ElfQuest
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a bit of coloring
It’s taken me about two weeks to do the fourth Elfquest graphic novel coloring book page. I reckon at the rate I’m going, I’ll do about one issue a year, and be finished around 2036. :)
I hadn’t posted page three yet, so here you go. I also hadn’t figured out how to manipulate the levels with Photoshop (or possibly I didn’t have photoshop installed) yet, so the color in it isn’t as representative of the TRUE BEAUTY OF MY WORK as I might like. :)
For page four I had Photoshop for sure and the levels are therefore manipulated and this is actually very close to the colors. I’m going to need an entire box just of green pencils to get through this issue!
This is the best coloring book ever. :)
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Recent Reads: The Art of Elfquest
Several months ago I discovered a Kickstarter for three deluxe Wendy Pini books, two on Elfquest and one on her other work.
Reader, I agonized. I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, require more Elfquest stuff. The completionist in me shrieks otherwise, but the truth is I got rid of most of my Elfquest originals before we moved, and I never did get several of the later Father Tree Press graphic novels (which I regret, actually, but I really still don’t like the coloring in them), but anyway, ‘completionism’ wasn’t a valid answer, especially at $100 a pop for the books, plus international shipping which added a shocking amount to the overall price tag.
Yeah, so obviously I bought them. The two Elfquest books, anyway, because I could just barely justify those but not LINE OF BEAUTY, the book about her other projects.
I got THE ART OF ELFQUEST last week and it’s *stupendously* beautiful.
There’s not, truth be told, a great deal of new material in it, not for somebody who’s been collecting Elfquest-related material for (good lord) thirty years, but it is so. so. pretty.
There *were* a handful of things I hadn’t encountered before, art or commentary about the art (one drawing that I’d seen before said it was done just after Wendy Pini finished her BEAUTY AND THE BEAST graphic novels, and points out that both Cutter and Skywise look like Ron Perlman in the drawing…and they do! Bahaha! And another that I’d probably seen before mentioned it was a preview/teaser thing for the current storyline, THE FINAL QUEST…but it was done in 1998!), so even for an old-timer (albeit one who’s fallen off the wagon this century) there’s a bit of new material, but mostly, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s about the utterly beautiful presentation.I actually sat around hugging it, in between looking through it. It’s so pretty I regretted not biting the bullet and getting LINE OF BEAUTY, too, and I’m going to have to rectify that failure because SO PRETTY. SO. PRETTY!
If Flesk Publications wants to do a complete deluxe hardcover graphic novel print run of Elfquest after the Final Quest is done, I will be right there standing in line and shouting SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.
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Elfquest: Final Quest, issue 4
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
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Elfquest: The Final Quest, Issues 1-2
So the first couple issues proper of the new EQ story are out. When the first one came out, there was some blogger/reviewer type who had never read EQ before who said “confusing, too many characters, no emotional connection,” or words to that effect.
In the comments and on FB and places, people shrieked, “How dare somebody come into a 30 year saga on the latest iteration and say it’s no good! They don’t UNDERSTAND!” and words to that effect.
The thing is, the blogger was right.
I mean, I’ve been an ElfQuest fan since I was 11 years old. Thirty years this autumn. I’ve read it *all*. The comics, the anthologies, the spin-offs, the novelisations, all of it. I’ve read the original quest and the Kings stories more often than the later stuff, but I re-read every one of the later issues multiple times when they came out. I can still pull up random ElfQuest trivia that no reasonable person could ever need to know from the storage files in my skull.
And the new stuff still isn’t real compelling.
Part of it is that the issues feel really, really *short*. 20 pages plus letters pages to fill it out, and yes, it’s true I’m in the habit of reading graphic novels these days and all single-issue comics feel pretty short, but these feel really. short. There’s barely enough pages to start being reminded of what’s going on and then it’s over. Bleh.
Part of it probably *is* a lack of familarity; a lot of the current story is focused on Ember’s tribe, half of whom I can’t particularly tell apart. And they’re pursuing a storyline with her that annoys the crap out of me, even though I see the logic of it in ElfQuest worldbuilding terms, so that doesn’t especially help. But there’s been very little with Cutter’s tribe, excepting the Moonshade storyline (which, tbf, I’m fascinated by), and the Wavedancers haven’t been re-introduced since the Prologue.
And dammit, I thought the prologue was done so *well*, and I was so excited about so much of it, but…really, the first two issues really feel like a nearly incoherent mess, and I’m pretty disappointed. It doesn’t feel well paced. There feels like there’s too much repeated to hammer points home. I dunno. It’s just…meh.
(Okay, there was one thing in issue two that got me, not because of the event itself but because of its effect on a beloved character. But still. Mostly, meh.) :p
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Recent Reads: ElfQuest: The Original Quest
Well, having read TFQ’s prologue I went back and re-read the entire Original Quest, which was kind of fascinating, really. And since I’m going to talk about the entire OQ I’ll just put this behind a cut and spare the uninterested. :)
