ELFQUESTS are descending on our heads so fast now, it's a bit like having a bookshelf fall over! The effect is a bit disconcerting... Before, we had a steady storyline, developing gradually, shaped by one set of hands and two very closely related brains. Now the issues are dodging between story and story, and shaped by a much larger collection of hands, even if still guided by the same double-brain. If this was 200 years' time it would look a bit like a tradition! Well, it's "from the studio of," a fine old tradition in itself. A few hundred years hence these pages will be hanging in galleries with goateed experts with little eyeglasses arguing. Is it a real Pini. Or Studio of Pini. Or School of Pini. And how is this going to affect the value at auction?
I decided that I was only going to follow the ones where the art was what would have caught my eye from any comic author. This is the kind of decision your eyes and viscera make for you without having to think about it much. On the other hand, I have met some new artists who perhaps I wouldn't have picked up otherwise, doing sections of Wendy's story with verve and panache. I'm getting to like the Pini/Blair partnership. There's some action frames in NEW BLOOD #12 where I can't quite work out what's happening, and then ping! it suddenly drops in focus. Brilliant.
Art!
Byrne and Dechnik in HIDDEN YEARS #9 1/2. When the subdued colors and broken lines work right, they work just perfectly. But when the color falls even just a tiny bit out of register, which happens rather a lot in HY #9 1/2, they go perfectly mushy. I'm glad you chose this issue to put the pencils/inks pages in the back, because I was sitting, wondering, would this style work in line only? And it does, but only just. It's a bit hard to make out what's going on at times - not because of the way the pix are laid out, but because of the confusion of line and color on top.
Or is it just the vibrations from the thumping?
(Years of research have revealed to me that when heroes throw rocks, they are usually trying to break someone's head, inconvenience a pursuer, knock down a gate, etc. But giants also throw rocks just for fun, or to see how far they can throw, because they're in a mean mood, or just because they think someone needs a rock thrown at him.
This makes Cutter a four-foot giant! Why does Rayek look so surprised? Doesn't he know by now that Cutter has a butch chest and a short-tempered Dad? Or is this just Rayek not paying enough attention again, again?)
When Cutter shouts at Rayek "What? You're crazy! I always knew it!" I thought that he had caught on, and was simply taking further advantage of Rayek's generous offer. I know Rayek has always been drawn as a man with tunnel vision, but I wouldn't even have the mental room to assume, after he's had his face tanned, his ribs cracked, and heard Cutter's side of the story, that he could possibly mean 'Till I've thumped you some more' and it didn't occur to me that it would take so long to get through to Cutter. You sit on the side and watch and maybe have to think about it two or three times before you gather into one place the full extent of Cutter's accumulated rage against Rayek. But I plead in mitigation that the authors warned us about Rayek's changing attitude earlier in the story, but they probably didn't warn Cutter and Leetah, so how should they know? So now I ponder: How would it have worked if you hadn't warned us? And we had to work things out at the same as Leetah and Cutter? Just a thought.
There's a lot of passion in that thumping, a lot of love as well as fury, and since not all the love can be Rayek's, and Cutter hasn't found his yet, I guess a lot of it must be yours.
When Cutter says "You made me human!" it's the innocent animal in him which has been wrenched into time. It makes me think of Peter Beagle's THE LAST UNICORN. At first I thought, "What, only 500 years? And he knows exactly where to wait for her? Piece of cake!" But then I thought: He knows it'll be hundreds of years, minimum, and he knows that he has only that one time to wait for, and that all the time between is an empty waste with nothing even to search for, and it's his kids too, and it makes him feel like a human. Not only a human, but a tree-notching human. That could make a very long 500 years.
(I read a newspaper report a few months ago about a naturalist, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who followed and observed her dogs as a tribe/family. Seems the book, THE HIDDEN LIFE OF DOGS, has become a best-seller in the states, so you may know it. This was the bit that stuck in my mind: "in the late afternoon sun we sat in the dust or lay on our chests... calmly, feeling the moment, the calmness, the warm quiet light of the sun - each of us happy enough with the others... each of us quiet and serene. Never have I felt as far removed from what seemed familiar as I felt with these dogs... Primates feel pure, flat immobility as boredom, but dogs feel it as peace.")
HIDDEN YEARS #10... (Er, back to basics: If you shoot the pilot, the rest just naturally, er, crashes. What now? Being as this is the Palace, will the bits take off by themselves? It gives a whole new meaning to the term Crystal Travel.)
Something that really bothers me here: At the end of HY #10, the humans are crude. I don't mean their manners. I mean, take HIDDEN YEARS #5. There you can put the humans and the elves in the same frame and, if either is going to look like a caricature, it will be the elves, because they could pass as stylized humans, and the humans look human. More often the elves look like, well, rather unusual little people. This is the right way round, being as we are human. With the elves (and zwoots, and so on) the line between drawing and cartoon is blurred, because there's nothing very similar walking around to make a comparison. (OK, zwoots look a bit like aardwolves, but how often do you meet an aardwolf?) So there's a safety margin. With humans, the gap between what's on the page and what you might meet is much more obvious. If your humans start to look like caricatures, then the whole picture will start to look like a caricature. Cartooning is a noble art. (I love the rabbit - I LOVE THE RABBIT!) But this isn't even good cartooning. It's very average comic book cartooning. The continuity's rough, the technology's rough (even for an alien planet), the horses are festooned with twice as much metal as the men, quite a lot of it in pretty non-vital places, and I can't see how some of it is even staying up. (Are those thigh-bands elastic, or are they glued to the tights, and if so, how do they cope in the laundry?) The horses look like those lumpy plastic ones you get in bargain farmyard packs. All the humans look the same but for the wigs. (Yes, I know that's a tough one faced by nearly all comic artists, afraid these ones look as if they haven't even tried not to be clones.)
ELFQUEST is going to be popular. Its going to be more and more popular. But it's not going to be more and more than average without readers like me snorting once, twice, and three times first.
Last thing: you've let the young ones grow without reducing them to cute. Even Ember. Thank you. I had a bad moment about Ember a few years back, but it was OK. If I'm a little touchy about Ember, it's because another little redheaded girl once started going cute in the middle of a story. I had a bad feeling about this. Then the creators wrote one more book, a duff one, and haven't been heard of since, ending a glorious career. Somebody told me they'd got fed up with the story and retired. Perhaps they didn't take enough breaks.
While a lot of this letter looks like criticism. Please accept my apologies. It's easy to enjoy the stories and only come across a few things that don't go so well, but if they are worth moaning on about at all, they seem to use up a lot of words. if I was fair and put down an exclamation of delight (as well as the odd snort of disapproval) at everything that called one forth you would end up with fourteen-page letters instead of four-page ones. But this is your fifteenth year, and it's over the tenth for me, not counting the backtracking. Erm. Thinking about it as detachedly as possible - Wendy takes little dinky people with birdy legs, pointy ears, great big googly eyes and little heart-shaped faces - and some of them even have big hair - in other words, everything that should make someone like me run a mile, and she overcomes my prejudices in one issue and goes on overcoming them, because her comic art is hardly to be matched outside the likes of Annette Harper and that chap who used to do the Greek myths for LOOK AND LEARN (?) so long ago that I can't even remember the name. And her stories are told in an individual voice. And I don't give a fig what the anthropologists say - this is a fairy tale, not a treatise. (But I don't withdraw my remarks about the ironmongery. There has to be a binding consistency, and mostly, ELFQUEST has never lacked it.) And the new contributors are doing some great stuff. NEW BLOOD #9 not only pulls in the mythic for the first time where it has never appeared before (except where it was implied by Timmain's existence as Ancestor), and as well as the story, the artwork is brilliant, consistent, and (!) not even Wendy! The wolf-headed Timmain is wonderful. And the bit where Egg takes the stick from her and puts it between his teeth. Everything said without words.
So ELFQUEST is going to be diverse, something-for-everyone. There are hundreds of paths you haven't even touched yet, as well as the ones you've only brushed so far. Sometimes I think I'm going to be torn away because of my preference for literature, for the single voice. But who says the single voice won't stay on, through all the facets?
Um. When I was little I occasionally wondered what happened to Wendy's pet wolf after she left the Neverland. Now I know: It followed her home and they raised lots of little ones - four-legged ones and two-legged ones. And - don't believe what they tell you - I'm sure she gave up darning socks.
Go for it, prosper, get 'em in. Come to the UK one day and get them in here. But first, grab the buckets and sponges, call the Save the Whales team and go and do something about Winnowill before she's fish-flakes.
Helen Armstrong
<<street address removed from archive>>
What she said! Let us know what the rest of you think, and we'll see you in 30! - RP