ElfQuest - Perhaps the best comic you have never read.

[Crackity Jones]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126158/...=tt_cl_sm#cast

Thanks, Flightpath07.

[Flightpath07]

Thanks, Flightpath07.

M'lady.

[Tawmis]

The recent AF Post Byrne thread made me dig this up... sorry about the Necro Post (6 years... is that too long?)

And I am not sure if this forum does Spoiler tags because when I go to Advanced, it all looks wonky and I can't tell if one of the buttons supports "Spoiler" tags...

But Wendy & Richard Pini returned to ElfQuest to celebrate 40 years of pointed ears... for a series (ran - what? 30 issues?) called "Final Quest."

I won't go into details - but the series makes a horrible mistake.

It assumes you, the reader, have read everything. It exiles any chance of new readers picking this up and enjoying it. It also exiles readers, who may not have this stuff memorized. Granted, you can read all the old stuff - free, legally - on their site (see first post) - but it's not friendly at all for anyone to try and pick up and run with.

And it's just... poorly written, and poorly drawn (in my opinion) because Wendy employed someone named Sonny to help with art and coloring.

The problem is - Wendy as an artist has ranked as one of my favorites (from her original three series, see the first post) - and what I saw in Final Quest was not growth, but reversal, for me anyway.

And the ending... is... just... Game of Thrones ending level. I mean it.

So they launched another limited series called "Stargazer's Quest" which focuses on Skywise and his daughter Jink, as Wendy continues to try and tie everything together. And again, exiles any potential new readers.

The problem lies here - mentioned in a previous post in this thread (http://alphaflight.net/showthread.ph...ll=1#post95132) ...

After Original Quest, Siege at Blue Mountain and Kings of the Broken Wheel (the three original series, by the creators) - they opened up ElfQuest to let everyone and their mother write it. As a result, titles such as Hidden Years, Shards, New Blood, Blood of Ten Chiefs, Kahvi, Two-Spear, Jink (don't get me started...), and The Rebels (so, so, so very painful), all emerged. Some of them were good - some of them were good in parts - some (Jink and especially The Rebels) were down right horrible (and I have no idea how Richard and Wendy Pini were okay with those stories being published under the ElfQuest brand).

She's trying to tie in all this stuff that other people did that were free to write whatever (if they ran these ideas past Wendy and Richard first, I'd be very surprised, because so many of these are very un-ElfQuest)...

So she's trying to wrap it all up, make it all make sense... and it's like Alphabet Soup... you can have a ton of letters, make some words, maybe a sentence or two, but good luck making all the letters make sense...

It's been disappointing. Yet I collect it because it's ElfQuest.

[Le Messor]

sorry about the Necro Post (6 years... is that too long?)

Given what I just typed on that other post, no.
Spoiler html is spoiler and /spoiler, if the next thing I write looks like a spoiler:

-> Open Spoiler<-

I don't know if this worked

The original was about 30 issues, yes. The others; there's a reason I've never read them, but having not read them I can't judge if they're worth my time to read, but if I do read them I've made that judgement already and now I've gone all cross-eyed.

~ Le Messor
"You can't judge a book by the cover. But you have to."
~ Le Messor

[Tawmis]

Yeah, the Marvel Epic Reprint ran 33 issues - https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?T...fID=1055159P01

But Siege and King's Wheel are worth reading - mentioned in my first post.
http://alphaflight.net/showthread.ph...ll=1#post94643

And you can read the original series (which you read as the reprint) in their original B&W (and to me, superior format) - and I am not sure if the Marvel Epic reprint cut out some of the stuff (like with the Go-Backs "celebrating before war")...

http://alphaflight.net/showthread.ph...ll=1#post94643

[Le Messor]

I like colour if I can get it - and the 'this is not Rainbow Brite or Smurfs' scene you linked to is definitely in the version I read.

If Epic censored what I read, I'm not sure I want to see what they left out.

~ LM

[Tawmis]

Normally, I favor color too. I think, perhaps because I read it in B&W when it came out (my first issue was #2, back in 1978 or 79). And I feel it was drawn in B&W - that the color doesn't fit right with it (for me). Again, probably because I knew it first as B&W for many, many, many years.

Ironically, I think the Epic series, may have even added a few panels here and there. I had it, but it was one of the many things lost in my moves across the states, and I never went back and got it. Surprised to see online, issues go for more than $1, since they're officially just reprints.

[Le Messor]

I think they did add panels (it came up in my researches) because the original B & W series had a different page count to a Marvel standard at the time, and they needed natural break points.

I haven't seen the B & W art, so can't really comment on that; but the colour feels natural to me, not tacked on, which I have seen before. But only noticed in things I originally read in black and white.