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Adam Savage shares with the world his Everyday Carry (EDC)—basically the stuff that stays in his pockets all the time. That got us to thinking. What do life hackers carry with them every day? More »

If you've never spilled an ice cube tray full of water or accidentally dumped a dozen cubes on the floor, I hope you have the medal you deserve. For the rest of us, a clever, covered ice cube tray like this could be a cool solution. More »

A Piet Mondrian painting is unmistakable for its big blocks of primary colors set in grids of horizontal and vertical black lines on a white background. The Mondri 3 in 1 vase is very clearly inspired by the late De Stijl movement artist, and it breaks apart into three pieces so you can create your own neoplasticism masterpiece. More »

Photo: Sebastian Saarloos

It was 10 degrees below zero, with 30 mph winds in the Alaskan wild, where the nearest town was 50 miles away, but Sebastian Saarloos came out alive and with this gorgeous souvenir: a magnificent photograph of a moondog.

In this image, the first quarter moon is flanked on both sides of a halo by "mock moons," also known as paraselenae or "moondogs." The apparitions are formed when moonlight is refracted through thin, plate-shaped ice crystals in cirrus clouds. They are easy to spot at an angle of 22 degrees from the moon when it is low in the sky.

SPACE.com has the story: Link

You can tell that Vinnie's Pizza in Brooklyn, New York, is a classy joint just by looking at its daily specials. Co-owner Sean Berthiaume's Special Bored tumblr documents the pop culture-inspired menu: Link - via Pleated Jeans

They're on a Game of Thrones kick right now, but rest assured that other pop culture references aren't neglected.

Photo: Ryo Ichikawa

Will the wonder that is Japan ever cease? First, the country gave us Dragon Ball Z. Then she gives us Kamehameha, a meme where people imitate anime fight scenes. How awesome is it? Let's just say that it's over NINE THOUSAAAAAAND!

More over at Kotaku - via PetaPixel

Photo: @mrmr0630

Photo: @ari_snows

Blocks away from Oakland's Fox Theater, in City Hall, groups of hackers are trying to help the city, one line of code at a time. vision63

OAKLAND, CA—Four years ago, Code For America (CFA) was founded with the mission to "help governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the Web." Within two years, the San Francisco-based nonprofit set up a fellowship program, inviting American cities to receive a team of three young motivated developers, activists, and policy planners. The Washington Post's description captured what everyone was already thinking: CFA is the “technology world’s equivalent of the Peace Corps or Teach for America.”

It's an apt comparison. All three organizations choose a specific municipal problem and recruit volunteers with specific skillsets—in this case, people able to conceptualize and build some sort of tech tool—to tackle it. Accordingly, the past two years of the CFA program have produced a few high profile successes: "BlightStatus" in New Orleans lets people check up on blight in their neighborhoods, while "Honolulu Answers" in Hawaii refined search on the municipality's websites. In Boston, the CFA was responsible for both "Where's My School Bus?", which provides real-time school bus information for parents, and "Adopt-A-Hydrant," which helps the city save money by letting people volunteer to shovel hydrants near their homes out of the snow in the winter.

Any city can apply to host CFA fellows. If successful, the paid fellows spend a month in the chosen cities, then head back to CFA’s headquarters in San Francisco to regroup, code, and work on their projects. The third crop of CFA fellows will disperse all across the country in 2013 to Louisville, Kentucky; Kansas City, Kansas; Kansas City, Missouri; Las Vegas, Nevada; New York City, New York; South Bend, Indiana; San Mateo County, California; San Francisco, California; Summit County, Ohio; and Oakland, California.

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Disneyland fans have created many of their own theme days, some of which I've been lucky enough to happen upon or attend -- Bats Day (goths); Gay Days, and more. But I didn't know about Dapper Day, where 10,000+ people descend on Disneyland and Walt Disney World in natty outfits and style their way through the fun park. Just looking at the official gallery makes me want to mark this in my calendar for next year.

"People are looking for an excuse to dress up," said Justin Jorgensen, who started Dapper Day in 2011 and has organized five of the events, all at Disneyland. The latest Dapper Day — the same Sunday as the Oscars, Hollywood’s own dress-up day — drew an estimated crowd of 10,000 to the Anaheim park and about 1,000 more at Florida's Disney World.

"Everything, including the workplace, pushes this idea of being casual," said Jorgensen, 38, of Burbank. "When do I get to wear my great stuff?"

Most of those in attendance that day were in their 20s and 30s. They had come of age in a time of shoulder-padded power suits, windbreakers in neon colors and frizzy hair — not exactly a time that will be remembered for its classic elegance.

"I think people like history, people love nostalgia," said Heather A. Vaughan, a historian studying 20th century fashions. "People love imagining a time they didn’t live in."

Dapper Day at Disneyland, the nattiest place on Earth [LA Times/Rick Rojas]

(Photo: Christina House)

Ed. note: This is the third and final post in a TP Ideas symposium on Branko Milanovic’s The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality. The first installment is here here and the second is here.

The wealthy don’t like it when we talk about it inequality. Mitt Romney famously labeled President Obama’s critique of inequality “class warfare” motivated by “envy,” and proposed instead that debate about economic inequality be confined to “quiet rooms.” It’s fair to say he’s not alone among the super-wealthy in thinking this isn’t a “proper” subject for open, political debate.

At first blush, their motivation here is straightforward: it could cost them money. But given America’s one percent already has so much, and so little redistribution is on the table, they’d have to be exceptionally greedy to have such a strong reaction to even broaching the inequality discussion. Of course that’s possible, but the history of debates around inequality as surveyed in Branko Milanovic’s wonderfully readable book suggests another explanation. The rich don’t like inequality talk because, by its very nature, it involves making moral judgments about the way the rich live their lives into a topic for public discussion.

In the book’s first essay, “Unequal People,” Milanovic runs down the earliest modern economic theories about whether inequality is good for economic growth. The difference between early theories wasn’t, as we think today, whether or not you thought inequality was something that happened as a consequence of a roaring economy: it was whether, essentially, the rich are good people or not.

On the first view, defended to varying degrees by Max Weber and John Maynard Keynes, the rich were virtuous workers, dutiful, acquisitive folk who accumulated but spent no more on indulgences than the poor. Their massive savings were invested back in the marketplace, which, as Keynes put it, “made possible those vast accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements” which redounded “to the advantage of the whole community.” The virtuous rich were uninterested in selfish consumption, serving principally as what Milanovic calls “saving machines” for the broader capitalist society.

Milanovic’s second view paints a dimmer picture of virtues of the rich. It assumes that the rich are selfish, greedy parasites who hold on to massive hoards and spend on themselves without investing in much of anything socially useful. In democracies, this leads the naturally-angry rest of society to impose punitive tax rates that slow economic growth. By being selfish misers, the rich end up taking money away from everyone.

What’s interesting about both sides of this debate is that they assume a public policy problem (“what grows the economy?”) needs to be discussed in terms of the moral character of the rich. This isn’t because economists have a yen for judging people; rather, it’s that when you have the amount of accumulated capital and power that rich do, the way in which one spend one’s money ends up having an extraordinary impact on everyone else in society. Invariably, assessing the desirability of rich people’s consumption choices will take on a moral cast, as what a person chooses to spend their money on says a lot about the person. Especially when they’re rich enough to spend it on anything.

It’s impossible to imagine that this point escapes wealthy people who follow the news. My guess (and I can’t prove this, but statements like Romney’s are certainly suggestive) is that when they hear that the one percent “should pay its fair share,” they hear the public calling the way they choose to live their lives unfair and unjust. No one likes being judged as a bad person, especially by the world’s most powerful politicians and in the pages of the world’s most-read newspapers. The wealthy, then, react negatively to public debates about inequality for the same reason many meat-eaters don’t like debating vegetarianism.

Uncomfortability, of course, isn’t a defense. The power wielded by America’s wealthy means that, like it or not, the rich can’t and shouldn’t be allowed to escape public scrutiny. Moreover, they often bring on themselves: see the pretty nasty things some wealthier folk say about poor and middle class Americans and the lengths to which others go to sing the praises of the “productive class.” But hypocrisy aside, the moral anxiety of the wealthy is both an interesting psychological fact and a neat window into the little, surprising ways in which the personal can’t be detached from the political.

A brief interview with one of our Stars from User Experience.

Lets face it I just like drawing cats…

Some real punchycards!

I’ll tell you all about them in a few days..

Hope you all enjoyed User Experience– but enjoy it fast! As I’ll be pulling it offline in ONE WEEK! I need to preserve an Air of Mystery for the Book!

skin_ubx

In the 1960's Stanley Milgram introduced the lost letter technique which had a notable impact on the field of social psychology (unfortunately the original paper is still paywalled even though it is now two decades after his death). One of the greatest inherent problems with social psychology is ...

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Austin Considine from Motherboard recently interviewed UC Riverside philosopher John Fischer about his project to study immortality and its implications to the human condition. During their conversation they talked about immortal jellyfish, near-death experiences, the problematic Higgs boson, and the possibility of living for billions of years.

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Jason Rohrer is well-known in indie gaming circles for his experimental "art games" like Passage and Sleep is Death, but his latest creation is something that may not be played by anyone alive today. Rohrer's latest creation, a board game titled A Game for Someone, is currently buried somewhere in a Nevada desert where Rohrer intends it to stay for the next 2,700 years.

"I wanted to make a game that is not for right now, that I will never play," said Rohrer onstage at this year's Game Developers Conference, "and nobody now living would ever play."

Polygon reports that the game was created as a (very literal) response to a "humanity's last game" themed challenge at GDC. Rohrer created the rules for the game and playtested it with a computer to account for balance issues, and then set about building it using materials that would last for a few thousand years—the board and its pieces are crafted from titanium, and the rules are written on acid-free paper stored in a hermetically sealed glass tube.

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For many years now, Swiss adventurer and balloonist André Borschberg has been working on an experimental solar-powered plane, which made its maiden flight in 2009.

Since a test showing that the Solar Impulse could stay aloft using solar power and solar-charged batteries, Borschberg has made test flight (Switzerland, 2010) after test flight (Madrid to Rabat, 2012), at ever-increasing distances.

Borschberg now has his sights set on the United States and is planning a cross-country, five-stage promo tour that will go from San Francisco to New York by way of Phoenix, Dallas, and Washington DC. The tour is set to begin on May 1—the plane will spend 10 days in each location to teach students and pilots about solar powered-flight.

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It's not a trailer, but it's still pretty neat; to go with the concept art shown during Bungie's Destiny panel at GDC was this short video, which is all about turning character designs into in-game models.

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@townesy77Megan Townes

I built the Globe Theatre in #massivelyminecraft this week: #lovethisgame

Wow.  Things have been moving very fast for me.  I have a backlog of Really Cool Stuff that I need to post on here.  I will do that very soon.  But for now, an update from Aleksi Postari about one of the things that are keeping myself and my partners busy.  Aleksi is the Lead Developer for MinecraftEdu.  Check out the progress of our custom Minecraft mod designed for educational use!

Aleksi / kulttuuri writes:

Peek of new features…

Few screenies here about what’s coming up… We will try to aim next release to be also available for individuals, so that has taken some time from us (had to develop separate mod install tool and such for it), but now we are mostly just waiting for the bugfixes for 1.0 and next release that could be merged into Edu!

But for the screenies, here we go:

 

 

 

By Tim Price, originally published on Next New Deal

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The corporate 'predator state' (WaPo)

Katrina vanden Heuvel argues that bipartisan agreement in Washington often means corporate interests have successfully bought off lawmakers on both sides, but there's a real left-right alliance to be forged between workers and small business owners.

For 'Faster Growth,' Soak the Poor? (Bloomberg)

Josh Barro writes that conservative economists are once again trotting out the argument that we need to cut government spending on poor people in order to fix the economy, which makes sense if you ignore everything about the economy and the poor.

Why the federal budget can't be managed like a household budget (Guardian)

Helaine Olen takes on the notion that governments and families must both maintain a balanced budget at all times, a dead horse that has been thoroughly beaten, dismembered, and restored by the finest taxidermists so the beatings may continue.

More Proof That America Doesn't Have a Spending Problem (Think Progress)

Travis Waldron notes that a new CBO report shows that government spending under Comrade Obama is so hopelessly out of control that discretionary spending now makes up a smaller share of the economy than it did in 2007, before the recession.

Declining Wealth Brings a Rising Retirement Risk (NYT)

Bruce Bartlett writes that as workers are shifted out of defined-benefit pension plans and into defined-contribution plans, it's become clear they're not as good at generating a return as corporate money managers. Now let's try it with their fall-back plans!

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (ProPublica)

As April 15 approaches, Liz Day notes that tax filing could be less ulcer-producing if the IRS prepared the returns. But that doesn't appeal to the tax prep software industry or conservatives who want the government to keep its hands off our payments to it.

The GOP Needs a New Product, Not a New Brand (HBR)

Justin Fox writes that while the GOP's current focus is on finding a spokesman who seems less old, white, and curmudgeonly, the key to success is creating and selling a product customers actually want, not just finding new ways to trick them into buying it.

Texas wants its gold back! Wait, what? (WaPo)

Channeling his inner leprechaun, Rick Perry is demanding the return of $1 billion worth of his state's gold from the New York Federal Reserve. Neil Irwin explains why that could be a hedge against Texas seceding from the Union—Perry's other favorite idea.

Tim Price is Deputy Editor of Next New Deal. Follow him on Twitter @txprice.

One of the odder things about reading Supreme Court oral arguments is how, well, small the discussion is. The questions being asked are questions that have been hashed out at dinner tables for years or even decades; I don't know if any more ought to be expected, but it's still odd to see Justice Scalia muttering phrases that seem to have come directly from talk radio, or to hear lawyers before the Greatest Court In The Land bringing up or knocking down strawmen that most of the rest of us thought had been dispensed with a very long time ago.

Case in point: Tuesday arguments before the Court, which centered for long periods of time around whether or not "procreation" was the be-all, end-all of marriage definitions, as the anti-marriage equality side had claimed in its briefs. Wouldn't that mean that old or infertile people shouldn't be allowed to marry? And isn't that ridiculous on its face?

Here's how Justice Kagan asked the question:

“Suppose a State said that, ‘Because we think that the focus of marriage really should be on procreation, we are not going to give marriage licenses anymore to any couple where both people are over the age of 55.’ Would that be constitutional?”

And here's how Charles Cooper, advocate for the pro-Proposition 8 side, argued his case:

"[S]ociety's interest in responsible procreation isn't just with respect to the procreative capacities of the couple itself. The marital norm, which imposes the obligations of fidelity and monogamy, Your Honor, advances the interests in responsible procreation by making it more likely that neither party, including the fertile party to that … marriage will engage in irresponsible procreative conduct outside of that marriage. Outside of that marriage. That's the marital—that's the marital norm."

It's all about the babies, then. Or rather, discouraging "irresponsible procreative conduct" that leads to out-of-wedlock babies. You see, even if two infertile people get married, or, say, one fertile and one infertile person, the state still has a general interest in seeing the "norm" of proper babymakin' adhered to, and that means no "irresponsible procreative conduct," and that means no gays because … wait, what?

If you can make any sense of Cooper's word salad, you're a talented soul. But while the question of whether the state's interest in marriage was all about the baby-making was (yet again) hashed out, none of the justices seemed to follow up on the one thing I would have loved to see Cooper explain. If, as Cooper says, the state interest is to ensure that neither party in the marriage "will engage in irresponsible procreative conduct outside of that marriage"—how do you figure gay Americans are more likely to engage in extramarital "procreative conduct," fella? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the number of accidental pregnancies resulting from irresponsible gay sex is, on the Famous Accidental Pregnancies scale of things, vanishingly low. It's not known to be a big problem.

That's what's frequently so surprising about these oral arguments. You've got lawyers making arguments that have been shot down over and over again, arguments that have been dull for decades, and arguments that aren't even internally consistent from paragraph to paragraph. In this case, perhaps we should just be interpreting it as the anti-equality side simply having a harder and harder time mustering up any sensible argument at all?

Marijke Visser from the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy writes with this provocative question:

What could a library do with a gigabit broadband connection? What kinds of services could they do that they can’t without that big of a connection? Thinking way away from the typical services libraries offer now, what are some really big ideas that would need that much connectivity? These services could happen outside the library walls, in relationship to other community organizations and/or government agencies… How would a library hooked up to a gig benefit its community?

Well?

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The right to organize is one more casualty of the filibuster. Faced with a barrage of attacks from congressional Republicans and corporate groups, the National Labor Relations Board has been struggling to fulfill its mission of protecting workers' rights to organize (or not) and participate in concerted action. The agency's difficulties, from legislative threats to constant lawsuits to an outright refusal by Senate Republicans to allow board members to be confirmed, are a threat to the rule of law and the operation of the government. It's not all abstract, though. There's also a massive human cost. Dave Jamieson details this human cost at one West Virginia mine.

The Cannelton mine went bankrupt and was acquired by the now-notorious Massey Energy in 2004. The bankruptcy put hundreds of miners out of work, and rather than rehire them when it acquired the mine, Massey did everything possible to avoid hiring those experienced local workers—because they had been union members.

Massey searched far and wide for non-UMWA workers. A freshly laid off Barry Kidd spotted a billboard on the highway inviting experienced miners to apply for jobs. Kidd called the number and it was Massey, he said. With no jobs and plenty of spare time, some former Cannelton workers were vacationing in Myrtle Beach, S.C., a favorite shore spot for West Virginia miners, when they saw a plane fly over the beach dragging a banner, the kind that usually promotes a tiki-bar happy hour or wet t-shirt contest. Instead, the advertisement was soliciting applicants for their old jobs at Cannelton.

Massey managers who were doing the hiring went so far as to create a spreadsheet to track the amount of applicants' "union time"—how many years they'd logged as UMWA members, which served as an approximation of union loyalty. [...]

In the end, out of 219 miners hired for Massey's new operation, only 19 came from the union, and none of them were union officers or committee members, the labor board found. Many of the new workers seemed to come from outside the area, with no roots in nearby Smithers or other local communities. Several of them had no mining experience whatsoever.

Many of the miners went from earning $50,000 and more to earning less than half that in the new jobs they were able to find. According to the National Labor Relations Board, 85 of them are owed back pay and reinstatement because of Massey's illegal discrimination. In fact, that decision has come twice. The first time, it was invalidated by a court decision saying the NLRB can't operate without a three-member quorum, which didn't exist at the time of the decision. The second time, it's been hit by the appeals court ruling overturning President Obama's recess appointments—appointments without which the NLRB wouldn't have had a quorum. And of course, Senate Republicans are blocking nominees to the labor board. The NLRB continues to operate while it appeals that ruling to the Supreme Court, but its power to enforce decisions is sharply limited.

So the situation is this: The NLRB can't function without a three-member quorum. Senate Republicans will filibuster the confirmation of basically any Obama nominee. And thanks to the decision of three Republican appeals court judges, companies can block any decision made by the current NLRB since its quorum relies on recess appointments. Meanwhile, the Cannelton miners wait, and struggle to get by, and wonder if they'll be too old or unhealthy to reclaim their old jobs by the time a final decision is made and enforced. And that's exactly the outcome that Senate Republicans are aiming for when they block nominations and that the Chamber of Commerce and law-breaking employers are aiming for when they sue to block any and every decision by the NLRB. Broken government and broken unions and broken workers are the goal.

Tell Harry Reid it's time to reopen filibuster reform.

Wil Wheaton sez,

On November 17th, 2012, New York-based comedy music group Fortress of Attitude uploaded a music video they created for their song "PS Gay Car" (using the exact words of a mean note they found on their car one day) to YouTube. The pro-gay rights video was immensely popular, garnering coverage from, Huffington Post, Out Magazine, College Humor and Queerty. The video gained 39,800 views in its first month, and then a month later YouTube took down the video, claiming they'd used bots to drive up views.

The story that unfolds is Kafkaesque: Fortress of Attitude hires New Media Rights to help them get their video reinstated, and Google/YouTube's response is to send form letters back that just restate the alleged initial TOU violation. Ultimately, Google/YouTube refuses to consider any evidence or explanation from Fortress of Attitude, and deletes the video permanently.

Google deletes "PS Gay Car"— We need your help! (Thanks, Wil!)

It is spring, 1978. Richard Pini lurks near the entrance to a building in East Lansing, Michigan, and waits. He had flown on impulse from Boston to Detroit, then driven to this suburban town on the East Cedar River, out of sheer frustration. His quest: to recover a comic-book fantasy, imagined and illustrated by his wife, Wendy, from the man who had taken it from them. Their publisher, the short-lived and so-called Independent Publishers Syndicate, wasn't returning her artwork.

What IPS's proprietor thought when confronted by an angry New Englander—no longer a mere voice on the phone—is his own business. But the look on his face, Pini says, was priceless. He handed over the artwork, and Pini was soon back on the road. With him in his rented car were 60 pages from another world, a place hidden somewhere between Japanese comics, American animated movies, and spooky Old World picturebooks.

ElfQuest would, henceforth, be self-published.

The story of Cutter and his clan of wolf-riding elves, burned from their ancient forest by vengeful humans, ElfQuest's inspirations are entirely different from Tolkien and his imitators. Their long search for a new home leads to more of their kind, to the derelict spaceship of their shapeshifting ancestors, and to an unsettling truth concerning their own nature. By the early 1980s, the magazine-sized books were selling 100,000 copies an issue.

Especially popular among young women, this romantic adventure was not didactic, and the Pinis say they didn't set out to push boundaries. But with a setting packed with novel "meta"—the heroes being an experiment in applied mythology both in and outside the story—ElfQuest's mix of mysticism and humanism renewed a gently subversive strain of arcadian fiction that had been long-eclipsed by the detail-obsessed worlds of high fantasy.[1]

Marking the saga's 35th anniversary, Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired the complete archives: thousands of comic pages, preliminary sketches, mockups, layouts and scripts.

From the clutches of a fly-by-night publisher to the permanent collection of one of America's oldest universities, ElfQuest's had a remarkable run. I asked Wendy and Richard about the forthcoming denouement, how times have changed, and the haunting connections it builds with its readers.

Misunderstandings and Making comics

Rob: First, let me add one more huge thank you to your collection of thank yous. I read ElfQuest when I was nine or ten years old, and it rescued me from some really terrible genre fantasy.

Wendy: What you just said never gets old no matter how many times we hear it. Being told ‘thank you’ is worth more than an Eisner Award to us--just being told ‘thank you’ because we helped someone learn how to read, or helped them with their sexuality[2], or helped them get started professionally as writers or artists. The thank yous have been the biggest reward over the years for Richard and me. Richard, would you agree?

Richard: I would agree 110%. For over 30 years we keep getting letters from folks. The cycle renews itself. We hear from a parent and then we hear from the children of those parents and there’s no statuette, there’s no plaque that you could hang on your wall that makes us feel as good as just those very personal expressions.

Rob: What do people most misunderstand about ElfQuest?

Richard: Most misunderstand? What do they most misunderstand.

Rob: Is it a stupid question?

Richard: Ha, no, it’s one I don’t believe has been asked before. The simple answer, at least in my mind, comes down to a four letter word and that four letter word is ‘cute’. Between the title, which has ‘elf’ in it, and a very criminally superficial viewing of Wendy’s artwork, I think some people glance at it and think, ‘Oh, it’s cute, oh it’s girly. Oh, it’s this, oh, it’s that.’ And they dismiss it[3]. Now that may be too superficial an answer for your question.

Wendy: I think Richard just opened Pandora’s Box there, because from the very beginning ElfQuest has been misunderstood particularly its influences and origins when we first brought it out. The entire comics industry was not really familiar with a drawing style inspired by Japanese manga and they didn’t know how to categorize it. ‘What in the world is this? They all have big eyes, the guys look like girls, it’s overly emotional, we’ve never seen anything like this[4]. It’s not even a comic book.’ From the beginning ElfQuest has been very, very hard for mainstream comics fans to categorize and so instead of just educating themselves on what its background is they just decide, ‘It’s a chick book. Maybe it’s a good date book. Maybe I can meet a chick if I ask her if she reads ElfQuest.’ Yet we do have a very large male readership and, for sure, from the feedback we get from men such as yourself, we know they don’t think it’s a chick book! We know they’re getting a lot more out of it than that.

Rob: In England, it turned up as graphic novels, right there with Asterix and Tintin and so on. I remember being surprised the first time I saw the actual magazine-size comics, which were hard to find in England because I don’t think they’d ever been officially published there. I just never realized just how unusual the format was that you used.

Richard: What you saw there was the serendipitous result of us really not knowing how to do it any different, and just using the few examples that we had at the time as a template. It worked out amazingly well. Everything was "wrong" about it,. It was the wrong size. It wasn’t in color. It was too expensive. It was, perish the thought, drawn by a woman. All the things that were ‘wrong’ about it made it blazingly distinctive.

Rob: Wendy, you fairly recently finished working on Masque of the Red Death, a big project that took several years. It has a very different vibe to ElfQuest. How do you go about moving artistically and creatively from one world back to the other?

Wendy: Both worlds have always been inside me. There’s a video we put up on YouTube recently of me drawing a piece of Masque. It’s about a 45 minute film and during the course of it I talk about the very first story I really ever worked on, and it was a prose story that I was writing for English class. It was yaoi before anyone had ever heard or even thought of such a term. When I was 16 years old, I hadn’t really even discovered manga yet, because there was just no way to have access to it.

But one of the earliest stories I ever wrote was a dramatic story, and it had a gay protagonist. I may have been ahead of my time with it, but that type of thing has always been a part of my psyche: a darker feel for gothic romance. I’m a horror fan, particularly anything with Vincent Price in it. Anything by Roger Corman—I love delicious, dark horror. I’m a huge Edgar Allan Poe fan, too, and that had been simmering for some time with me. After our contract with DC Comics was fulfilled in 2007, I realized that I had an opening where I could actually tackle Masque. I set out to do it, and it took me four years to finish. It was one of the happiest and most enjoyable and creative experiences I’ve ever had.

Rob: You guys have been in the front lines for 35 years. How has the web changed how the business and the work of comics goes?

Richard: Good heavens. I’m afraid I’m not going to have a terrifically reasoned answer to that and the reason is that, in around about 2002, I decided that I was, as a publisher, getting burned out. All of the administrative trivia, day to day stuff, was wearing me out and I was losing sight of the fun of being part of a creative team. That’s when we picked up a literary agent, licensed to DC, and they did a very nice production job on the archive books, the manga books, and the new work that Wendy did, Discovery and The Searcher and the Sword. At that same time, the web was really beginning to make its presence known in the world of publishing. I realized that, just as I came to print publishing not knowing a damned thing and learning as we went when ElfQuest was first conceived and born, that’s how I would come to the web. The desire to do new things is very strong, but not a week goes by that somebody doesn’t send me an email and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got the perfect platform! I’ve got the perfect app! I’ve got the perfect method!’"

Wendy: I think things are in the same state as they were in 1977, when we were learning how to publish by the seat of our pants. I think independent publishing has moved to the internet, and people are discovering their own ways of doing things just like we did back in the 70s.

Richard: I absolutely agree with you. However, I cut my teeth on paper and ink. And all of this new stuff is... Heaven knows I’m not Grandpa sitting wondering what the hell a mouse is for, but it is still muchly arcane to me and I am doing my best to hack my way through the brambles. But, to bring it back to your question, personally the web has affected the business of ElfQuest in that I find myself and we find ourselves much more desirous of forming partnerships with people who are savvy about this new frontier, so that we can just tell the stories.

Rob: I think you might have just answered my next question, which was if you were doing it all over again, or if you were just starting in it, how do you think it might be different?

Wendy: I don’t think we would have anywhere near the chance of getting started now the way we did back then. In the mid-70s—and I know it’s kind of hard to picture—the way was really clear for us. The independent comics movement was just getting started, and we were among the pioneers. There was not the competition for shelf space. There was not the competition for audience attention and, quite frankly, the audience’s attention span was a lot longer back then than it is now. ElfQuest happened to happen at the right place and the right time. It took off like wildfire. It was lightning in a bottle, and I really don’t think we could have that opportunity again right now. I think if we were trying to launch ElfQuest today, the amount of competition, the sheer amount of product that is out there, would make us just one among thousands.

Richard: Never mind the sheer amount of product, which you’re absolutely right about. Just the sheer amount of noise. Consider, in 1978, a lot of things didn’t exist. There was no web, books existed only on paper, you only got them in shops, and people mostly wrote letters back and forth. Communication between and among us was laborious compared to the instantaneous abilities of email and Skype and chat and all that. And because it was laborious, you paid more attention to it, because you invested more of yourself into the effort of getting these things, reading these things, and interacting with others who were interested in these things.

Wendy: Absolutely. Back then our audience was willing to wait four months between issues. ElfQuest only came out three times a year, for 32 pages of goodness, and they were willing to wait four months! And not only just wait but the audience grew with every issue. Again, it was a magical period that could never, ever possibly come again.

Richard: I think that’s the essence of it. The attention span, the amount of patience was infinite compared to what it is now.

Wendy: And that affects how I tell stories now because I’m quite aware that I can't really be as glacially leisurely, with the pace of the stories, as I was back in the early days.

Rob: Four hours is the new four months! So we recently installed a live monitoring system at Boing Boing, and it really shows how the ‘long tail’ works. This is the idea that while everything big happens at the beginning, there is this long tailing-off of attention for any given thing. Especially on the internet. The long tail works when you're abstracting bookstore inventories at Amazon or other huge aggregations of content, but people will apply to everything--and on the level of individual stories on our site, it really doesn’t exist. The long tail is homeopathic--it only appears to exist when you aggregate loads of different things together. But individuals have a hard time benefiting from it. So the web, damn, it's scary.

Wendy: It’s scary, but that’s an absolutely brilliant description.

Richard: I really like the use of the homeopathic metaphor. Homeopathy is, literally, one or two molecules of something in a bottle of water. Essentially nothing, and yet aggregate enough of those and you’ll have the appearance of something.

From ink to digital

Rob: 35 years!

Richard: You know, there’s young, there’s old, and then there’s post-old. I think I’ve gone past. Now whether that’s denial, or simply a new state of being, I don’t much care to analyze in depth. But that I’m still here, to be talking about what we can do next, is rejuvenating. So we’ll take it.

Wendy: I know. Just think about it: 35 years and here we are getting ready to tell another story.

Rob: You mentioned on Facebook how Photoshop makes it easy to experiment with different ideas, to change the lighting in a scene without destroying the art, experiment with spatial relationships, and so on. How has your creative workflow changed since the pencil and ink days?

Wendy: You see, the experience of working with Masque wasn’t just satisfying creatively, but was an enormous learning experience as well. I developed techniques while working on Masque for saving time with characters. The style of artwork in Masque of the Red Death is very stylized, very theatrical, and one of the techniques I used was to create the characters on several different layers so that, for example, if I wanted to reposition an arm or change the angle of a head but not necessarily change the facial expression. that limb or that appendage would be on a layer and I could simply grab it and not have to redraw it and simply reposition it.

But, at the same time, I didn’t feel that I wanted to cheat. I didn’t feel I just wanted to constantly repeat art—so I might grab an already existing drawing, but once I had laid it into the new panel I would change it.

In the case of working on Final Quest now, the artwork for ElfQuest is quite a bit more detailed and organic than the artwork in Masque, and so it requires a lot more initial drawing than Masque did. But I will be using some of those same techniques, especially with weapons. All the elves have signature weapons; Cutter’s sword, New Moon, is kind of famous. I have that existing in my files at different angles so that no matter how he’s standing, I can grab it and attach it to his breeches. Then, I just change the lighting on it to make it fit into the panel. It saves a tremendous amount of time, and it also keeps the artwork looking very, very consistent.

Rob: I wonder if in a few years there’ll be 3D modelling programs that help with that kind of scene setting. Not rendering the final image in 3D, but posing characters and blocking out the scenes to help make drawing the panels easier.

Wendy: They already exist. They already exist. I don’t use them but things like that definitely already exist.

Richard: A lot of fans have, over recent years, sent us 3D renderings of the ElfQuest characters. There is still that ‘uncanny valley’ element to deal with. You can get a somewhat decent-looking, somewhat on-model character, but it’s just off enough to be a little bit creepy rather than appealing. The day that some magical application is able to allow someone to capture what Wendy does every time she puts stylus to tablet, that’s going to be a very interesting day.

Wendy: Here’s the thing. One of the things that’s driving my work on Final Quest is my understanding of the fans’ expectations. They expect a certain level of artwork, they expect a certain level of consistency and especially attention to detail. One of the things that ElfQuest fans are very devoted to is the amount of detail in the artwork. So that’s important to me as well. As much as it might be tempting to–I hate to use the word ‘cheat’, but it’s a good word–as much as it might be tempting to cheat by constantly reusing files and files and files of different drawings and it wouldn’t look bad, I’m not going to do that with Final Quest. I’m still going to approach it pretty much the old fashioned way, and let what is needed in the panel to tell the story dictate what I draw.

Rob: European fans are much more OCD about that stuff than American fans.

Wendy: That’s what I’ve noticed. The primary backlash against my digital art work, which started with my relationship with DC because both the Discovery and Searcher and the Sword were done entirely digitally[5]. That’s when I made my move into the digital realm, and there was a pretty strong backlash.

There were fans that absolutely hated the work, even though it came from the same hand and heart that had always done it. There were a number of fans that just thought it was abysmal! And they said so, and we did notice a large number of them were European. The preference we see expressed over and over again was to see brushstrokes and pencil lines existing within the artwork. The European sensibility seems to be more oriented towards a classical approach, where you can see the work of the artist’s hand. I can understand that, but not many of them understand that coloring ElfQuest was always very frustrating to me until I went digital. The artwork itself is so detailed that it requires a rather simple coloring technique for it not to get muddy. Back in the day before I even started working on computer, using watercolors and the like, really frustrated me because I personally didn’t like those brushstrokes–the extra ‘spinach’, I call it–that made the artwork look kind of muddy to me.

Rob: I’ll admit that I’m fond of the hand-painted Starblaze editions, even though I understand you also had to paint over substandard reproductions. And the watercolor Hidden Years. And one of the things I like about it is the texture. Perhaps its that cultural European thing.

Wendy: But you see, that’s okay. In a way I was grateful for it, because any time you experience criticism from readers, or from critics, you can either get knocked down by it or take a really good look at yourself and decide what it is that you truly like, what you truly want to express. When it comes to comics, as a comic artist, clarity and a very strong line, and a very powerful relationship to animation, are what I have always striven for. Nothing has gotten me closer to the look of animation cells on rich backgrounds than working digitally.

Richard: One of your very favorite things to say these days has been that the way you’ve done comics for most of these 35 years has been almost a detour, because you used to say that what you wanted to do most of all was to paint with light. And when you put line on paper and you put paint on it you are using reflected light, which can be very beautiful, but to paint with light needed the computer, and the tablet, and the monitor. Only then were you truly using light.

Wendy: ElfQuest is an animated film that’s been running in my head since Richard and I started it together. ElfQuest and animation are indelibly connected; all I’ve ever wanted is a beautiful 2D cartoon. If I can’t have it on the big screen, for whatever reason, I can come as close to it on paper as I can, and that will be what satisfies me as I finish work on Final Quest.

Rob: You use a Wacom Cintiq, right? How have you found it?

Wendy: I remember how I learned about them. I was down at Disney MGM. They were working on Mulan at the time, and all the animators were using them. That was the first time I ever tried drawing on one, and I just lost my mind. I was trying to figure out how to smuggle one out under my blouse, or something! It was just the most wonderful drawing tool I’d ever seen, and I just took to it immediately. I remember telling you about that, Richard and I think you went looking online.

Richard: They were relatively new at that time and it was just a matter of finding one and then biting the bullet, and saying, ‘Okay, here you go.’

Wendy: I was just going to say, that’s a very important aspect of our relationship. Richard is not just the CEO of Warp Graphics and the editor and publisher and co-creator of the stories. He’s also a facilitator. If I discover something that I think is going to be useful, he will just do what it takes to make it happen for me. We really try to stay up on the tools that people are using, and the techniques, and that sort of thing. He’s just marvellous at finding tools and things that I ask for. That’s his primary role. He likes the label of ‘facilitator’. I think everything is lumped into that basket when you describe him.

Rob: Have you had a chance to check out the pressure sensitive pens that just came out for the iPad amd Android tablets?

Richard: I’ve heard of them. I know that people are starting to use the iPad now the way they used the graphics tablets before. Since I’m not that type of artist, and I can’t draw to save my life, I can’t see how it’s going to affect me all that much. And since Wendy went from an 8 x 8 to a 12 x 12 to a 21” Cintiq tablet, she seems to be going in the other direction, toward the larger and larger workspace.

Wendy: Definitely. Going back to my 12” Wacom tablet, I don’t foresee that ever happening.

Richard: Can you see yourself, we’re at a convention, and it’s after hours, and you’ve got your iPad. Can you see yourself drawing the next page of FinalQuest on the iPad?

Wendy: Shoot me, shoot me!

Rob: What's the iPad? About ten inches? Tiny, isn’t it?

Wendy: Oh my gosh, I’m going to leave that one alone.

Richard: Yeah. Where are you from?

Rob: Next question!

Wendy: Next question!

Richard: That’s one of those things that if you overheard it at a convention it would be on Twitter and Facebook within seconds.

Rob: Haha. I started out as a tech writer, so I’m obsessed with all these gadgets and how they influence our creativity, but also how they influence the execution of the work.

Wendy: And this new technology is very interesting stuff. It’s very interesting.

Rob: In 20 years time, there'll be something completely new at hand, and European ElfQuest Fans will be complaining because the gradients aren’t the perfect clean Photoshop ones anymore.

Wendy: [Laughs] That’s great.

Richard: Clearly he knows these people.

Rob: We Europeans, we do have a thing about obsessive continuity.

Wendy: In working so hard to preserve the past for people to study, you’ve certainly got to be detail orientated, don’t you?

The Final Quest

Rob: Someone pointed out that to them the elves have been taller in the new work, and that seems to reflect what you’re talking about: the art remains consistent, but you’ve changed style over the years. Looking back, I remember that in the Siege at Blue Mountain series, the art was starker. The proportions were more human. Whereas in, say, the Dreamtime series, the characters are more cartoonish. You’ve said that in the Final Quest, they’re going to become lean and mean. Is that an art thing, or foreshadowing for the story?

Wendy: Oh, boy. All the threads and clues, planted along the way for these three decades? This is the story that’s going to reveal those. We’ve been leading up to Final Quest for a long, long time[6]. As we’ve said many times, in different places, Final Quest doesn’t mean the end of ElfQuest. But what it is the end of is a long, long arc: our hero’s journey.

We are now going to take Cutter into to what Joseph Campbell calls ‘ the cave’, and we’ll see what happens, whether he emerges from the cave or not. Cutter has always been the central figure, the guiding spirit of the story. He’s the one we follow, and yet at the same time, there’s all this stuff that happens around him. Well, that’s never been more true than in Final Quest, because we have so many elf tribes, so many new characters, we have the next generation, the children, to take a look at, as they grow up, during the course of this story.

It’s my job, as the storyteller, to keep a central theme going that has been there from the beginning—and yet, at the same time, weave all these new storylines and all these new characters into it. Therefore, when it comes to the idea of lean and mean, I’m taking a lean and mean approach to telling the story.

It would be very easy to get sidetracked into the minutiae of what is going on with all of these characters, and I want to give everybody the spotlight and give everybody their due, but not to get bogged down at any point. To keep the story moving. So I’m taking a lean and mean approach. And the characters themselves, because of all they’re going to get into, are really going to be in survival mode.[7]

Rob: ElfQuest is the love story of Cutter and Skywise. Given that they’re...

Wendy: I like that!

Rob: It wasn’t me who said it, I can't take credit! You know, I can’t remember who did. I was probably drinking when I read it. But that seemed to me to be another way of saying that ElfQuest is really your love story.

Wendy: I would not deny that. How about you, Richard?

Richard: I wouldn’t even if I...I’m tongue tied simply at the notion that it could be conceived otherwise.

Wendy: You know, at times, we’ve said that this is the story of our friendship, because Richard and I have been together for, is it 43 years now? It is 43 years, right?

Richard: Going on 44, yes.

Wendy: 44 years and the relationship has gone through as many changes and evolutions as the elves' have. ElfQuest has reflected our lives all the way along. Many times we’ve said it’s also a reflection of my and Richard’s friendship, because beyond the husband and wife relationship, beyond the business relationship, there is a true friendship there.

Rob: The elves’ journey is intimately tied to your journey.

Wendy: Oh my gosh, yes. Anybody who knows us can see how autobiographical it is.

Richard: We’ve taken great delight in pointing this out almost from the very beginning. To a greater or less extent, ElfQuest is autobiographical, all the way from the nearly literal to the really, really bait and switch symbolic.

Wendy: A perfect example is the Kings of the Broken Wheel[8] storyline because between the two of us, Richard is actually a more in the moment kind of person than I am. I tend to have a really powerful sense of time and of time passing. Everything is kind of urgent to me. Richard is constantly having to remind me to stay in The Now[9], stay in the moment because I’m thinking about the past, the present, the future all at the same time. In Kings of the Broken Wheel Cutter was, I’ll say, ‘afflicted’ because it changed him for good, by developing a sense of time passing as he was waiting for his family. Unlike the other elves who can stay in the moment and have a blessed gift of forgetfulness that he doesn’t. That is absolutely autobiographical in the sense that it reflects where I am and how I feel about time and my awareness of it.

Rob: I remember reading that series, and getting the feeling. Cutter knew soon enough that Rayek had failed, somehow, that the cyclical story was inexorable. So there was a kind of sense of destiny to the whole thing, that they’re still there, that the only thing left to do was wait.

Wendy: Now you’re going to make me cry.

Richard: This was one of the things that I remember more clearly than many that Wendy and I needed to talk about, because when you play with time travel in any fiction, it’s dangerous. You introduce the possibility of paradox, you introduce the butterfly effect and all of this [10]. We were hung up for a brief time when Rayek steals the Palace [into a different time]. How do we let it be known...how do the elves come to realize that in some way he had to have failed? We talked about this, and what we came up with is that the instant after the Palace disappears, the fact that they are still there, asking the question of what happens, means that he has to have failed. Because, if he had succeeded, they wouldn’t be there.

Rob: A temporal paradox is threatened but not introduced to the story. I liked how Rayek's daughter, Venka, has the power to stop whatever he might do, but but says, ‘I won’t stop you.’ Perhaps she's giving him a moral choice, but maybe she knows she doesn’t have to. She's just waiting for him to do what was already, from their point of view, ancient history.

Rob: Next question! You’ve also described ElfQuest as ‘herding’, because of the size of the cast. I’m one of those people who love minor characters and the archetypes they represent and all that jazz. Outside of the main batch, whose stories will we see more of in the new books?

Wendy: There’s nobody’s story that won’t be addressed. If you’re interested in what happened to Kahvi and Tyldak, you’re going to find out. If you’re interested in what happened to Venka and Aroree and Two-Edge, who went off looking for Kahvi, you’re going to find out. If you want to know what happened to Ember’s Tribe, either minor characters in her tribe or Ember and Teir, you’re going to find out. If you want to know what happens to the Wavedancers, you’re going to find out.

The premise of the story which is ‘be careful what you wish for, because when you get what you want there are consequences that come with it.’ When the elves gave all their blood, sweat and tears to achieve the Palace, they won their war, and they achieved their goal, and now the Palace is with them. It is right beside the Wolfriders in the Holt, disguised as a forest-covered mountain. But beneath this illusion is the Crystal Palace of the High Ones. Now that they’ve achieved it, they’re beginning to discover that the mere ability to have the palace, which gives them the power to travel anywhere at the speed of thought, on the world or off, is eliminating a lot of the elements of life that, in particular, made the Wolfriders who they are. Day-to-day survival is no longer the difficult problem that it used to be. They have an over-abundance of food, which they can store up in the Palace. It is changing the way they are, and this is the core problem of the story. If it comes down to a choice between the Palace and the Way, what are they going to choose? This affects all the known elves on the planet of Abode; what happens, how it all plays out, what choices are made. It affects all of the characters, major and minor.

Earth as we wish it would be

Rob: Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say that ElfQuest is symbolic fantasy? I guess this is opposed to the wikis-with-plots fantasy that we get from the Tolklones.

Richard: We have often said that ElfQuest is either really a story about real life; or it’s a story about us in an autobiographical way but just wrapped up in symbols of fantasy. Cutter is Wendy and Skywise is me; that’s just one use of telling the story using symbols of fantasy.

Wendy: ElfQuest is a giant metaphor. I’m not a World of Warcraft type of girl. I’m not even a Lords of the Rings girl. I’m not about dragons and unicorns, and that sort of thing don’t interest me very much. I like to use fantasy to make a statement about the experiences of life. I like to use the characters that we’ve created to talk about real life in a metaphorical way. To me it’s the only way to keep it interesting, to give them problems to solve that don’t involve slaying a dragon—although one could go to the very depths of what metaphor a dragon is.

I choose smaller metaphors: the issue of racial prejudice[11], the issue of gender identity. Perhaps a male character does not want to be a warrior; he wants to be more of a nurturing type. Things like that are still on everybody’s minds, to this day. I will tell you something that has surprised me is when we started in the 70s all of these things were on my mind. It was the height of the feminist movement, nudity, sexuality, gay rights, all of these things[12] were hot-button issues back then, and I think Richard and I both envisioned that these would be problems and issues that would be resolved by 2012. Both of us are very surprised that all of these issues, that were so hot in the mid-70s, are even hotter now [13]. People seem more lost, and more confused about them, than ever. To us that makes ElfQuest more relevant than ever. We can talk about the things that we’ve always been talking about in ElfQuest maybe with even a stronger sense of urgency. [14]

Rob: It transgressed in subtle ways.

Richard: I’ve said for a long time that it’s our mission to be subversive. [15]

Wendy: Yeah, pardon my French, but the shit we’ve gotten away with just because it’s been subtle enough to fly under the radar. [16]

Richard: Which is going to be very interesting because the radar is different these days.

Wendy: The radar is different these days, isn’t it?

Richard: But by the same token, we’re so much further along our own path and, at least in my mind, have achieved a certain place in the process of storytelling, that we’re going to tell it the way we want. And if it pushes the same buttons it used to, or if it’s as subversive as it used to be, or if it’s not as subversive as it used to be, hey, we’re going to tell it the way we want it. That’s how we’ve always done it. That’s why we’ve always done it.

Wendy: I used Masque partly to get out of my system all the things that I couldn’t do in ElfQuest, because Richard and I have created a certain border for ourselves. It’s not self-censorship; it’s just what we feel is appropriate for ElfQuest. We bear in mind that many younger readers, age 10 and under, read ElfQuest. We don’t feel there’s anything we should hold back or protect them from. At the same time there are ways to get a point across without being too adult about it.

Rob: Subtlety can make it more powerful.

Richard: It’s the difference between a story and a sermon.

Wendy: Yeah. Yeah. Or a diatribe. Maybe they’re the same thing. I don’t know.

Rob: Do you see your influence felt?

Wendy: I think I can sum it up by talking about last year’s San Diego Con, which was one of the most brilliant experiences that Richard and I have had in a long time. For some reason, and I don’t know why, an awful lot of people, an awful lot of industry people, people in show business, sought out our table specifically to let us know how much ElfQuest was an early influence on their careers.

The people who came by ranged from one of the producers of Xena, Warrior Princess to Chris Sanders, who created Lilo and Stitch, to one of the head writers of Avatar. People just kept coming by and of course when I was on the Gays and Comics Panel, or I should say ‘Celebration Event’, so many LGBT cartoonists, writers came up and told us that they got their start because of ElfQuest. That ElfQuest showed them it was all right to be different. It was all right to be who they are.

You ask me where I feel my influence has been felt. People tell us it changed their lives. Now, this is just a comic book. It’s just a story, but stories do have the power to transform, and maybe even some of the most unlikely stories do. For sure, ElfQuest has been one of those. I don’t mean to sound so sentimental here, but it moves me when someone comes up and does exactly what you did at the beginning of our conversation which is to say thank you.

Rob: At Boing Boing, here's there's a strong connection to comics and counterculture, especially the indie and DIY side of things, and I keep finding myself chatting to people who were influenced by ElfQuest. There's a 'find the others' type thing going on ... and suddenly the others are just all over the place. There's a certain... I don’t know what the word is. Now, hang on a moment, I don’t want to use a stupid word. A certain feeling that one is slightly detuned from the world. A kind of indefinite differentness that isn’t quite covered by geekiness or queerness or something as obvious as that.

Richard: There is a term for that. It’s one that we’ve used for a long time, not necessarily in ElfQuest because it would call attention to itself by its use in ElfQuest, but the term is ‘otherness’ and it doesn’t speak specifically to being a nerd, being a geek or being gay or being anything else. It’s just as you say, a slight turning aside of perception or of how one feels about the world in which one lives and moves and interacts.

Wendy: Or more classically, ‘marching to a different drummer’.

Rob: What is it about ElfQuest that speaks to otherness?

Wendy: Now we’re almost getting to the point where I wonder if we’re trying to pin the butterfly to the board because... I don’t know. I don’t know how. I know how Richard and I feel inside. I know that we’ve always felt a little bit out of step, and we express ourselves from the heart in the stories and we trust it. We trust our intuition as to what feels right to go into the story, but beyond that I don’t know. I don’t know why it speaks to that.

Richard: Back in the 60s, and this is at best an indirect comparison, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and half a dozen other really talented, idiosyncratic, rabble-rousing people tapped into a vibe, a cultural vibration waiting to happen, and the golden age of Marvel Comics began. Stan Lee famously said, ‘I just wanted to write stories that I would like to read.’

In the first place, the ElfQuest story, the underlying bedrock bare-bones ElfQuest story, is something that Wendy has been telling since she’s been about two years old, in one form or another. That’s always been there. In the late 70s, she said, ‘I have this idea for a story. How can we get it out there?’ I listened and I said, ‘Well maybe we can do this or that’, and when we both set about learning how to do this thing, I think that there was another cultural vibration waiting to break loose.

We simply told the story that was in us the way we wanted to tell it, the way we would want to read it. There was a synchronicity of cause and effect; that’s really the best answer anyone could give. Stan and Jack and all the rest couldn’t tell you how they caught lightning in a bottle. They just did, and they wrote it, and we’re the same way. We just did what we wanted to do and it had the effect, and it continues to have the effect, and we’re just being true to ourselves. We’re more savvy about the world into which ElfQuest must go these days, but at the bottom of it all it’s still just the story that we need to get out, from inside to outside.

Coda

Homily on social mores has always been abundant in social science fiction. ElfQuest's utopian qualities are crafted to speak not with the voice of reason, but with what H.G. Wells called the "shot-silk texture" of subversive storytelling.

Inhabitants of arcadia may recall the narrator of The Green Child, who spoke of his ability to "escape from the sense of time, to live in the eternity of what he was accustomed to call the divine essence of things." In their saga, Wendy and Richard Pini speak of life with the same joy, but also of death—of time—in terms of unrecoverable bliss. The Green Man smiles, but offers just a suggestion of his form, with no rite to honor him, and he is gone forever once lost.

More like Andy Goldsworthy's forest vortices than Digory Kirke's magical wardrobe, the void looks back into you.

"In the new utopian fictions, the traveler feels lost in the evening gloom, haunted by strange forebodings lurking in the uncertain light," mythologist Richard Gerber wrote in 1976, at about the time Wendy Pini sat her husband down and told him a story. "The utopian journey, if it is to survive on a literary level, will have to assume the form of a spiritual and symbolic quest."

Behind these modern fables and their eerie forests is a friendly darkness: the unknown potential of oneself, drawn from the secret history of all of us. We find ourselves drawn to it, but uneasy within it, uneasy at utopia's new promise, where the journey passes not through the avenues of a perfect republic, but a more intimate landscape.

To learn that one must change or die, or choose death itself, are callings singular to human experience. But not everyone hears them.

Footnotes

1. Even before Tolkien's entirely different vision of fantasy—an elaborate and fine-grained taxonomy of the fantastic past—utopian fantasy was eclipsed by the golden age of science fiction, World War 2, and the withering criticism implied by Orwell and Huxley's dystopias. The terrestrial arcadian imagination slept, more or less, until the beatniks moved to San Francisco; ElfQuest is often identified as a sort of post-New Wave hybrid of high fantasy and science fiction. ("I am very glad to see this sort of thing goes on in Poughkeepsie" — Ursula K. LeGuin, reviewing an early issue)

2. In ElfQuest, there are no gay or straight elves; instead, there is generally polyamorous pansexuality, free love in omnino. Much was gotten away with on the periphery of a heavily self-censored comic industry—"everyone's visited everyone's tree sometime or other"— though Wendy Pini has also expressed a desire to maintain the books themselves as family-friendly.

3. "If one were to simply glance through the pages," writes psychologist Maja D'Aoust, "a scoff or a pfft! might escape the lips of the typical Pantera T-shirt-clad comic enthusiast who picked it up. [But] ElfQuest is telling the secret history of our existence."

4. Pini elves are the descendants of shape-shifting, post-singularity aliens who took on the form of creatures from human myth, got stuck with it, and were then subject to adaptation over subsequent generations. They are under five feet tall, with large, slanting eyes and pointed ears. They have paranomal powers such as telepathy and telekinesis, and elves may experience an involuntary and overwhelming mating imperative, recognition, which guarantees gifted offspring. Most elves are ageless, with a notable exception in the Wolfriders, whose natural lifespans may nevertheless extend to thousands of years. H.G. Wells' Men Like Gods are among the miniature supermen of his time that anticipate the Pini-elf (as opposed to the late Victorian elf or the smug Tolkien-elf): comfortably naked and red-skinned, they age slowly and communicate through telepathy. Wells' "elves" were mythological offspring of the Native American noble savage and Old World fairy-lore—parochial antecedents for Pini's own Magonian visitors.

5. European and American appreciations of ElfQuest are intriguingly dissimilar. For example, American fans generally prefer the animation-style colors found in the current editions, which look like stills from a high-quality animated feature film, whereas European fans often voice a preference for the watercolors used in earlier editions, which more closely resemble classic childrens' books. The answer to why may be found in the context brought to ElfQuest by its readers. In America, it "manifested" as an independently-published comic book, interpreted in the traditions of the medium and of screen animation. In Europe, however, critics were struck by its resemblance to local graphic traditions, in particular picturebooks: there, perhaps, it presented as an intoxicating mix of local fable and foreign (i.e. American) novelty.

6. The original series of ElfQuest ran from 1978-1984, Siege at Blue Mountain from 1986-1988, and Kings of the Broken Wheel from 1990-1992. From then until 1996, ElfQuest became multiple concurrent series, consolidated to a single monthly issue from 1996-1999. The Searcher and The Sword was published in 2004, and a miniseries, The Discovery, ran in 2005. The first part of Final Quest's prologue was published right here at Boing Boing (and on Elfquest.com) from 2012-2013.

7. ElfQuest's elves have their own utopian vision: the Crystal Palace of the High Ones, a symbol of past and future possibility. They find it to be a derelict star-ship, as used by their space-faring ancestors to escape an ecological dystopia that they had created on their own planet. Clues to the content of Final Quest suggest that the tension between the starship's nature and that of its wolf-blooded occupants will result in a final reckoning.

8. Upon their arrival on the World of Two Moons, the elves' ancestors are thrown far back in time by an accident. After their vessel is restored, generations later, the powerful Rayek plans to travel in time to the moment of the mistake, in order to prevent it from having occurred in the first place&. In doing so he kidnaps the hero's family, forcing him to count the years until the cycle of time completes.

9. The Wolfriders live by an indefinite code called The Way, closely tied to the lives of their wolf companions, which stresses tradition and recognition of the eternal now. It's an unromantic but sensual life—think Eloi with teeth!—sharpened by the need for savage self-determination. (Compare to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which satirized the eternal now of contemporaneous socialist utopias—especially of the lure of forgetfulness—as the official present of the Party, where history is manipulated and memory suppressed. ElfQuest returns to the earlier tradition of the compassionate, arcadian now—the now of wolf-thought—as civilization's rusted keel descended to ferity.)

10. "If your story is not about time travel, but it has time travel in it, then your story sucks." — JWZ

11. Black elves were a striking feature of a 1970s comic. But the elves themselves—with one or two exceptions—are more or less color-blind. Issues of prejudice are illustrated by the general mix of trolls, humans and elf tribes. But there are still contextual ironies—such as barbaric "European" Wolfriders plundering the civilized "African" Sun Folk village—to enjoy.

12. Womens' freedom and the sexual revolution were anticipated in utopian fantasy as early as Plato's Republic.

13. Sex for elves is fun, and there are no sexually-transmitted deseases, religious dicta or institutionalized monogamy to make things complicated. Recognition, the biological urge that mediates procreation, means that females know when they are fertile. "Nature prescribes to us a joyful life," Sir Thomas More attributes to his utopians, "with pleasure as the end of all our operations. And they define virtue to be life ordered according to the prescription of nature." Though it might be added that More's utopians weren't much into omnisexual orgies.

14. "The modern utopia must not be static but kinetic" — good old H.G. Wells.

15. The new wave science fiction of the 60s and 70s addressed issues such as sexuality and race more directly than ElfQuest or mainstream U.S. comics (which were forbidden by a self-censorship regime from depicting or mentioning homosexuality), but tended toward a more wildy cerebral focus on gender-bending sociology than ElfQuest's straightforwardly-embodied polyamory and pansexuality. [Uranian Worlds: A Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror]

16. "Family-friendliness" allows a subversive message to be seen by as wide an audience as possible, but necessitates compromise with arbitrary standards. For example, ElfQuest’s depiction of same-sex relationships are usually implicit, whereas heterosexual pairings are more explicitly rendered. On the other hand, when she presented her Masque of the Red Death, a Yaoi-tinged remix of Edgar Allan Poe's classic, some ElfQuest fans found it obscene. (In fandom, entitlement is the only variable that never changes.) Pini says a new same-sex relationship will emerge in a forthcoming ElfQuest story.

ElfQuest at Boing Boing

Friendly Darkness
In Wendy and Richard Pini's saga are the haunted echoes of utopian fantasy, removed from the epic to the intimate.

The secret history
The creation myths that bind all of us are at their most powerful when they're part of the plot, writes Maja D'Aoust.

Trajectory
Fables are portals to other worlds, writes Heather Johannsen—and to new places in this one.

A Girl at the 1978 Comic-Con
A snapshot of comics culture in the year that ElfQuest made its mark

Part 1 of the Final Quest Prologue
An all-new tale, published first here at Boing Boing

Read all 6500 pages of ElfQuest online
Fans acquire ElfQuest film rights
Columbia University acquires ElfQuest comic archives

Background Illustration and layout: Rob Beschizza
Illustrations from ElfQuest courtesy of Warp Graphics

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