The final issue, ElfQuest: The Final Quest #24 publishes on February 28, 2018, the same day as the original ElfQuest debuted in 1978. The creators are launching a year-long tour of appearances across the United States and Europe in their “Forty Years of Pointed Ears” tour. We had a chance to talk with Wendy and Richard about the conclusion of the series and what it has been like to create a story that stretched over forty years of comics. Den of Geek: First, congratulations on the forty-year mark with ElfQuest. That’s so exciting! Wendy Pini: Oh, thank you. And this is the real conclusion of the series, right? Wendy: Not the dead end of the series. This is the conclusion of a master hero’s journey story arc that we’ve been telling for forty years. But there still is more story to come. Richard: We have already dipped our toes into the water of some of those different directions. We have told some stories that take place in the future of this world, and there are some stories that I guess you could consider prequels. So there’s a lot more fertile ground. But this is the big forty year conclusion to a major hero’s journey. And you had planned a conclusion from the beginning, is that correct? Wendy: Absolutely. So how has it changed since you started? Did you know exactly where it was going to end, and now you’ve gotten there? Wendy: We had a skeleton, a treatment of the overall story. We knew where we wanted to get to. The wonderful thing about that is when you have that skeleton, you can hang all sorts of ornaments on it. You can come up with characters that take the story in interesting side-trips, and you can do lots of things that really enrich and make the world more believable and bigger. In the final analysis, you always come back to that skeleton treatment, and you always keep your hero on track on his hero’s journey. Richard: Imagine being pregnant for forty years. Oh gosh, no, please! Wendy: But I bet you’d be surprised to hear that one of the emotions we feel the least is sadness. We are not sad that it’s over, because even though the story ends on a bittersweet note, we just feel that the ending is the only way it could have ended, and therefore it’s very cathartic. In that sense, we’re very pleased with it. I’m actually a latecomer to the series–I didn’t start picking it up until the Dark Horse Complete ElfQuest volumes came out. Did you see a lot of readers like me come in when the series is released in a new format? When you started putting everything online in 2008, that was an immense undertaking. What was it like to revisit the material as you were going along? Richard: The point of this forty-year journey is that we have known how this is going to end almost from the beginning. So we have lived with all of these stories pretty much continuously throughout the creative process, making sure that if we refer to a character in 1997, it’s consistent with how we talked about that character in 1987. All I had was many, many, many pages of books to scan and to put online, but it wasn’t like “Oh my God, I have completely forgotten about this.” I’ve known all these stories as long as we’ve been doing this. That’s a lot for you to keep track of! Wendy: Oh, very much. It’s like walking around with two universes in your head. Richard: There are so many humorous answers, but I’ll give you a semi-serious one. What I miss as a co-creator and independent publisher from the old days is the feeling that you had room to make a mark. The field wasn’t so crowded as it is today. I’m not saying that [a] crowd is necessarily a bad thing, but we introduced ElfQuest into a brave new world that had very little competition in our segment of the market. I think what I miss most is the feeling that I could stretch my shoulders out and say “We’re going to do this” and have it mean something, have it be received easily–more easily than new things are received today. Wendy: I’ll tell you what I don’t miss! I don’t miss India ink under my fingernails that I can’t get rid of. I don’t miss spilling an entire bottle of ink over a page that I’ve just drawn and having to start over again from scratch. I became digitally savvy in the early 2000s and taught myself how to draw on a Wacom tablet. I have not looked back since. Digital is enormously forgiving. You don’t spill bottles of ink in digital. If you make a mistake you can go simply back through history and go back to where you started, and it will preserve everything up to the point of the mistake. Wendy: Which happens every once in a while. In every creative endeavor you have to expect a disaster or two. But I do not miss messing around with eraser rubbings and paper tearing and all of that. I’m very much a creature of the digital age, and I look forward to doing more. I look forward to getting into animation now that I’m done with this project. I know there was a failed animated version of ElfQuest at one point–is there any thought of revisiting the series in animation? Richard: Hollywood has been after ElfQuest since about 1981. We get taken to the altar all the time, and we get jilted there all the time. We’ve made a kind of peace with the process. There are discussions happening now about ElfQuest as an animated series, or a Game of Thrones style series, or an animated movie, or a CGI movie… we feel very calm and level about that. What Wendy’s talking about with regard to animation, though, is not directly related to ElfQuest. She’s been a lover of animation all her life, and I think she’s looking forward to just seeing what she can do on her own with all of these amazing, high-powered technological tools that are available today. Wendy: I think the reason that we get jilted at the altar so often is because Hollywood auctions ElfQuest with one expectation, and they don’t really read it. When they finally do read it, they realize they haven’t got what they thought they’d got. Hollywood wants ElfQuest to be Lord of the Rings. They always want ElfQuest to be about Good vs. Evil. They want villains and heroes bashing the snot out of each other. That is not what we have in ElfQuest. It’s never been that. ElfQuest is a hero’s journey of discovery, about identity and the origins of the [elves], and if there’s any conflict at all, it’s ignorance vs. knowledge. Richard: We’ve known the skeleton of ElfQuest for forty years. There’s stuff in the final issue that was written down and drawn twenty years ago. We knew that long ago where certain things were headed and what events had to take place. We’re really kind of surprised over the last year or two of Final Quest at how amazingly and disturbingly the real world that we’re all forced to live in seems to be mirroring issues that we wanted to tackle ten and twenty years ago, about identity, about violence, about intolerance, about prejudice, about getting over these things. We have kept telling the story the way it was meant to be told. We have not changed the story to adapt it to current events. Current events, in a very scary way, seem to be mirroring what we wanted to do all those years ago. We’re not quite sure what that’s all about! Wendy: ElfQuest was born in an era of bellbottoms and Flower Children and hippies and free love and peace and all of that. Those were our ideals when we were starting, and we wanted to tell a story about characters that lived that way. They treated each other as well as they could, given circumstances. Forty years later, here we are, looking at racial intolerance and homophobia and all these issues that we thought [we] were going to be done with in forty years. It’s a little disheartening, but if our story is more relevant now than ever, then maybe that’s a good thing. Wendy: We have such love and affection for these characters, and it was really tough, because we knew twenty years ago that all of this was going to happen to several of the characters. We had to keep our lips zipped whenever fans would ask us or speculate, “What’s going to happen to this character?” We would just have to keep our peace, knowing exactly where the story was going to go. That was tough. But saying goodbye to the characters, if what happens to them in the story is inevitable, there’s a certain peace with it. Richard: There’s also the element of, if I’m looking at a given character, I know, in ten years, you’re going to bite the bullet. But we’ve got, between now and then, 100 issues with you in it. And so the challenge is to just forget that you know that this is happening and get with that character, get with that family, get with that situation, in the moment of the now of that particular bit of story. They’re alive now, they’re vital now, they’re acting now, they’re doing their thing now, and forget that you know. Because otherwise, I think it would cripple some writers or artists to portray a character being all kinds of happy knowing that down the line they’re going to die. What comes next? Richard: Speaking only for myself, I’ve still got a lot of ElfQuest kittens to herd, because the publishing program, the reprint program, and the repurposing program with Dark Horse are scheduled for at least the next two or three years. I’m going to be overseeing that. Plus, we are talking with them about the possibility of engaging new and different and exciting writers and artists to create and produce some of these stories in the future of the world of ElfQuest, or maybe in the past, to keep ElfQuest itself going. ElfQuest: The Final Quest #24 hits the stands on February 28, 2018.
