I was poking around an old editorial I wrote on my comics review site, BubbledText, and I ran across me talking about my early days in the world of ElfQuest. I rarely ever have anything throwback-ish to share with the world on Thursdays, but this definitely fit the bill.

My first introduction to the World of Two Moons was though an interview with Wendy and Richard Pini on the TV show Sci-Fi Buzz on the Sci-Fi Channel. The video here is from 1993 and this 4 minutes and 35 seconds of video changed my life in ways that I still can’t fathom.

As cliche as it sounds, the story that Wendy and Richard have put out into the world (and continue to put out, new comics are coming from Dark Horse) drew too many parallels (too many to mention now) to what my life had been at the time. I found that someone out there understood. And I was hooked. Scouring the comics wasteland that is Utah back then trying to get my hands on any ElfQuest books and comics was a challenge, but I dived right in. And I dived in deep. I landed in a group of good friends (on America Online… yes, back when you still had DIAL-UP MODEMS and AOL was it’s own online world) where we’d live chat roleplaying stories with our own rag-tag group of elves. Sometimes to an unhealthy extreme, but that was how engrossing the world that Wendy and Richard had created.

I eventually hooked up with Richard online and became the designer for the comic’s website and had the pleasure of doing that for nearly 16 years. I was also the site’s webmaster for a while as well. The ultimate was being able to do some coloring work back in the 90s and early 2000 for the European release of the ElfQuest: Dreamtime books. (Admittedly, not the greatest work in the world looking at it now, but for the time and being early digital coloring, I think it was pretty good.) Wendy has been a great inspiration to me, as a creator and as an artist. The fact that she was able to take the concept of ElfQuest and, despite all the odds against her, she was able to prove the naysayers wrong and she triumphed. It’s an exceptional success story that shows that if you work hard and love what you do, anything is possible.

It’s been 21 years since that fateful day I saw the Wolfriders for the first time. On a whim after reading that editorial, I did a search for Sci-Fi Buzz on Google. There, I found a Sci-Fi Buzz playlist. And what would be at the top of the list? Wendy and Richard.

It was a good trip back to the day that changed my world. Some days it’s great that everything is on the Internet. Today is one of those days.

Enjoy the retro video. Happy Throwback Thursday!