So Richard and Wendy Pini have been sending out an email newsletter for a while called “matter of oPINIon”: where they talk about ElfQuest retrospectives and current news in the world of Abode. But what they also do is encourage comments and discussions, as well as feedback that they will sometimes share in future newsletters.
I was fortunate to get a part of my letter reprinted.
Please forgive how small this is. WordPress’ layout has changed over time, and this is the best I could manually enlarge this. But this made my morning. But what I want to add is that there was more to this message, and I would very much like to share with you what I Sent. Perhaps there are other Elves out there that might share Recognition with my words. The topic was called “What If.”
This is what I meant to Send.
Hello Richard and Wendy:
I love “What Ifs.” So many of my own stories started from What Ifs. So in honour of your speculations, let me tell you about what my life would have been like without ElfQuest: if the comic came out in 2023 instead of 1978. Well, for starters, I would never have heard of Two Moons. There would have been no mention of it in Piers Anthony’s Xanth, and there would have been no Jenny Elf and she might have written to Anthony making herself into another kind of Elf that did not know Sending, or Recognition.
Then, after the Nineties in the early aughts, I would have never seen the ElfQuest Archives at Cyber City Comics and contemplated buying those pricey, beautiful volumes in the late afternoon sunlight. The strange American Eighties style cartoons reminiscent of the days of Smurfs, Ewoks, Gummy Bears, and Teddy Ruxpin married to the manga style of Astro Boy and The Little Prince would not have stayed in the corners of my mind save only from my childhood.
But, more importantly, in the ’10s — after my University unenrolled me from my part-time studies and wouldn’t release my student loan, when I was still living on campus as a Graduate student of York University’s Humanities Program in Canada, I would have gone to Seneca College and bought Mark Millar and Tommy Lee Edwards’ Marvel 1985 at a comics sale stand: regaling myself with Marvel’s villains unleashing themselves in the real world while a young boy is the only one that can stop them, and potentially made the whole thing happen. Toby was a lost boy, who later in other stories becomes a reality-destroying villain himself. That is the story I would have been reading in my apartment, with the last bit of my free money, had ElfQuest Archives Volume 1 not been there, and made me realize that it inspired Jenny the Elf from Xanth, and had themes of polyamory and non-monogamy that were — and are — quite relevant to my life at that time. I would never have written years later, When I Recognized Elfquest for my Mythic Bios, or When I Found “The Heart’s Way” in the World of Two Moons for Sequart: because “The Heart’s Way” was the moment where the wonder of my past imagination, and the present of my love and intimate life intersected. I would have had to discover feeling seen, being represented, in smaller web comics. In fact, the closest I would have come to knowing Sending and Recognition in Elfquest and the Wolfriders would have been grokking and water brotherhood from Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.
And I think, by the time ElfQuest came about in in this alternative 2023, I would have seen Steven Universe and thought it influenced by that cartoon by Rebecca Sugar: the LGBTQ+ Fraggle Rock of this generation, and perhaps it’d be more futuristic and start out with Jink as the protagonist discovering a world where immortals once crashed and found prejudice, but for a time found adaptation with the wolves … where she is hoping to find her way from the fragments left, and the strange people she encounters while teleporting in strange, short distances seemingly without patterns here and there. Perhaps it would have best mirrored how I feel in my own life right now.
So many speculations. As Wendy posed to Stan Lee with regards to how the Silver Surfer views humanity and other sentients, perhaps Jinks’ futuristic grittier world wouldn’t have been so bad, and she wouldn’t be — and isn’t — so lost. There is still wonder. Still friends to make. Still adventures to have. I think I would have liked that 2023 world. But I appreciate this one more, on this facet of the multiverse.
Sending much love.
— Matthew Kirshenblatt
Mythic Bios 