Wendy Pini and Richard Pini, ELFQUEST, MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, comic book creators: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1
You know when you meet someone early in your life how that’s the person they will always be in your mind’s eye?

That’s how I’ll always see Wendy Pini. I was a teenager with a comic book fixation, and she was a stunning redhead who dressed up at comic book conventions as Red Sonja, the chain-mail, bikini-wearing, female barbarian that emerged from Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian comics.

She also participated in a nightclub show put together by comics artist Frank Thorne, with Thorne as “The Wizard.” My friend Bob Pinaha was a little older than me at the time. Well, I guess he’s still older than me, now that I think about it, and he had a real thing for Wendy, so I always saw his latest Polaroid snapshots of her. Wow!

We were all doubly impressed over the years as Wendy re-emerged in comics as a successful artist, writer, and publisher and the creator of the Japanese manga-influenced Elfquest books that have endured for the past 30 years. Elfquest, most recently published by DC Comics, was actually a production of Wendy and her husband, Richard Pini.

Wendy and Richard join me today to talk about Elfquest’s long run as well as their latest work, an online comics adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s novel, Masque of the Red Death.

You can LISTEN to this interview by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: How did you get involved with the online comics and Masque of the Red Death in particular?

WENDY PINI: This actually goes way, way back to my roots. I never thought I was going to be a professional comic book artist and writer. When I was 16 years old, I started a project because Michael Moorcock, who created the “Elric” character in the Elric series, was my guru, and I used to correspond with him. I asked his permission if I could do a semi-animated movie adaptation of Stormbringer. I started the project when I was 16 years old. I carried it all the way through college and through the first couple of years of our marriage until it drove Richard crazy, and I abandoned it. It was simply too much work for one person to do. My vision was too big, but my vision of myself was always that I was going to be an independent, animated filmmaker.

Elfquest came along in the mid-70s. It was the biggest accident that ever happened to us, and it took us on a wildly different path for a long time.






That brings us up-to-date to Masque. Masque of the Red Death is an idea that I’ve had for some years now, but, of course, because of commitments and deadlines for Elfquest, I really didn’t have much of a chance to do anything with it. I would make the odd sketch here and there. My friends at Go! Comi, David Wise and Audry Taylor, were just forming their little manga publishing company, and we all got together, and I told them this idea, and they thought it was great. It expanded into the idea of doing it as a web comic first in order to gain an audience, to let an audience know it was out there and that it would be coming as a book eventually. David and Audry and I did a deal, and the result of it is that, since July, Masque has been appearing more or less weekly as a weekly episode on gocomi.com. The thing of it is that Masque isn’t really a web comic. What it is is actually a semi-animated movie because I do about four pages, manga-style layout pages, per week in full color, and each panel becomes a frame of the movie. And I animate that in Flash, and then it goes up every Friday or Saturday.

ANDELMAN: Wow. It sounds like a tremendous amount of work.

WENDY PINI: It’s very labor-intensive, but I am totally in love with this project. The characters are wonderful. Basically, Poe’s story, Masque of the Red Death, is just an eight-page mood piece. It’s not really a novel. It’s not even really a story per se, although it does have sort of a moral to the ending. Basically, I just took that skeleton and populated it with characters and some real soap opera plotline because I wanted to aim it at what I consider to be a rather underserved audience, which is women ages 17 and up. This is definitely adult material. It includes some adult erotica, and it is definitely gothic romance, and it couldn’t possibly be more different from Elfquest.

ANDELMAN: We have a caller. Do you have a question for Wendy or Richard Pini?

CALLER (Curt): Yes, I do. Wendy, this is Curt. I’m in Illinois, and I’ve been sort of a fan of yours for a while, just sort of off and on, but have recently just sort of delved into Elfquest head-first. And actually, we have some mutual friends who confirmed that one of your influences for Elfquest was Vedic literature, so I want ask about that a little bit. I can see sort of the opening panel of the first issue would be Floating Castle. Well, that’s clearly like the Pushpaka that is the Ramayana but more so the depth of intimacy between Skywise and Cutter I think…

WENDY PINI: Rama and Lakshman, right?

CURT: Right, and also Krishna and Arjuna, as well. I just wanted to know how much that sort of literature figured into the creation of those characters.

WENDY PINI: First of all, let me thank you for a wonderful, wonderful question. I read the Ramayana and the Bhagavad-gita when I was very young, and they did not overwhelm me. They just felt like fabulous stories, and they stayed with me all my life. And I’m sure that images that I’ve come up with in Elfquest, some of the more spiritual imagery, is definitely drawn from those sources.

RICHARD PINI: I can expand a bit on what she was talking about. We’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. When she was about 10 years old, she saw the animated cartoon, “Alakazam the Great,” which is, of course, based on the journey west and the monkey king Hanuman and his adventures. And as she likes to phrase it, when she saw that, she was quietly mad. One, because it resonated with these works that she was reading and two, because it was a feature-length animated cartoon that was not Disney and told in such a spare but full style that it was one of the major pushes to her becoming the artist she is and in the genesis of Elfquest.




CURT: This may be entirely coincidental but, of course, one of your characters is called “Kahvi,” which in Sanskrit means “poet.”

WENDY PINI: I didn’t know that. I know it means “coffee” in Swedish, but I didn’t know Kavi meant poet. That’s really amazing.

CURT: In the Shastra, it says that one must be a poet or in your case, a graphic artist to become a guru or shamanite, so it’s pretty auspicious on your part, I suppose.

RICHARD PINI: There are no coincidences.

WENDY PINI: No, there aren’t. In fact, toward the end of the story, when the story of the palace is finally revealed, as I understand it, I used four images from the Tarot – the bull or maybe it was also Biblical. I’m not exactly sure. It was like the bull, the eagle, the sun, and the chariot, and I wasn’t even aware I was doing that. Sometimes I think a lot of this stuff is channeled and actually, when you think about fantasy, fantasy is a work of the imagination but what is the imagination other than getting closer and closer to your own soul, the own internal workings of yourself. And you draw upon what’s inside you to tell the story, and that’s what makes fantasy very universal -- fantasy and myth.

ANDELMAN: Well, Curt, did that answer your question?

CURT: Yes it did, and I look forward to whatever the Pinis have coming next as far as Elfquest. And even though they’re not with DC anymore, I pity the loss of the archive editions, but I look forward to more Elfquest. And thank you all very much.

ANDELMAN: Thank you for calling. We appreciate it.

WENDY PINI: That was a lovely question. As to the archive editions, there may not be a loss there. I think we’re actually going to try and work something out to keep them going.

ANDELMAN: That’ll be good. Well, let’s come back to Masque. How close are you hewing to the original Poe material?

WENDY PINI: Absolutely, the story is there. Basically, it’s the story of a nobleman who retreats from the world thinking he’s superior to the rest of humanity, which is in the grip of a terrible epidemic. He takes a thousand of his cronies, and they hole up in a castle, and they party, and they debauch, and they have a very perverted lifestyle. And yet, in the end, the red death claims them all. The moral of the story is that no matter how superior you think you are, you can’t run away from the world. The lead character is Prince Prospero, and I have changed this character into a young man named Anton Prince Prosper and in his case, "Prince" is sort of a nickname like they call Donald Trump "The Donald." And he’s fabulously wealthy, and he retreats to the island of Penumbra and very much his experiences in life follow the story of Prospero and the end he comes to.



ANDELMAN: And again, you sort of touched on this, but you spent 30 years developing your own material with Elfquest. Why do you want to adapt someone else’s? Why not just keep creating original material?

WENDY PINI: Well, two reasons. Don’t forget, my very first project was an adaptation, which was Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer.

ANDELMAN: Right.

WENDY PINI: I was deeply inspired by his works, and I’ve been a Poe lover. I love dark, gothic romance and always have, and the fact that the characters in my version of Masque of the Red Death are all new. They have nothing to do with the very sketchy portrait that Poe painted of his one character, Prospero. These are all brand-new characters. The plotline is new, and it actually takes the story into a science fictional direction. This takes place on a futuristic world, what appears to be a utopian world, but underneath, there’s a lot of decadence and decay.

RICHARD PINI: Poe’s story is eight pages, and it’s got some wonderful descriptions, but that’s it. It is almost a floor plan of the castle but very little action. So it was a great, huge, empty bucket into which Wendy could pour lots and lots and lots of new ideas.

WENDY PINI: Yes, and actually, the recognition factor of Poe is wonderful because I was at an anime convention about three years ago when I was first thinking of trying out the idea of Masque of the Red Death with Go! Comi. And I ran the idea past some manga and anime fans at this convention, and I said, “What do you guys think of the idea of an adaptation of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death?’ And they all squealed with delight because the recognition factor of Poe is very high.

ANDELMAN: You mentioned that Masque is mature and you’ve got warnings on it. So who is the audience? Who should be watching this and really who shouldn’t?

WENDY PINI: Initially, the audience that we wanted to aim Masque at was the audience of young women ages seventeen and up. This kind of gothic romance is very, very popular with that age group, and if you throw in erotica and particularly gay erotica, which is called by the Japanese “yaoi.” It is not graphic. It is not crude or anything like that. It’s more romantic. A couple of our characters in Masque are gay. And Prosper, who’s the lead character, actually swings any which way so he has lots of opportunities for encounters in all sorts of ways, and so that definitely is a factor in the storytelling. And the emotions that come up around bonding and betrayal and who wants to get revenge against whom for what are the driving forces of the story. It really is pretty classic gothic romance.

ANDELMAN: And is that going to be a problem for your traditional readership, people who’ve grown up with Elfquest?

WENDY PINI: I know that there are some Elfquest fans out there that are pretty mad at me right now.





ANDELMAN: Really?

WENDY PINI: Oh yeah, but I expected that. There are some of them out there that wish I would just continue with what I was doing, and they weren’t particularly happy with what I did for DC. There are some fans out there who want Elfquest to look exactly like it looked 30 years ago when Elfquest was under an entirely different set of influences and in an entirely different comic environment than what exists today. There seems to be a factor out there that’s pretty mad at me for moving on, expanding in my knowledge of technology and the use of Photoshop coloring and different special effects techniques and getting into Flash animation and all that. They’re not interested in that. Some have come with us.

RICHARD PINI: We’re discovering on the Elfquest forums an entire spectrum of reactions, and it’s quite interesting to read. There are some who say, “It’s interesting, but not my cup of tea.” There are some who are saying, “Go Wendy, this is great!” There are some who are not happy, as Wendy has explained. It’s very educational for us to see this layer beneath of what our fans are thinking.

ANDELMAN: It’s strange isn’t it that people can’t accept that you can do more than one thing in a career, that everything you must do must be either Elfquest or Elfquest-like, that if you do something else that that throws them off?

WENDY PINI: That’s a very good point. David Wise, my publisher, says that the nature of fans is that they want more of the same but different. And for an artist, that’s almost impossible to give. The only folks I know who have managed to come even close to that are “South Park” and “The Simpsons.”

ANDELMAN: And maybe Bone.

WENDY PINI: Say again.

ANDELMAN: I was thinking of Bone also.

RICHARD PINI: Bone is done. Bone is very self-contained.

WENDY PINI: Yeah, Bone is finished.

ANDELMAN: It kept going. That was it for a long time. Actually, I was going to ask you. How do you do, in terms of Elfquest, how do you do that for 30 years?

RICHARD PINI: You keep having stories because the stories are out there. Actually, the entirety of Elfquest has been known for a long time from start to finish, and however long it takes to do that is how long it takes to complete.

Getting back to something you said, we know that a lot of our earlier fans just absolutely fell in love with Elfquest because it was so unlike anything else that was out there. They identified with it strongly. They felt a part of it very deeply in their souls. And when you have that kind of an initial reaction, a first impression, that’s not so easy to let go and to grow up from and away from. We know that that’s part of the reason why some fans are saying, “Can you give me again what I fell in love with years ago?”

WENDY PINI: The analogy I would make, and this takes me back to my early fan days was when Jack Kirby left Marvel, and he went to DC, and he created the Forever People and the New Gods. And I remember feeling, because I was such a huge Kirby fan and the Fantastic Four was it and only he could do it, I remember feeling almost kind of betrayed like, “How could he leave Marvel? How could he go and do these new characters that aren’t anywhere near as good as what he used to do?” And then I remember after a little while, these new characters grew on me and quite frankly, I would give anything for Jack to still be around and giving us more of the Forever People and the New Gods because that material was absolutely great. It just took a little while to open the mind and say okay, this is the direction he wants to go now. Let’s take the ride with him.

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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Labels: anime, Bob Pinaha, Conan the Barbarian, DC Comics, Elfquest, Fabian, Frank Thorne, General William Westmoreland, Jamie Farr, manga, Mike Douglas Show, Phil Seuling, Red Sonja, Richard Pini, Wendy Pini

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