This past July I was scheduled to present at The Comics Arts Conference at San Diego Comic Con. Because the conference was canceled when the con went online, I was invited to present next July. I am really hoping that we have COVID-19 under control before then. I have always wanted to attend Comic Con.
Anyway, my presentation was about sexuality and gender identity in Elfquest, which is the first comic I ever collected. I have been an avid fan since the Marvel Epic reprints of the original quest began in 1985. I still remember picking up the first two issues during a family vacation to the Thousand Islands region of upstate NY. It was raining, and we stopped by a drug store in a small town. My mom told me to find some things to read in our hotel room until the rain let up. Elfquest looked nothing like anything else on the spinner racks in the store. It captured my attention immediately. It was the comic that got me into comics and comics fandom, EQ fandom in particular. From about 1988 to 1992 I was fairly involved in a variety of fan-run EQ fan clubs called holts. For the most part, holts have died off. My interest in EQ hasn’t. Despite a long period in my twenties and early thirties when I really could not afford comics, I have collected EQ and various EQ tchotchkes.
More recently I began collecting every article about the series and its creators, Wendy & Richard Pini, that I could find. While comics aren’t the mainstay of my academic research right now, I am doing more and more to shift in that direction. To that end, I put together a bibliography of everything I could find about EQ. I’ve shared it in a few places online, but haven’t yet posted it to this blog, so here it is: a not entirely definitive list of articles, videos, blogs, and podcasts about Elfquest.
If you know of other works that aren’t listed here, please let me know. Thank you.
There’s a wonderful website that’s a bit difficult to navigate, but includes all manner of EQ paraphernalia: check out Elfquestinventory.com.
Indie Creator Explosion 