Sigh.
I’ll be giving the Final Quest one more issue, because it’s ElfQuest and I’ve loved it since childhood, and because there’s an *extremely* faint chance that the character they apparently killed at the end of this issue is actually dead. If they have actually killed the character off, the story becomes *much* more interesting to me…but I’m so very, very dubious that they’re really dead.
This issue featured 20 pages of story, which is enough for one solid story thread, but not the two and a half they’re jamming into these issues. Somehow they managed to find 2 pages for letters and 6 pages for ‘preview material’ of the forthcoming Original Quest collection, so from my perspective: 20 pages of not very good story in exchange for a handful of letters and some pages I memorized as a teen instead of, say, 24 or 26 pages of more elegantly told story and a letters page. I would really, truly rather have two separate stories happening in two separate comics and only get 3 of each a year than have this half-assed crushed storytelling trying to fit 40 characters and several story arcs into 20 pages.
Also, irrelevant to the actual storyline, I find the bits of gauzy Preserver-silks that Palace denizens are wearing to be…really cold-looking. It seems to me that at some point in the history of ElfQuest somebody commented that the Palace wasn’t especially warm (not that it was exactly *cold*, either, but that it wasn’t *warm*) and so watching Timmain walk around naked and Moonshade and Sun, uh, stream, in see-through bits just makes me think, every time I see them, “Aren’t they cold all the time?” (I mean, okay, Timmain probably not, because Timmain, but still.)
Sigh. Anyway. One more issue, in which, if they have any sense, they will not resolve the issue of whether the character is dead or not, which may cause me to hang on for another issue or two, because it also appears they might be getting the whole gang back together next issue which may help with the fractured storytelling. Maybe. Still too many characters for not enough pages and too much story I don’t care very much about. :p