The Original Elfquest

by on April 15, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

It is impossible to overstate how important this series was to me during the ’80s. If you want to understand teenage me, Star Trek, Robotech, Elfquest, and role playing games are essential knowledge.

I recently picked up the Dark Horse collection of the series and read through it for the first time in entirely too long. Mostly, this is long-familiar ground. The Wolfriders are elves, persecuted by humans for generations, and then burned out of their home. After an introductory story, the titular quest begins as Cutter, youthful chief of the Wolfriders sets to to understand more of the world, and what, if any, place they may have in it. As our knowledge of this nameless world with two moons (which has since been named the World of Two Moons…) expands, so does the scope of the story, ramping up from thoughtful beginnings to an action-packed epic fantasy climax, and finally, unexpected answers.

This was the kick-start of the independent comics boom of the ’80s (along with Cerebus), and parts of it are rooted in its time. Narration text boxes are heavy and sometimes weigh down the storytelling (though on occasion they do heavy lifting to keep the page and art from getting tied up in talking heads). And parts are ahead of their time, with Wendy Pini’s art being an early source of Japanese manga influence in the US. On top of that, there is a great story, with great art that also shows her animation training, as characters have life on every page.

Reading it was also new to me as the Dark Horse version is in the original black-and-white. Wendy Pini’s inks are gorgeous, and it’s great to see them here. But the World of Two Moons is a colorful place, and one where color can be very important. The original series has been colorized three or four times, and the best of those colors is how I first discovered the series, and the version that is both the hardest to find now, and what I would have hoped for others to see in the Dark Horse version.

The worst color version is the 1985 Epic Comics reprint. This was produced in the usual (for the time) comics standards which means it would have suffered from lackluster registration and a very coarse color screen no mater what, but it also suffered from a non-technical problem. Glynis Oliver did the colors for the series, and while she is generally good and celebrated colorist, for some reason the trolls, who should have a kind of an olive drab skin tone kept coming out with regular human(/elf) pink skin tones. And it was a recurrent problem that would go away and come back. I don’t know what happened there, but it’s solidly the worst.

Next up is the Father Tree Press graphic novels from 1988. The printing job is fine, and the colors are actually very good, but a bit flat. I think this was produced by the traditional color-guide and separation method of comics. For that, it’s very good. At least in the original series. The graphic novels after that, where there were no previous color jobs to act as a guide, get worse with some odd color/highlighting choices, and some garish results. I know very little of the 2003 DC release, but it has computer color obviously based on the Father Tree Press versions. What little I’ve seen does have some very nice effects.

The first, best, now lost, colors were in the 1981-84 Donning/Starblaze graphic novels. These were hand-painted over prints of the original pages and then photographed. Wendy Pini did a very good job with the first volume and 2-4 were even better with Jane Fancher doing the colors (the first Dark Horse volume is all four of the Donning books together). Given that the relationship between the Pinis (and many other creators) and Donning ended in court, I have to assume that Donning owned the rights to the color work, which is why it’s never been re-used.

And it is a shame. Compare the B&W, Father Tree, and Donning versions here:

Or just the two color versions:

And a glimpse of Fancher’s colors:

Dark Horse’s collection seems to be meant to preserve the original. It sticks with the original black-and-white, and foregoes the extra pages from the Epic series that were inserted into the Father Tree Press version. It’s still missing a bit, as originally there were twenty color front and back covers to give a much better guide to how everyone looked, but preserving the original presentation is worthwhile in its own right.

And color or not. Or any of the various color jobs, it is still a very good story well worth a read or a dozen.

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The Last Best Hope

by on April 3, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Star Trek: Picard picked up later Star Trek continuity with a fairly tough job. It had been nearly twenty years since the last TNG-era movie came out. Since then we did find out that the Romulan star had gone nova (as the backstory to the reboot movie). So, if you want Patrick Stewart back in his iconic role, anything you do will have to happen later to account for his ageing, and you’re going to have to account for this bit of backstory.

The first season of Picard did well with this, and gave us sometimes confusing tidbits of those missing two decades. New characters that he had gotten to know, Picard in a quiet semi-disgraced retirement. And much more.

This prequel novel fleshes out much, but not all of that background. (There are two other prequels….) The Federation becomes aware that the star for Romulus and Remus is on a path to a supernova detonation, and that is going to require evacuating far more people than anyone is equipped for. The novel then follows, in a very summary fashion, the years of Picard’s efforts at the head of the Federation’s effort to help relocate people out of the way of the blast.

The good news is that this is well-written with a good feel of the characters. You can often hear Patrick Stewart saying Jean-Luc Picard’s lines, because the characterization is spot on. I’m sure that McCormack had access to the writer’s bible for the series, and this looks to mesh perfectly with what has been said on-screen.

Of course, that tells us that this is not going to come to a happy conclusion for much of anyone, and the novel more ends than concludes. As a pure prequel, that’s not bad, but it is the weakest point. The journey is the main thing, and it is well told, and this makes a good guide to some of the confusing backstory of ST:Picard.

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Karavans

by on March 26, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I’m used to Jennifer Roberson’s series containing fairly self-contained novels, so this one took me by surprise. Tiger and Del is a series of nearly independent novels, and while the Cheysuli series very much has an overall arc to it, each novel is also pretty self-contained, which is essential since the books happen years apart, and feature new generations of characters as time goes on.

Karavans is part one of a much more tightly spun story. As such, it takes time to get started. There’s a bunch to unpack, and much of it we don’t get a lot of answers to.

The easy part is that the nation of Sancorra has just been overrun by a warrior people called the Hecari. At this point it’s best to just think of them as Mongol stand-ins, though we may learn more later. This has led to a lot of people fleeing the country to get away from them, including one of the central groups of characters.

To do this, a family packs everything up in a wagon, and prepare to join a regularly scheduled caravan out of the country. These are complicated affairs, with a lot of people moving, and fortune-telling is used to make sure that things will go well. This brings in the rest of the characters.

But not the major MacGuffins. The central one, introduced at the very start, is Alisanos. We’re never given a great idea of what exactly it is, as those few characters who know anything about it aren’t talking. It’s an area deep in the woods that anyone with any sense stays away from, as anyone who goes in, does not come out… if they’re lucky. We slowly start getting a bit more as the half-way point approaches.

After a very slow-burn start, the book does start picking up momentum, and we get into real plot territory. Simultaneously, a couple of tedious days of the caravan preparing finishes, and it starts to move. In fact, a sign of the too-slow start is that we spend nearly half the novel with a lot of detail of two days, and then we skip forward through much of a week before the ending starts powering up.

And there is certainly a powerful action climax to the book, which helps make it a satisfying read, but it’s really all just a lead up to a second book. Some important plot threads are just getting started, and the ending itself puts a main character into new, unknown, danger. The ending also promises we’ll learn a lot more about Alisanos next time.

This is an unfinished series, with current info saying book four is to be self-published. I imagine the series didn’t do all that great, and I certainly don’t recommend it as a place to start with Jennifer Roberson, who I do generally recommend (start with Sword-Dancer). Overall recommendations on the series will have to wait.

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Virginia: The New Dominion

by on March 18, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I picked up this history of the state of Virginia mostly because of curiosity about the Colonial era. There’s lots of political cross-currents going on as the Colonies move towards rebellion and independence, and providing true scope to these just isn’t something histories of the Revolution can have space for. (I would really like to see this on Pennsylvania, the politics there are extra-special.)

It was written in 1970 and shows. There is no sympathy for slavery and direct racism as such, but often feels apologetic for some of the further offshoots in Virginia politics. This is largely just trying to keep some distance and evenhandedness, ‘these are the people, and this is what they did’, leaving moralizing for in extremis. But it’s really more the author’s love for his state, and wanting to show how it did better/different than the rest of the south, and it’s obvious enough to cast doubt on what he’s saying on occasion.

Its a large book, covering a bit over three-and-a-half centuries, and while it spends a lot of time on politics, it also covers everything else you’d expect in an overview. The establishment and growth of the major cities, overall economic and population trends (that last might have stood some more attention). However, this all purely from a modern and Western view. Which is to say, even when talking about the original charters, establishing Virginia as having authority over a wide swath of land, all the talk is pretty much limited to Virginia’s current, or at least pre-Civil War borders. There is some nice attention paid to the increasingly separated politics of the future West Virginia, which helps explain that split.

The big missing part is not a lot is said about Native Americans. They’re there, various conflicts, and problems on both sides are there. But you don’t really see them outside of direct dealings with the colony. No discussion of the original tribes, how broad a cultural spectrum there was, how they dealt with each other, and so on. If it’s not dealing directly with a political entity called “Virginia”, it doesn’t exist in this book.

Overall, it’s decently written, a little dated, and covers the subject about as well as anything so broad can. It’s been printed three times, with the last in the early ’90s. It’s not going to be a common find on used shelves, and I wouldn’t recommend specifically hunting it down, but if a cheap copy crosses your path, consider picking it up.

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The Relics of Thiala

by on March 10, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Okay, this was interesting. It’s the far-future, the galaxy is well-settled, though there’s no sign of aliens. But there’s not just humans. There are genetically-modified animals, given human thought, near-human shapes, and powers beyond normal humans.

The Bestiae are rare, the leftovers of a war to take over the galaxy a generation ago. And given what little we get to know of the society of the core systems of the galaxy, a coup might be well deserved. The novel follows a small group bound together though bonding, a psychic link to form a pack. They seek answers, as what happened twenty years ago has been largely made to disappear, leaving little to no knowledge of that the Bestiae really are.

So, it’s mystery, and adventure, and found family. This first book is complete on its own, but there is certainly more that these characters need to do. I don’t rate it as great, but it is quite good, the action and characters well-done, and just the plot being a little more predictable than I’d like.

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