This past February, fan-favorite fantasy series Elfquest ended its initial 40-year run with a 24-issue series titled The Final Quest on the anniversary of its debut in 1978. Launched in an era when American independent comic books existed firmly in the underground of the industry, Richard and Wendy Pini's epic story followed the World of Two Moons populated by all manner of mythical races, with multiple tribes of elves among them, including one led by the long-running series' protagonist, Cutter.

The Pinis sat down with CBR at Baltimore Comic Con to talk about ending their expansive story, how the series has stayed relevant over four decades, taking the book to different publishers over the years and teasing what's to come next.

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CBR: It’s been seven months since the last issue of Elfquest hit, almost seven months to the day. How has it been putting the series to bed after 40 years?

Wendy Pini: Well, it’s not like it’s been put to bed. The victory tour we’ve been on these past seven months has been, for me, like one long standing ovation. The reaction of the fans has been amazing, very positive, and Elfquest still feels very alive to us. I mean, just because we ended a story arc, it’s alive in the hearts of the fans and it’s alive in our hearts and we know what’s coming next.

Richard Pini: Yeah, a lot of fans have had heart attacks at the title “Final Quest,” like “oh my God, is Elfquest coming to an end?” And, like we’ve said from the start, a major story arc that’s taken us 40 years to tell is concluding but, as you already know, there are future stories in the world of Elfquest. So, how can Elfquest possibly end? As far as putting it to bed, we’ve known this end was coming for decades.

Wendy: Yeah, we planned this story ahead for many years, for more than 20 years.

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CBR: To that point, what surprises, what twists and turns took by surprise in The Final Quest? What surprised you as the storytellers behind this that kind of caught you off guard and took you in unexpected directions?

Wendy: Well, certain characters jumped into sharper focus that had been kind of background or secondary characters and, all of a sudden, played a rather major part in the story. We found characters kind of waiting in the wings that we were like,“oh, we can use them!” Like Kimo was quite a humble, secondary character.

Richard: Suddenly, he got thrust into the spotlight in a very crucial moment! One of the things that surprises us even though the story has been “put to bed” for seven months now is just how relevant some stuff that we came up with 10, 20 years ago is today. When we look at the world in terms of politics, gun violence and discrimination and polarization, we just wanted to tell a story that was a kind of life lesson 10, 20 years ago and suddenly it’s in the headlines every damn day.

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Wendy: Elfquest was born in the Nixon, Watergate, hippy-lovechild peace-love era; bell bottoms and leather vests -- and the elves reflected all of that. And we thought that by now the stuff that we were putting into our stories about racial prejudice, homophobia, violence, guns, weapons used against each other, we thought we’d be done with it by now in 2018, and here it replayed except bigger and more awful. Just harsher because the internet and everything, you just hear it everyday now. So the fact that [what] we planned 20 years ago is so relevant today, like gun violence, kind of surprises us, wishes it wasn’t so, but kind of makes us glad that Elfquest can be relevant and address modern issues.

Richard: More readers of Elfquest have been coming to us in the last six or seven months saying, “You have really spoken to my condition” than in the last seven years. And that’s, on the one hand, gratifying, but on the other hand very sobering to realize that it needs to be expressed now more than it ever did.

Wendy: Absolutely. Times have changed and there were things that we were more subtle about in the past and just couldn’t write about until we put it in the spotlight in The Final Quest.

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CBR: That leads me to next question: So, you were saying Elfquest continues to live on with the fans; what kept bring you guys back for 40 years, what kept it fresh to keep coming back to craft these stories?

Richard: Wendy is a consummate storyteller and, in 1977, she told me the skeleton of Elfquest and I was intrigued immediately. She knew and, thus, we knew where this was beginning and where inevitably it would end up. Now, a metaphor I like to use is we’re taking a road trip. We’re starting in New York and we’re going to end up in Los Angeles. We don’t know how long it’s going to take, we don’t know if halfway through we want to stop and investigate something in Oklahoma, but we know we got to get to LA. We’re going to take as much time to a.) do it right b.) enjoy the doing it the way we need. That was always in the back of our minds, that we had a destination and wanted to just have as much fun getting there as it took, and it took 40 years!

Wendy: If you think about it, One Life to Live, All My Children, all these soap operas are way older than Elfquest and they just kept the storylines going. Elfquest is a big soap opera. Apart from everything else, it’s got a lot of drama, a lot of angst and stuff going on, and so, I would imagine, the way they keep soap operas going on TV is the way we kept on going. It’s so character-driven with these individual personalities and they always work to keep it going.

CBR: I was always a Dark Shadows kid, myself.

Richard: [laughs] A bit closer to home. But, still, a soap opera. You’d be 25 episodes in and, suddenly, this character you thought you knew everything about reveals hitherto unknown side and the story goes in another direction for six months.

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CBR: Elfquest is probably one of the few properties that’s been published by DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, you guys self-published, as well. Logistically, how has that whole experience, how has that whole journey behind-the-scenes been, too?

Richard: When we started, I didn’t want to be a publisher. I didn’t know jack squat about publishing. I wanted Marvel or DC to take the property, to send us nice checks that we would cash and Wendy would draw beautiful art and we would cash checks and that would be the end of it. We took it to Marvel and DC, they said, “sorry, a little too peculiar for us.” We took it to several of the other alternative comics of the day in the late 1970s. Finally, after a couple of stumbles, we decided we had to do this ourselves and I took a crash course: “Okay, I need printer!" Look in the Yellow Pages, find printers. “Can you print a copy of a comic book? No? Fine, thank you.” And we learned, we learned by making every mistake, inventing some new ones and just going forward. And the thing that happened was that Elfquest took off, it took off like wildfire. Our first run was 10,000 copies. Usually, in those days, most fan zines were 500, maybe 5,000 if you were real, real spectacular. We sold 10,000 in a month or two. Our second issue sold 20,000. Nobody saw anything like that. That said, we’re doing something right. We did that for seven or eight years and then, irony of ironies, Marvel came to us and said, “We would like to reprint Elfquest for our Epic line of creator-owned comics.”

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Wendy: They were just starting to become aware of the issue of creators’ rights. And Epic came about to honor that.

Richard: They knew a good thing when they smelled it. So, our first dance with a major publisher was Marvel. They got Elfquest on to newsstands and we got a whole new audience, circulation doubled and tripled. I have always liked to say, “We’re independent, we’re not isolationist.” I remember in those days, there was a lot of crying, “No, the independents should stay and, if you go with Marvel, you’re a sellout.” And I said crap on that because if someone had the resources that we didn’t have to get the story out there, I’m fine with that. So, Marvel took a reprint license, we went back to doing our own thing and then DC took a license. They did reprint material and new material. We were happy with DC, they did beautiful books. They didn’t quite know how to market Elfquest. And then we went back to independent and then Mike Richardson [from Dark Horse Comics] called up going, “I’ve been lusting after you people for 20 years, are you ready to do the dance?” And I said, “Yes.” Dark Horse, Mike Richardson, came from the same scrappy background that we do. We’ve been for Dark Horse now six years, we’re very happy with what they’ve done because they’ve done a beautiful job with production, a great job with marketing. They did a bunch of reprints, they did Final Quest. I think I can sum it up by saying we’ll dance with anybody who knows the steps and won’t step on our feet.

Wendy: As Richard pointed out, DC didn’t know how to market Elfquest and it’s always better when Elfquest has a home or a company, an entity that gets it.

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CBR: We were talking about surprises, what surprise characters and elements with the fans kind of caught you off guard, like, “I didn’t think they would go for that.”

Wendy: I was nervous to the point of having the shakes when the issue came out where we revealed the connection between Cutter and The High One, that they were one and the same being, just expressed as male and female. I thought we were going to lose half our audience. I just thought that the whole gender-bending thing, and doing it with our macho little Cutter who everybody thinks was just a little tough guy -- I was scared. Richard remembers how scared I was. And the fan response just blew me away. They were receptive, they were intrigued, they were like, “Oh, I can see how this was coming!” Because we did set up clues, and the relief I felt that we didn’t lose half our audience springing this on them, it was more a surprise for me than it was for them.

Richard: I kept telling her. She would go through a crisis of confidence every single issue and I kept saying, “You’re good! They’re going to love it! You’re doing it right! It’s perfect!” And the issue would come out and the fans would love it; the next issue, the same thing. This one was the biggest, like, “Oh my God, nobody has ever gone here before. What am doing?” But like I said, her storytelling, humanistic, emotional instincts are bang on. And the fact that we’re deluged here [motions to queue of fans waiting patiently at the booth] speaks to that.

Wendy: Oh yeah, I think our sales even went up after that.

Richard: Again, thanks to Dark Horse and our publicists, we got a lot of very good press ever since February. People are discovering it, even now. I gave a panel presentation yesterday afternoon, and we do this at every con, and we ask every time, “How many of you have never read Elfquest?” And hands go up. And yet, they’re curious and they’re there.

CBR: You did this harder fantasy/sci-fi blend, harder than Star Wars ever did. Almost predating Star Wars, in a way.

Wendy: They were born almost at the same time.

Richard: The connection to Star Wars is simply this: Star Wars came out in May of 1977. It blew the lid off pop culture by telling the whole world it’s okay to love spaceships, it’s okay to love outer space, because space-fantasy more than anything else. It’s okay to like fantasy and the fact that it made a bazillion dollars was not lost on anyone. The fact that the world of pop culture embraced it so easily gave us the courage to say maybe we can do ours, too.

Wendy: Yeah, that’s what brought me the courage to sit him down on the couch and tell him the story; that there might be a receptive audience for it.

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CBR: The idea that there could be a happy ending to The Final Quest, the idea that you could go home again, that element, without necessarily going into spoilerific details, was always there from the start?

Wendy: Yes.

Richard: The word we hear the most is “bittersweet.” The word we hear almost as much is “inevitable,” because this was built in, baked into Elfquest’s DNA from the start.

Wendy: Elfquest, at least the story arc that involves Cutter, is a classic hero’s journey. Without us doing it consciously, it followed the steps, the 12 steps of the hero’s journey. And what we discovered about Cutter, at least in mythological terms, is that he’s a demigod, because he is part-High One. Part of him is this little hunter, gatherer, fighter figure. Very scrappy. So you’ve got the feminine and the masculine perfectly merged.

Richard: And what happens to all demigods?

Wendy: That’s where I was going with this, you take Hercules or Achilles, in fact, it’s very common in mythology for demigods and other godlike beings to be taken down by the tiniest thing. So, in Cutter’s case, it was a spider and we planted that spider so early in the story, and had it show up so often in the story and, yet, the fans never caught it.

CBR: Sort of an eight-legged Chekov’s gun?

Wendy: That’s a good analogy, yes!

CBR: You’ve hinted that this isn’t the end, there’s a new beginning in the works. Without necessarily giving the game away, when and what can we expect next?

Richard: We’ve been talking for several months, first and foremost with Dark Horse because they’re our home now. We are also talking with a small and selected set of creative people that we’ve worked with before and that we trust because [Wendy’s] done with deadlines.

Wendy: I am done with deadlines! I’ve been doing deadlines since I was 19 years old and I want to know who I am when I’m not under pressure.

Richard: But we are still going to very carefully shepherd stories and artwork into the future, I can safely say.

CBR: Become more curators and showrunners?

Richard: Showrunner, that’s a good way to put it!

Elfquest is available in its entirety now through Dark Horse Comics.