I moved when I was 8 to a new neighborhood and a new best friend. Visiting her house, I always wondered at the amazing comic books they had there. They were bright and vibrant, and seemed so alive! But elves were silly and comics were for boys, so I never did more than glance at them.
A few years later, I was introduced to Archie comics that my friends and I devoured. I could see now, that comics weren't just for boys. I still thought elves were silly, though.
When I was 15, the artwork of my friend's comics finally drew me to them enough to borrow the first volume. Fire and Flight would burn itself into my mind and soul. It spoke to something in me I didn't know existed. I borrowed the rest of the volumes they had, and that was it. I was hooked on ElfQuest.
It was a time that I was able to buy most of the volumes in hardback color format at bookstores, and eventually in paperback as the newer stories were released. I scrounged and saved my allowance and babysitting money and bought any and all comics I could find at bookstores, because I didn't have access to a comic book store and Amazon didn't exist yet. RIP Walden Books, B. Dalton, and Borders bookstores...I bought the anthology short story books, and the novelized versions of the comics.
I made a Skywise mask and the World of Two Moons held in Winnowill's hand(sadly lost over the years) in my high school ceramics class. I scanned pictures of the elves to cut out and decorate my locker at school, and after the school year ended, my bedroom walls.
I tried making and using a bow and arrow in the backyard, and that one time my dad and cousins went rifle shooting out in the woods, I did my best to ignore them and tried the bow and arrow again, unsuccessfully.
I found a necklace with a crystal and a figure of a pixie that looks just like Petalwing. I still have it.
ElfQuest was my life.
When I graduated high school and "grew up," my EQ collection moved with me to my first apartment, and has come with me everywhere else I've gone since then. I have actually contemplated who I would leave them to in a will, should I meet an untimely end. They are that much a part of me.
I collected the comics as long as I could before they stopped being published. Luckily, most of them are now available for free online through their website. I did collect the four Final Quest volumes as they were published a few years ago, but I never read them. They sat in my collection, gathering dust. I wasn't ready to say goodbye to the people who had been a part of my life for so long. One day. Some day, I would read them.
In the MCU, they used the tagline, "Part of the story, is the end." That stuck with me. When the pandemic hit last year, I decided to do a grand, sweeping reread of the comics and the novels. I decided that when I got to them, I would read the Final Quest story.
I have spent a year and a half reading these at night before bed, escaping the former guy and the pandemic. And true to my word, I read the Final Quest, finally. I finished it this morning, and I cried. I know the quest is over, and some people's stories have ended, but I know the world Wendy and Richard Pini created is in good hands. Like Disneyland, the World of Two Moons will never truly be finished. They and their team will hopefully continue to create new stories for as long as they are able to and wish to, and a world of fanfiction awaits me to read and maybe even write. EQ has influenced my writing over the years, perhaps it's time I gave back to it. And there is the audio movie coming out. Hearing my beloved characters with voices after such a long time is going to be a dream come true.
I will never not love ElfQuest. I will never "outgrow" it. I grow with it, and it with me. I owe a lot of who I am to Wendy and Richard Pini. I thank them for sharing their story with the world. Through their elves, I learned to love hobbits, and superheroes, and a school for witches and wizards, none of which I would care about at all, it if wasn't for the world of two moons.
I thank them for helping me learn to love elves, at long last.
