Wendy and Richard Pini began the series “Elfquest” in 1978, and after 40 years, the longest-running American fantasy comic series came to a close in February in “Elfquest: The Last Quest” #24 from Dark Horse. At C2E2 I had the opportunity to talk to the Pinis as the reflected on their own long hero’s journey, or self quest. The Pinis already had a multidue of fans talking and waiting to talk to them before I arrived, and Chris Claremont came over at one point during our interview. The Pinis put out one of the original self-published comics, and after 40 years, they’re on their farewell tour. Check out the interview below.
Thank you both for doing this. So issue #24 of “The Last Quest,” your final issue of “Elfquest,” came out at the end of February, on the same day that the first issue came out 40 years ago. To each of you, what’s it been like to have created and been a part of something so magical for the last 40 years?
Wendy: Magical, that’s an interesting slant on the question. From a magical perspective, there hasn’t been much magic in just the sheer creation of the series, it’s just been sticking to it day after day, meeting the deadline, and that sort of thing. The magic happens when it all comes together. When you’ve got an issue planned out, the script is written, you do the layouts, you do the pencils, you do the inks, the color, and it is a very very magical moment when that package from Dark Horse comes in the mail and the issue is in your hands, and you’re flipping through it.
What has that been like for 40 years? It never gets old, it really doesn’t. We have sort of a little, what do you call it, ritual, that we do when we finish a series. We’ll take all the issues and we lay them out on the floor so we can look at all the covers. It’s just been a little ritual we’ve done for all these years.
Richard: For me, well the way you phrased the question, 40 years to the day this came out. I’ve been very lucky because Wendy is the creative force behind “Elfquest,” and I’ve been lucky every day to have helped facilitate that. I have done my, whatever, part creatively, but just helping to get it from her mind, and heart, and soul, out to the world in various ways printing or digital, or arranging a license is what I love to do. It’s the first and maybe only time in my life where I’ve been part of something where we started out to do a thing, and it took 40 years, but we got to the finish line and we did it just the way we wanted to do it. That’s just mind-expanding as an emotion.
Absolutely. What’s it like to have spent 40 years with this growing cast of characters? How have these characters changed and morphed from their original introduction til now where we’re leaving them at the end?
WP: Well it was always our intention to, in particular, take Cutter through a complete “hero’s journey.” That means we had to start him out as an untried, callow youth and take him through a maturing process of trials and tests that the hero has to go through. We had it very thoroughly plotted out. When it comes to “Final Quest,” that was figured out more than 20 years ago. The process of taking Cutter through the last part of his journey, through the cave, bringing the elixir back, and all the Joseph Campbell phases.
That’s such a beautiful idea, the hero’s journey, I’m a graduate student at The University of Chicago Divinity School actually so…
WP: Oh, so you understand that
That shit is awesome.
BOTH: [Laughs]
WP: You are right.
RP: That needs to be a meme, right there. “That shit is awesome,” with a picture of Joseph Campbell. Can you believe that? [Laughs]
WP: Yeah, so every character that we created is each in their own right the hero of their own story. Each one has a little bit of an arc, even if its a very small one for a background character. We always like to think about their lives. I’ll tell you something that may sound a little weird. We treat death seriously in “Elfquest.” We’re not the type of comic company that kills off a character and revives them. So when somebody dies in Elfquest they die. So even when I kill off a very minor character, or one of the humans, or one of the trolls, I’m always a little bit, you know, verklempt, because I think about that character’s life. Who they might have been, and what they might have done with their lives if they had the chance. They’re very real to us in certain ways.
Continued belowRP: Now here’s the thing. When you know where you must start and you know where you must end, you get to…It’s like taking a road trip from New York to Los Angeles. When you know you’ve got to start one place and get to that place, you have the ability to take side trips. With some of these characters we took some side trips that we didn’t quite know that we were going to take in the beginning. But, because we just loved sitting down over pizza and talking about story, an idea will strike one or the other of us and we’ll go “Oh my god!” And we go “What if instead of this they do that,” and that’s a side trip. That adds to the character development, it doesn’t change who they fundamentally are. We learned stuff just out of the blue that has made this story much richer than it might originally have been.
WP: Course in the early days it could’ve been a whole pizza, but these days we have to keep it to like two slices which means we have to talk faster. [Laughs]
RP: No then we just finish the conversation on the ride home. Then we have pizza for breakfast! [Laughs]
Very cool. Well how have you seen this world grow over the last few years, as the fantasy genre has changed, as your series has encompassed these other mediums like novels and RPGs, and how has it been having this series published by multiple different companies?
WP: Well, the thing of it is, our vision always stayed the same. Anytime we ever formed a license it was a complete non-interference kind of relationship. They always took the “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” attitude. So we never had anyone standing over us saying you need to do it this way or we need to change this or that.
In that sense we have been spoiled rotten because we really got to do it our way no matter who we hooked up with. We had a very strong vision for how we wanted to develop the world and keep it going. When we’ve worked with others who have done interpretations like for role playing games or card games or whatever we’ve been able to say no that character wouldn’t do that. We have a firmer grasp on what is and isn’t in our universe.
RP: We’ve been very lucky. “Elfquest” as far as we know is the only indie comic IP that’s been published by all the big three, Marvel, then DC, now Dark Horse. They have completely been editorially hands off. I guess from the very beginning we put forth a vibe that said, “This is ours and we know what we’re doing. We’re happy to work with you, but we’re not part of your particular editorial wheelhouse.” And they have said “That’s fine with us, because we appreciate “Elfquest” for what it is.
Genre has changed since we began. For example, the whole YA thing over the last decade or two, that’s a huge explosion and we’re very happy to see it. We’ve never changed “Elfquest” to make it more “YA.” What we have found is that the young adults who discover “Elfquest” just love it because it already speaks to them, and it already did from the very beginning until now.
WP: Yeah it was never aimed at children. We did it for ourselves and we told the kind of story we ourselves would enjoy and that means we treated mature topics I think wisely, with taste, but at the same time we didn’t shy away from certain mature issues.
What was it like to have self-published this comic when you did? How do you think it would be different trying to do something like that now in the age of Kickstarters?
WP: I’m gonna leave that you. [Laughs]
RP: Oh well when we started we didn’t know diddly squat about what we were doing. We knew that we wanted to tell this story. We knew we wanted it in the comic format because that was the best, as Will Eisner has famously said, “The best combination of words and pictures.”
There was no competition. You had the undergrounds, but they were their own genre. You had the mainstream and that was Marvel, DC, and Archie basically. We entered a completely, wide open and level playing field, and because it was “Elfquest” and full of Wendy’s wonderful artwork and spirit it took a new audience by storm. The direct market was just getting off and, you know, most indie comics were printing 100 or 500. We printed 10,000 and they flew right off the shelves. You couldn’t do that today, for a bunch of reasons. One, there’s just so many titles out there, there’s so much stuff.
Continued belowWP: And so much smaller shelf space.
RP: With Kickstarter, I see in our social media news feeds all the time, there’s a whole lot of Kickstarter campaigns going on that look really, really great, and we wish everybody well. But it’s tough though because look around, we’re in artist alley and there’s a couple hundred, at least, people here and they all want to do the same thing. So you have to keep at it, you have to be faithful. You know the first issue is easy, but you have to get numbers 2, and 3, and 4 out on time. But you have digital, you have the web. It costs nothing to go out there, but again you have to build an audience.
How did the process of publishing “Elfquest” change with the advent of digital comics?
RP: Well we were print and we still are print, and when digital came along we took advantage of that. I mean, we’re round heeled that way. [Laughs]
WP: We’re adaptable.
RP: I like her word better. [Laughs]
WP: Yeah I’ve been working digitally since about 2001. That was a big shift for me, to change, to teach myself Photoshop and all that. It’s almost a requirement nowadays that you be digital savvy just in order to meet those deadlines. I mean, a bimonthly book where you’re writing, and drawing and sometimes even coloring the darn thing, and you want to meet your publisher’s deadline, it has to be digital.
RP: Yeah, we have always been easy adapters to whatever the resources that became available to us.
So “Elfquest” has helped pioneer and bring attention to all these different trends in comics. We’ve already talked about this a little bit. Being a part of something for 40 years as the market has grown and changed, especially this idea, this notion, that women love comics as much as men do. How have you seen your series continue to be about inclusiveness and all these trends?
WP: Well that was automatic. See, in the beginning we didn’t know…well we were certainly always aware, we were flower children, we were part of the ‘70s, we were politically aware, and there were things we cared about. It seemed to us that the best kind of story in the world to tell would be about things that you care about. We didn’t set out to have a message of any kind, but we always included the stuff that mattered to us. As an artist, part of my world is that I need color, I want my characters to be all colors. So it was automatic for me to include, I suppose you could call them characters of color. Interestingly enough people came along and said they felt represented, but that wasn’t in our minds originally, it was a nice coincidence.
And so for other things, for example, the LGBTQ community, we have a huge audience there, because our characters represent the marginalized, the persecuted. The people who feel different who don’t fit in, and who fight for acceptance and all they want to do is get along and live in harmony in the world. But that was our theme, and again, it wasn’t intentional, but people who feel that way find “Elfquest” and it stays relevant because of that.
RP: “Elfquest” is all about finding others, finding family, finding tribe, finding community. We both come from backgrounds where that was kind of important as we grew up. Wendy didn’t come from a happy family, I didn’t come from the greatest family. We grew up wanting to find others of the same ilk. So that went in to “Elfquest.” We didn’t set out, as Wendy said, to do that. We did a market survey early on. This would have been like 1980, when the audience in comics was 95% male and 5% female. “Elfquest’s” audience was 55% female, and 45% male! And we just kept putting our own “self quest,” if you will, into the stories and different audiences, people of color, people feeling marginalized, people of different gender identifications would come to us and say, “Thank you for having characters like this or that or other.”
WP: Or, “I found myself in your book and I couldn’t find myself anywhere else. And wow, you know just wow.
Continued belowRP: You know the most relevant fantasy is the most truthful. And “Elfquest” is our truth, and we just put it out there.
After this long 40 year career what are you most proud of with this whole series coming away from it?
RP: [singing] We did it our way!
WP: Well you got me to thinking, we got many letters like this. I choose to believe them I don’t think they’re just for show. We received many letters from kids who said, and you may not believe this, “I was going to kill myself, but I had to know what was going to happened in the next issue.”
Oh my gosh.
WP: Now what do you do with that? You just…in other words someone’s alive because you told a story. I think of the story of Scheherazade, you know the story of Scheherazade? It’s an ancient, Arabian Nights fairy tale. She was a concubine of a very cruel sultan who would marry a wife, have her for one night, and then kill her. So he marries Scheherazade, and she knew about this, so she started telling him stories. And she would stop at the cliffhanger every night.
RP: You have heard it under A Thousand and One Nights.
WP: Right, so he was like, “Okay, I’m not going to kill her because I have to find out what happened to Aladdin.” And on and on she went for a thousand and one nights, and she so entertained him. As sexist as this story is, I just related that in my own mind to I was going to kill myself but I had to find out what was going to happen. So what I’m proudest of is that people are alive because they wanted to know what would happen in this story.
Absolutely. What do you hope the legacy of “Elfquest” is or will be? What do you hope that people remember in the next 20-30 years?
RP: That they just keep on reading it. “Elfquest.” we’ve discovered, is generational. Kids who were in their teens when they first discovered it in ‘78 are now parents, and they’re reading it to their kids. And we’ve been doing it long enough that some of those kids have babies of their own and they say we’re going to pass it on. Elfquest is like three generations right now. I think that’s what I hope that…if we don’t write another word or draw another line, what’s out there will continue to be passed along, like stories of Homer told over campfires generation after generation after generation.
Thank you.
Wendy: What he said!
“Elfquest: The Last Quest” #24 is out now from Dark Horse, and the entire corpus of “Elfquest” before 2013, can be found online for free here on its official site.
