Forgotten Dreams of Elves

Although the goal of this blog was to cover more research/technical things, sometimes other things will slip in as well. This is one of those times.

Last night I had a dream about something I hadn't thought about in quite a while: ElfQuest. For quite a number of years, from elementary school (starting in 3rd or 4th grade?) up through high school I was entirely obsessed with this wonderful independent comic book series. A classic work of fantasy, ElfQuest followed a tribe elves who ride wolves living in a primordial earth-like planet with two moons. Sadly (fortunately?) after two and a half decades of independent publishing, DC comics now distributes it in a manga-like paperback format. The best of the series is considered to be the first 3 series (all originally black & white), which were published in a series of 8 colored graphic novels, which is how I was originally introduced to it. I would read all the way through those volumes, excitedly pouring of the pages, and then start over again at the beginning. I lost track exactly how many times I reread those 8 volumes, and along the way I obtained a nearly complete collection of the original comic books they were published in and eagerly awaited the newest issues to read my local comic book store. I loved everything elven, and I excited used my first scanner and later my first laser printer to scan scenes of favorite my characters and post them up on the walls of my room (and they were still there the last time I was home along with my treasured ElfQuest poster). I in fact still carry a keychain that bears an ElfQuest scene (it was a keychain which you could open up and put in your own little picture--the rubber part long since too hard to open to change the picture). This was actually how I fell in love with comics and fantasy originally. And, interestingly, it was actually ElfQuest that drove me to Japanese comics in the first place, looking for a longer, more emotionally involved stories then I could be satisfied with the super hero comics that ruled in America. Ironically, also was that Wendy Pini (the artist/co-creator of ElfQuest with her husband Richard) was partly inspired by manga in the first place; the elves are reminiscent of anime characters, while the humans are closer to those of American comics. Thus, as I had already had a partial sense of the anime aesthetic burned into my eyeballs from my many readings of ElfQuest, it was not that large a jump to Japanese comics.

Waking up this morning, I found that ElfQuest was very much still on my mind, and a visit to the official website reassured me that it was still around. However, I realized that there was a bunch of stuff I had missed when I lost track of ElfQuest in college as I got deeper and deeper into Japanese. Near the end of high school, I had discovered Inuyasha (which I had originally hoped would be like ElfQuest) and then by association, I found Maison Ikkoku, which turned into my new obsession for several key years in college and was undoubtedly one of the reasons I ended up in Japan. Ironically, it was not the fantasy manga that really did it for me, but the a seinen romance series set in Tokyo in the 1980's. Of course, as a high school student, Tokyo was probably almost as exotic to me as the elves on the World of Two Moons.

In any case, I once more lamented the loss of my copy of the first ElfQuest graphic novel, presumably, lent to a friend in high school and never returned. Having invested so much emotion into a book, it was a very painful realization that I didn't know where volume one had gone. I had picked up the first volume of the DC comics reprint, but in black & white and with the page layouts redone for 'manga' size (as ElfQuest could fit in nicely with the booming manga market), it just wasn't quite the same as the oversized graph novels I had read so many times. Looking at the list of items for sale on the official website, I thus found my wondering how the new DC comics reprints fit in with the ones I knew (as they have 14-volumes published now) and ended up on wikipedia. To my surprise, they actually gotten up to a couple volumes near the end covering material after I what I had known. A quick look on Amazon found a hardcover version of volume one in the editions that I had originally read (I had actually owned the paperback of volume 1) being sold used starting for a bit over $10. Needless to say, I ended up ordering a copy out of nostalgia and a need for completeness (how could I not have the first volume of a comic I loved so much?) .

As a side note, my love of wolves (I spent much of high school wearing wolf t-shirts) also came out of ElfQuest, and this is part of the reason that Princess Mononoke is my favorite Miyazaki Hayao film. Long live the elves!