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Boing Boing, one of my favorite blogs, is going to start publishing new chapters of Elfquest, the comic that was the shining and beloved fandom of my youth. World, you do love me and I love you back so much.
What I love the most about this announcement, besides the fact that it's real and it's happening, is that it shows that Elfquest's creators Richard and Wendy Pini are eminently sensible people who genuinely cherish and prioritize their fans. The comic stopped appearing regularly a decade ago, and the last time any new material came out was in 2006. Releasing the new series online is sure to get Elfquest a lot more attention and a lot more new fans than if they'd tried starting over in paper publishing. And this isn't the first time that the Pinis show that their main objective is to make sure that Elfquest is always accessible to old and new fans: in 2008-2009, they released the whole 6000+ pages of the series on their website entirely for free.
Devour it before the new series starts! Begin with the Original Quest. In its later years, the series branched out into a lot of spin-offs by guest artists, and some of those were not exactly earth-shattering. But the bits drawn by Wendy (MY HERO), especially the first couple of series, are consistently excellent and beautiful and very, very moving. After the first few issues, the art goes from pretty to stunningly gorgeous, and the story is captivating. Elfquest was one of the first US comics to seriously deal with character deaths, non-heteronormative sexuality, and other 'adult' themes, and still feels wonderfully fresh and new today.
(More Elfquest. I can't believe it. All right, I'll probably spend the whole run of the new series tearing my hair out in frustration because my favorite characters, Pike and his Go-Back harem, are in Ember's tribe and it sounds like the new series is going to be all about Cutter's tribe. But I'll live. I'm so looking forward to moaning about all the things I used to moan about!)
What I love the most about this announcement, besides the fact that it's real and it's happening, is that it shows that Elfquest's creators Richard and Wendy Pini are eminently sensible people who genuinely cherish and prioritize their fans. The comic stopped appearing regularly a decade ago, and the last time any new material came out was in 2006. Releasing the new series online is sure to get Elfquest a lot more attention and a lot more new fans than if they'd tried starting over in paper publishing. And this isn't the first time that the Pinis show that their main objective is to make sure that Elfquest is always accessible to old and new fans: in 2008-2009, they released the whole 6000+ pages of the series on their website entirely for free.
Devour it before the new series starts! Begin with the Original Quest. In its later years, the series branched out into a lot of spin-offs by guest artists, and some of those were not exactly earth-shattering. But the bits drawn by Wendy (MY HERO), especially the first couple of series, are consistently excellent and beautiful and very, very moving. After the first few issues, the art goes from pretty to stunningly gorgeous, and the story is captivating. Elfquest was one of the first US comics to seriously deal with character deaths, non-heteronormative sexuality, and other 'adult' themes, and still feels wonderfully fresh and new today.
(More Elfquest. I can't believe it. All right, I'll probably spend the whole run of the new series tearing my hair out in frustration because my favorite characters, Pike and his Go-Back harem, are in Ember's tribe and it sounds like the new series is going to be all about Cutter's tribe. But I'll live. I'm so looking forward to moaning about all the things I used to moan about!)
