A (Wolf) Pack of Books!

Go! To your nearest bookstore and snag some ElfQuest - you won't regret it!

I'm on a bit of an ElfQuest kick right now, so I'm bypassing potential posts on Tolkien, women's literature, more game-changers, Star Trek, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe to write this one. ElfQuest has been with me since my cousin's uncle placed the battered yellow-orange cover of the novel into my hands. I was so enamored that my stepdad then invited me into the world of comics - and I've been hunting and howling with Wendy and Richard Pini's wonderful characters ever since!

I taught the first ElfQuest graphic novel in my Epic class this year, and it made me return to the novel. A good book changes with you as you read it across your life and I found myself attuned to new nuances, impressed by the Pinis' ability to create and represent such a large cast and to deal with such large issues (a clash of cultures, gender, race, magic and the limits of magic) all within a believable world. This is one of my game-changer novels and I know it is going to keep delighting me for years to come!

This is the latest offering in the ElfQuest universe and I can still remember my burst of joy when I learned it would be published. I remain nervous about the word "final" in the title, but the art is breathtaking and the story is tight, exciting, and complex, tackling all of the issues that ElfQuest has always navigated so skillfully. I will admit that my first reading was a rocky experience; there's a great deal of death in this first issue and I wasn't ready to let some of the characters go, and the plot is very complex, so I think it is going to take me several readings to understand all that's going on both on the surface and underneath!

I'm including Moorecock's work here because he was a huge inspiration for Wendy Pini and I probably wouldn't have read him without her recommendation. Moorecock writes about challenging the fantasy worlds of writers like Tolkien and he certainly succeeds; his writing is terse - almost cutting - and Elric is more antihero than hero. I found this first title very difficult to read, but I'm open to reading more in the future and seeing how Elric develops from ruler of his kingdom to, well, whatever he's going to become!