A Childhood Want

Suntop, Skywise, Cutter, Leetah, and Ember all sleeping

If I was to think back to when I had my first experience with poly in any form, I would have to say that it went back to when I was in middle school. My friends were just getting into Elfquest. It was something so very new. My mom wouldn’t let me read comics when I was a kid because they were evil or something. In all fairness, I have no idea why they were considered so bad. The storylines at that point were still fairly simplistic.

There were three characters that shared a loving V relationship. They are Cutter, Skywise, and Leetah. The connection point between Leetah and Skywise is Cutter as he’s the one with the intimate relationship with the other two.

I didn’t realize how profoundly the image of the three of them sleeping was for me. After all, I never had that closeness when I was younger, despite how much I wanted to feel like people wanted to be close to people.

There was something comforting about the relationship between the three of them, that just made me feel… I don’t know… comforted. I think that would be the most accurate, especially because at that point in my life, I didn’t even have a good place when I was home with my birth family.

It’s funny, because I’ve always wanted to know what it felt like to have a warm and loving family. I didn’t really have that experience when I was a child. A majority of my childhood was chaos and anger and fear. It was everything that you would never want to have as a child. Looking at a picture of Leetah, Cutter, and Skywise sleeping peacefully with Leetah and Cutter’s children…

It’s something that I desired when I was a child. It’s never something I really experienced nor do I have a conscious moment of when I was younger. There was a lot of anger, pain, and fighting… but never a sense of peace of serenity. Never a sense of what I hear is supposed to be what it means to be in a family. The strife that I dealt with when I was younger has made me a bit more standoffish than I think anyone should be.

Life does seem to have a way of righting itself some of the time. While chaos will always be a part of life (as much as I dislike it), It is possible for things to right themselves. The peace that I saw in that picture, the love that I saw in that relationship… that seems to be within reach. I keep hoping and waiting patiently to have that an image like that of my own… and it’s possible that maybe I can have that family. It’s certainly something that I want more than anything. I want to have in my adulthood all the things that my childhood never presented me. I want constancy. I want a warm and loving environment. I want people who will actually love me, make me feel like I’m loved regardless.

All it took was a simple picture of three people sharing a loving moment…

Comic Con, Day 2, pt. 2: Keep On Truckin’

This was an amazing crossplay of the Riddler.

After the Titan panel, I stayed for the Neon Alley panel. There were some techinical difficulties that started during the Titan panel and persisted into the Neon Alley panel, forcing a late start. So, instead of just getting into the programming, they started off with some Q&A.

A lot of the news that they shared wasn’t much different from the information I heard about at the Viz Media Panel at San Diego Comic Con and at the Viz panel at Fanime.

Things that weren’t talked about at those panels were that Set 2 for Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan was to be released on August 2, Set 18 for Bleach was released on September 10 and Set 2 for La Grange will be available this winter.

I did have quite a bit of downtime between the Neon Alley panel and the panel I was eagerly awating, 35 Years of Elf Quest.

In that time I did another turn around the dealers’ room. I visited the Viz booth. This year they were

A fabulous Chun Li.

doing this neat scavanger hunt through the dealers’ room. I also got to play a demo of the next Phoenix Wright game. This might be the game that makes me want to get a Nintendo 3Ds. It was fun to play and I loved playing it as much as the previous installments.

When it came to be about time to go to the Elf Quest panel we went in early enough to sit in on the panel before it. The panel was about Pongo. I had heard of Pongo, but I had never read them. It was neat to hear people talk about. It piqued my interest in the Pongo comics.

I was thrilled to see that there was an Elf Quest panel. It made so incredibly happy to hear about all things Elf Quest… because, yes, I’m that kinda nerd. I started reading Elf Quest back when I was in middle school. I fell in love with the story when I first read it. It was amazing for me to get the chance to meet Richard and Wendy Pini last year. They had

Cutter, Leetah and Pike.. oh my!

written a story that was more formative of my than I had realized.

The panel started out talking about Wendy Pini’s personal history. They talked about Elf Quest had started in Fantasy Quarterly. They formed their own company, Warp Graphics. She then moved to Hollywood for an Elf Quest movie. They still hope an Elf Quest movie will happen, to this day. I think that Elf Quest would make for a great series of movies. It also turns out that Johnny Galecki (of Roseanne and Big Bang Theory fame) is a huge fan of Elf Quest.

There is currently a 5 minute Elf Quest short movie online, you can watch it here. However, their information about their being an Elf Quest movie in development is outdated… unfortunately.

Kokiri Link, FTW!

We Love Fine is also selling a line of Elf Quest t-shirts… They are really cute and I would love to have them all, except price woud preclude me from doing so. They are really neat looking shirts and perfect if your the same kind of nerd as I am when it comes to Elf Quest. Wendy’s personal artwork will be kept at Columbia University as well.

There are 2 artbooks coming out as well by Flesk. One will be an art of Elf Quest book and the other will be a book of Wendy’s art and may not necessarily be Elf Quest oriented. They both should be out in 2014.

The most exiciting and saddening part is that there is new Elf Quest. They will be released through Dark Horse. The first book will be starting something called Elf Quest: the Final Quest. And that’s where it’s sad. I hate to think that Elf Quest is ending. The series had meant so much to me. In many ways it was something that gave me the push to be a writer. While I’m glad there’s new Elf Quest (yay), I’m also sad that that’s it. I don’t know if they’re going to re-release the earlier editions of Elf Quest.