The Elfquest Archive of Letters and Editorials

"...no one wants to read 32 pages of letters!" -- Richard Pini, EQ #20

Welcome!

January 2000: After lying stagnant since 7/21/96, this archive has now been updated! Really! No, I don't believe it either. There's still over 100 75 50 25 issues of EQ left to add to this thing, though... :-)

January 27, 2000: Meet our new web-wolf-friend, Sendscenter! He's a search engine who'll track down those keywords and simple phrases you might be trying to find in this archive! Visit his den, and he'll be your web-wolf-friend too.

Apologies for the length of this introductory text, but pleeeease read it before using this archive for the first time. A moment or two spent reading this introduction should prevent a lot of confusion and questions later on. :-)

This archive is an attempt to collect all the "alternate" text from every issue of EQ in its long and varied history-- and present it in a reasonably convenient and publicly accessible electronic form. This means every letters column. Every editorial. ...And other non-story features (but not advertisements) as well. From Fantasy Quarterly #1 onward, here is an opportunity to see the story of Elfquest unfold as seen through the eyes of its creators and its readers.

Although this archive can't possibly hope to reproduce the exact formatting and visual style of the original letters pages and editorials, it does try to take an intermediate stand between preserving their general flavor and maintaining a (fairly) consistent look-and-feel that will both (a) make the text easy to read and follow, and (b) be as independent on specific browser features as possible. The earliest issues of EQ had type-written letters columns with formatting varying from issue to issue. Later, the letters columns were done on a word processor and printed out on a dot-matrix printer. Starting in issue #9 of the original Warp EQ series, the editorials and letters were typeset and, from there, quickly fell into a more consistent format.

For the nick-picky among us, here's (roughly) how the formatting of the original text is translated into these web pages:

• Obviously, no attempt is made to preserve the line formatting of the original text.

• Editor replies to individual letters are always in bold, even though the original columns may have instead used italics, indented paragraphs, or other devices to signify reply text. To further reduce confusion between readers' letters and editor responses, an extra line break is usually inserted before the start of each letter of comment.

• Emphasized text (the appearance of which is dependent on your browser) indicates any emphasized words in the original text-- regardless if they were originally italic, bold, underlined, or some combination of the three.

• Italic text which is set aside in square brackets and signed with an "--MK" identifies a note added by the transcriber/editor of this archive, and (obviously) does not appear in the original printed text.

• Changes in font and type size in the original text are generally not preserved in any way at all.

• Signatures (and other hand-written text) are replaced by their textual content. This should be obvious.

• Archive headers (i.e. "EDITORIAL", "LETTERS", etc) may be followed (in parentheses) by the title for that section if there was one present in the original text. This title may not necessarily reflect the exact capitalization or punctuation present in the original. Anything which appears to be a title following on another line does generally try to mimic the capitalization and/or punctuation-- but not the font size or appearance.

• Typos, misspellings, and other errors present in the original text are preserved in this archive. ...even though it sometimes bothered me a bit to have to leave them in. :-) This is done not only to keep this historically accurate, but also because, in the case of the letters pages, it's impossible to determine if the error was made by the letter writer or was a typo added when Richard (or whomever) transcribed the letter. In a few cases, there's the added possibility that the "error" was intentional. Therefore, all errors have been left as-is.

If there's a letter "T" in the original text, there should be a "T" corresponding to it in the archive. The original "T" might have been italic or underlined while the archive's "T" is in bold instead, but it's still gonna be a "T" and not a "t" or a "J". Same goes for punctuation-- if you see 5 exclamation marks and two question marks at the end of a sentence in someone's letter, you can be pretty sure there were 5 exclamation marks and two question marks in the original text. :-) About the only exceptions to this rule are (a) inter-word spaces and (b) cases where long lines of dashes or asterisks are used as section separators (mostly in early issues of the original EQ series). These might not correspond exactly-- there might have been 67 hyphens used in a particular letters page, but I sure didn't try to make sure there were 67 of them in the archive. :-)

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DISCLAIMERS (Important-- Please Read)

• The text contained in this archive is copyright (c) Warp Graphics, all rights reserved worldwide. You may download this archive for your personal use, but further redistribution is prohibited except by permission from Warp Graphics.
• Please keep in mind that the information contained in this archive reflects the time in which it was written, and therefore contains information regarding offers, addresses, and products which are no longer valid/available.
• Richard Pini would like to remind the user that the use of "WaRP" to refer to the name of the publishing company reflects EQ's earlier years, and that "Warp" is the preferred, modern, form of the name.
• The archive transcriber (Marty Kuhn) takes no responsibility for any damages caused by information or misinformation contained within this archive.

Archive Links:

Fantasy Quarterly

Warp Elfquest (Original Series)

Marvel/Epic Elfquest (Reprint Series)

Warp Elfquest (1989 Reprint Series)

EQ: Siege at Blue Mountain

EQ: Kings of the Broken Wheel

EQ: Hidden Years

EQ: New Blood

EQ: Blood of Ten Chiefs

EQ: Wavedancers

EQ: Shards

EQ: Jink

EQ: The Rebels

EQ: Kahvi

EQ: Two-Spear

EQ: Metamorphosis

Elfquest (New Series)

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