To Hunt, To Howl, To Read Forever! ElfQuest in 2017

Somewhere in the many pages of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Gail Wynand discusses the books that he loved as a child and tells Howard Roark that, although he's grown up, he still loves those works with the same intensity. I don't know that sharing traits with a Rand character is ever an unambiguously good thing, but in this case I'm a sort of extreme version of Mr. Wynand.

On my computer, I keep a list called "Inspirations." The list includes cartoons, novels, poets, comic books, and films that I continuously return to as sources of inspiration. Many of them have made some impression (no matter how faint or altered by time and my imagination) on the world I've been writing into a novel for much of my life. Many of the items on this list came into my life when I was very young, and, like Mr. Wynand, I haven't lost my love for them.

Another comparison that sometimes comes to my mind when I think of these well-loved and long-loved things is "Elaine the loveable" in Tennyson's Idylls. Taking Lancelot's shield, she climbed to her tower and "lived in fantasy," reading stories in the marks on the metal and making her own story as she worked at the silken case. Books like ElfQuest were my shield - and from them I learned to note good description an the power of dialogue, characterization and pacing of plot (which I never did quite learn for myself). The silken case I made were the games that took place in the World of the Two Moons and, later, the fan fiction I would write.

I still have the original novel that introduced ElfQuest into my life.

While staying at my cousin's grandmother's house, her uncle passed the book along to me. I fell so in love with it that he never took it back. It's worse for wear now, but it opened an entire universe. My stepfather began ordering me the comic books (still in print back then) and my mom spent November on the phone with a small press, trying to acquire the hardback graphic novels that were officially out of print. They tracked down paperbacks of the Blood of Ten Chiefs series - though our local bookstore ruined the surprise when they shelved those titles instead of holding them for my parents to pick up!

ElfQuest introduced me - gently and without me knowing it - to concepts that would later cause great strife for my conservative classmates (homosexuality, for example) and some of its racier content caused conflicts between me and my parents. I must give them credit, though. My love of reading (under the covers with a flashlight if necessary) won out and they didn't take my books away-- choosing, instead, to discuss the material with me.

ElfQuest has enjoyed an exciting revival in the past few years with the publication of The Final Quest and re-releases by Dark Horse comics. I'm even teaching it in my Epic seminar (and, next year, in my graphic novels class). This year, I enjoyed re-reading The Complete ElfQuest volumes 2 and 3 - even as I struggle with the complexities of the serial Final Quest.















I also re-read the first volume of Blood of Ten Chiefs -- though I allowed my adult self to skip selections (my child self would never have dared to do this!). I finally completed The Big ElfQuest Gatherum, too. I've had it just as long as the other titles (since I was about 8 or 9) but I couldn't understand the content at that age and wanted it more so that the set would be complete. My stepdad knew this at the time and tried to talk me out of the purchase, but I am hard to sway when it comes to books! Years of waiting didn't improve the book much. There were some great insights by Wendy into the issues surrounding women and comics and some of the big picture of ElfQuest did appear. However, the book was in sore need of an editor.

It did - as most books do - take me down a new path by pointing toward Elric of Melnibone. I'm truly surprised that I never encountered Moorecock's work; I used to read every bit of fantasy I could get my hands on. Sometimes I imagine that books come to us when we need them, so perhaps I need ruby-eyed Elric now!