantastic art unlike anything I'd really seen in comics before completely different from all the superhero stuff. (manga hadn't come along yet and I hadn't discovered the likes of Conan the Barbarian yet). Suffice to say, I became a fan.
The Marvel reprints of the first series were most of what I was able to find initially (but missing a large chunk of it) along with *most* of the two sequel series, Siege at Blue Mountain and Kings of the Broken Wheel, which were in black and white. The story was in fragments, but I eventually hunted down the trades and missing back issues, and eventually even managed to find 17 of the 20 original printed issues (Which are oversized.) I followed the series after it added multiple artists and started to do multiple books at once, and then later when it become a 30 issue black and white anthology, and the handful of stories they've done over the years since. (It has not been continuous publication for 40 years.)
After moving to Canada to be with my wife, I ported many of my old books, but of all the comics I own, all the series I've read, its the one I've been rebuying the collected editions of. (Partly purely for the sake of having them in nice easy trades rather than hundreds of loose issues)
Over the least 22? 23? years, I must have read the original quest and its immediate follows up start to finish a dozen timestimes, and piecemeal I can't even count. (The later spinoffs like Shards and Hidden Years and the anthology I have read much less.)
I haven't reread it in some time, not in years. Life gets in the way after all. Of all my current friends there's really only one person who knows about the series so I never have anyone to talk to about it, but it is what it is.
I had planned to reread the whole series over the last month or so,(somewhere between 150 and 200 issues) leading up to "The Final Quest" which I actually haven't read at all as its come out the last two years, as I was sort of waiting for it to get close to the end... but I have the first three trades sitting on my shelf waiting and the digital issues for the last few waiting for me. A crazy deadline and travelling kind of got in the way of that, but I am going to binge at least a chunk of it over the next couple days while I'm a little more free than I have been.
That the series has reached it's end, that Wendy Pini after putting forty years of her life into it ha reached her natural retirement, that something I've followed for *decades* is ending? It's kind of a crazy feeling. (I can't imagine what I'll feel like when Gold Digger and One Piece finally end.) It's been a personal and important story for me for years, and that's hard to put into words and summarize.
I don't really know why I'm writing this wall or what I really want to say, but... big epics from childood don't often hit ending and anniversaries like this.
Congratulations on 40 years Elfquest. Been a hell of a ride.