that’s totally wild – for whatever reason, i woke up thinking of Elfquest this morning. (Wish the movie would come.)

my fave comic ever :)

This is great. I hope it helps gather lots of new fans.

And, um, I had a HUGE crush on Winnowill. So scared… yet so turned on…

It totally changed my view on elves. A radical re-visioning of something I’d only ever considered in Tolkien-esque or mythological paradigms.

Additionally the art was cool, the story was awesome and epic, and wolves. . . . oh . . . . and the elf-chicks were hot.

-abs

I just read through Issue #1, and I swear to God I’m 10 again.

It will be great to read these again, I sort of lost track of what they were doing around 1990 or so.

It irks me that this never got animated properly. The Pinis did right I think to not let the various studios they tried to get it animated at ruin the story, which is the real treasure of the series.

Them, Peter David, Jane Yolen, and a few others on the board, were the first creators I ever spoke to…..when you’re 12, it was an absolutely amazing feeling to discover a response from any of them to something you posted.

This being basically before the internet, in the days of AOL, Prodigy, etc.

God, I haven’t thought of any of that in years.

OMFG A GEnie alumnus! I remember the EQ boards there well! S&SW!

GEnie as a whole had a most excellent SF/Comics discussion board section. I accessed it from a Mac Classic and a 2400 baud modem, and logged everything, so I have all those boards archived in plaintext. Lots of great interactive fanfic went on there.

Oh man, good times. Good times on my old LC3 in grade 8.

To the person that didn’t read past the first 20 issues, don’t. There’s a couple of good stand alone issues in The Hidden Years (the first issue of the Hidden Years is good, and it’s up now), but that’s it. Most of the rest is unendurable.

But the original series, fantastic.

Minor correction though, ElfQuest is not even close to being the oldest indy comic (nor the oldest indy that’s still being published–which is perhaps what they meant–since it’s not being published anymore). The underground comix scene, R. Crumb and the like, were putting out stuff a decade before the Pinis.

It was actually the third indie comic book, however. Elfquest started in 1978, so it was preceded by Dave Sim’s Cerebus (1977) and Jack Katz’s The First Kingdom (1975).

Personally I like it better that my imagination was left to work and bring out the life colors to the drawings.

Still EQ is a landmark series and still stands as a valid series among the new breed of comics …

As strange as it may sound… Those elf chicks gave a young man something to dream about way back then ;)

I’d read it, compose whatever I wanted to post to various topics and he’d let me on the computer to post it. He’d then wait a few days and then print out whatever the responses were.

Most of my memories of GEnie are sitting on the porch with a glass of milk and a giant stack of barely readable computer printout in my lap. :)

And I’m surprised you like ‘all of them.’ Did you like Jink? Holy crap was that bad.

Surely something was not worth loving… What were the ones were she farmed out the art (and stories?) to other people. I know they weren’t supposed to be ‘official’, but man was that stuff bad. Really cringe-worthy. I gave up thinking then they had a purpose even in the original series, but instead just got lucky, like George Lucas.

That doesn’t take away from the original series. Long die the author.

Elfquest (and Cerebus, the other comic I was collecting at the time) both got started before the infamous Black and White Crash of 1986. The first EQ run was just finishing up when TMNT#1 came out and started the wild speculation period. I was going to alot of conventions at the time, and all the high-priced crap that was being hawked at the time was apalling, very low signal-to-noise ratio. When the B&W market imploded soon afterwards B&W indy comics were a barren wasteland for more than 10 years. Opinion is varied on whether this was a good thing or not.

A good telling of the tale is here:

http://www.io.com/~patman/posts/thompson.txt

So in this context, it is more correct to call the Pinis ‘pioneers’, even though they were not the first indy publishers.

Yehuda