from ElfQuest:
Sometimes, you get closure.
I don’t know how many of you know of the book Law & Chaos, or have heard us mention it now and then over the years. Briefly, Law and Chaos is the story of how Wendy Pini (actually, Wendy Fletcher when she started) tried to adapt Michael Moorcock’s fantasy tale Stormbringer into an animated film. It was an ambitious project that she started as a teenager, continued through college, and kept at for a short time after, until 1973. The magnitude of the task, on many levels, was too great, and the work — some 400 paintings, drawings and sketches — was put aside.
Fast forward to 1987. ElfQuest had been running for nearly ten years, and Father Tree Press was publishing the colorized graphic novel collections. But as the publisher I wanted also very much for this long-hidden artwork to be seen. So we gathered the best of it, Wendy wrote a connecting narrative of her hopes and struggles, and Law & Chaos was released.
The book sold well, and then went out of print. We thought that was that — until just a few months ago when we decided that Wendy’s newest magnum opus, a re-envisioning of Masque of the Red Death, should have its own web site. In the discussion of what content to include, she realized that the driving force behind her desire to tell the Elric tale was a direct ancestor to what inspires Masque now.
One way to present the book online would have been simply to scan the pages as printed, and have you click through them, reading as you would any online text. But that wasn’t going to work, for a number of technical reasons. Plus, with access to all of the original artwork, why not at least show it off to better advantage, with some better design to complement it?
So that’s what you will find when you go to masque-of-the-red-death.com, and click on the Purple Room’s window. You’ll see a lot of the artistic touches that eventually found their way into ElfQuest, and you’ll discover, as Wendy did, that when the spirit is strong (to paraphrase the line from Jurassic Park) art will find a way. It’s not quite the animated film that Wendy first envisioned, but it’s a heck of a lot closer than the printed book could ever be. And it’s a fair dinkum pretty piece of webwork, too.
Enjoy!
Richard Pini