If you’re familiar with the ElfQuest series at all, you probably already understand why I think it’s amazing, epic, and one of the most gloriously beautiful comic book series ever created. If you’re not familiar with ElfQuest…well where the heck have you been?
First printed waaaaay back in 1978, ElfQuest started as an independently owned and published comic book series written and illustrated by Wendy Pini, with her husband Richard Pini contributing as editor and co-writer. Over the course of thirty-six years it’s spanned more than a dozen different story lines, and is one of the first successful comic book series that has attracted an equal number of male and female readers. The comic is amazingly well-written and (I’m going to be harping on the artwork a lot in this review) absolutely gorgeous.
ElfQuest: The Final Quest began its run in January of this year, and the first graphic novel for the title will be out in April of 2015. For anyone who’s interested in starting this series from the beginning (or for those nostalgic fans who want to update their collection) Dark Horse Books has released a graphic novel that collects all four books of the original series in one volume.
I first stumbled across ElfQuest when I was twelve years old, and it’s hard to describe the impact that the series had on me. Up until that point, comic books meant Teen Titans, the occasional digest-sized Superfriends issue at the grocery story magazine rack, and some fairly terrifying (to me) Ghostrider covers I saw at a vintage comic book sale. And then out of the blue someone loaned me Fire and Flight, the first ElfQuest graphic novel. The series was originally published in magazine-sized issues in black-and-white, but the graphic novels were printed in full color, and they were absolutely staggering.
And if the beautiful artwork wasn’t enough to draw me in, the main characters are known as the Wolfriders. Elves, telepathically bonded with wolves. Which they ride. It was like something right out of a daydream, and it couldn’t have been more perfect.
The main core of the story follows the Wolfriders as they search for a new home, after being driven out by a band of primitive humans trying to wipe out all elves. It was one of the first stories of real fanaticism that I’d ever read, and it was hard to believe and yet so true that someone would be so caught up in race-hatred that they would destroy even their own homes by burning the entire forest to the ground, just so they could finally “win”. The elves retreat underground to the trolls’ domain (another group that only barely tolerates the elves’ existence) and then find themselves stranded in the desert. Barely making it across the wasteland alive, the elves stumble across a village of distant (and previously unknown) relatives, make probably the worst possible introduction of themselves, and through a series of misunderstandings, discoveries, rivalry, and thwarted love, eventually find a happily-ever-after with their kin, the Sunfolk, in the village of Sorrow’s End.
That’s just the first graphic novel. After that, things get a lot darker.
The real quest begins when the elves realize that nowhere on the World of Two Moons is safe from humans, so Cutter and Skywise – the leader of the Wolfriders and his best friend – set out to search for other tribes of elves. The ones they find aren’t nearly as peaceful as the Sunfolk, and in some cases they’re downright dangerous. Parts of the story were frightening, parts were hilarious (the chapter with the drinking party still makes me laugh), many scenes had an otherworldly beauty. And at least one development hurt. I mean really hurt. I remember going to a family dinner and having to hide the fact that I was in mourning for a fictional character. Over the course of the first four graphic novels, Wendy and Richard Pini created a whole world and a history of the elves that spanned several generations. I finished reading the fourth book and was absolutely convinced that the only thing anyone would have to do to earn my undying loyalty would be to hand me a book titled “ElfQuest Volume 5.”
So the story was amazing, but the real draw for me was the artwork. I can’t say enough good things about Wendy Pini as an artist. She created an entire population of characters with delicate features and big eyes, every one of them with their own quirks and personalities that come through with just a few skillfully placed lines. Remember, this series was originally done in black-and-white, and yet Wendy can still convey things like shimmering fabric, long silky hair, or moonlight shining off of eyes. I bought one of my sisters an artbook Wendy Pini had done for a proposed Elric The Stormbringer animated movie (never made, sadly), and I almost didn’t want to give it up. It was just that beautiful.
There have been several reprints of the entire series, and just about everything is now available on the ElfQuest website. All of it. For free. Quite a handy resource for those of us who like to revisit the story at random times during the day but don’t want to haul our graphic novel collection around with us. If you want the entire story in print format you should…well actually if you happen to find any of the graphic novels printed in 1981 you should grab those suckers first; they’re definitely my favorites. The twenty original WaRP issues (that’s Wendy and Richard Pini, if you’re curious about the publisher name) are worth buying as well, since the newsprint pages have a surprising amount of warmth, and you also get the full-color painting on the cover and another painting on the back featuring a different set of characters for each issue. Both of those versions are hard to find, so you may have to pick a more recent printing. ElfQuest: The Grand Quest and ElfQuest: Wolfrider collect many of the stories together in manga format, but I’m not really a fan of either collection (Wolfrider in particular bugs me by putting every issue printed in the series in chronological order, including later issues that were drawn by other artists. The results are irritatingly choppy; I think narrative flow is a lot more important than chronology.)
The Complete ElfQuest puts together the first few volumes with the story as originally published. It also sticks with the tried-and-true format in the original black-and-white artwork (touched up in a few places, but not obviously so), and has several bonus pages with the original scripts and layouts for the Fire and Flight story. And at 720 pages, it looks nicely impressive on a bookshelf.
According to the reviews on Amazon, there’s a minor printing error in this volume. Page 405 was accidentally replaced with a repeat of page 371. Just something to keep in mind.