HERE WE ARE FOR THE FIRST TIME AGAIN...
To those of you who are seeing this initial chapter in the ELFQUEST of Cutter and his Wolfriders for the first time, welcome. To those who have a copy of the original edition of this issue and who also bought this anyway, our heartfelt thanks and hopes that you'll enjoy the changes and additions we've made.
This seems like the place for a small reminiscence. It's been a little over a year since ELFQUEST first appeared in early March, 1978. That edition (which we've taken to calling "the little number one" because of its size) was done by another publisher. When our copies arrived in the mail we were both thrilled because the book was finally, after a long gestation, a reality, and disappointed because the quality was much less than we'd been led to believe. We were worried, but it was your enthusiastic response to that first ELFQUEST (even with its faults) that gave us the much-needed courage to pull away from our ex-publisher and give it a go ourselves.
Thus was born WaRP Graphics. WaRP is us, Wendy and Richard Pini - two people who share a too- crowded apartment with elves, wolves, trolls and lots of drawing paper! Every four months, if everything goes the way it should, a new issue of ELFQUEST goes off to the printer, and from there to you. We do all the work right here, from taking care of subscriptions to trying to keep up with all of your letters (if you send a stamp with your comments, we guarantee a reply - otherwise, help!)
This issue is different from the little #1 in a number of ways. It's bigger, has two brand-new painted color covers, four new pages of behind-the- scenes taken from a large pile of sketches and scribbles, and the story art itself has been gone over to make it, we think, even better than it was.
We hope you enjoy it.