The identity politics of Elfquest at 40: moving beyond race, class and gender?

ABSTRACT

This article provides a critical analysis of the political content of Wendy and Richard Pinis’ independent comic series Elfquest (1978–present), focusing on the identity triad of race, class and gender. In my analysis of Elfquest (EQ) as a popular culture-based political intervention, I make a threefold contribution to the literature of popular geopolitics. First, in a normative contribution challenging the norms of male-dominated 1970s-era comics, I situate EQ as subversive medium that imagined a new world ordered by the progressive values of the ‘1968 generation’. Second, via a theoretical contribution, I present EQ fandom as a form of transformative political engagement, wherein the reader/seer maps their own situatedness in the US’s changing socio-political milieu. And, third, in an empirical contribution, I provide a critical analysis of the original series, interrogating Elfquest’s engagement with identity politics through a close reading of the visuals and text of the ‘Original Quest’ (Issues #1–21, 1978–1984), fan feedback (letters to the editor), and interviews with the creators (including my own, conducted in 2017). In the conclusion, I reflect on EQ’s transition to the post-identity politics of the contemporary era as the series concludes its fourth decade in publication.

KEYWORDS:

• Elfquest
• race
• gender
• class
• politics

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Wendy and Richard Pini for their time and support of this project, as well as Joel Vessels and the two anonymous referees for the helpful critiques and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In my interview with the Pinis (2017), Wendy drew a political parallel between J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (LoTR) and their own project stating: ‘[LoTR is] actually a commentary on what was going on in England at that time [i.e. 1930s–1940s]. Same with Elfquest. Over the period of 40 years that we’ve been doing it, everything that’s been going on in the world around us has informed the fantasy. And we use it to just comment on the human condition’.

2. Hill and Wilson define ‘identity politics’ as ‘discourse and action within public arenas of political and civil society’ wherein ‘culture and identity… are articulated, constructed, invented, and commodified as the means to achieve political ends’; such forms of identity include: ‘traditional, modern, radical, local, regional, religious, gender, class, and ethnic’ (2003, 2).

3. Several stories from Heavy Metal, a magazine known for dark fantasy and science fiction (sf), were adapted into an animated motion picture in 1981. Keiji Nakazawa’s manga series about the Pacific War and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was adapted into a feature-length animated film in 1983. John Byrne and Chris Claremont’s Phoenix storyline, involving Marvel Comics’ original X-Men character Jean Grey’s transformation into a genocidal villain, was adapted in the second and third instalments of the X-Men film franchise, X2 (2003) and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006).

4. Here I am influenced by the work of McLeod (2015), whose work on the ‘personal-political imagination’ argues that that imagination is agentic, i.e. it makes one do things.

5. In my linking of identity politics to the pivotal year of 1968, I am making explicit the generational shifts that occurred in North America and Europe, resulting in student protests, new forms of political activism, and widespread social changes. This transformation was particularly profound in the US, where – influenced by the success of the African-American Civil Rights Movement – identity emerged as a key rallying point for political action, including among women, Native Americans, Latinos and the LGBTQ community (see, for instance, Frazier and Cohen 2009; Rimmerman 2002; Smith 2012).

6. Elves are extremely long-lived when compared with humans, with some reaching centuries or even millennia in age.

7. WaRP, an acronym based on the first letters of artists/writers Wendy and Richard Pinis’ names, was later changed to ‘Warp’.

8. The original EQ series’ size and lack of colour granted the imprint a certain cache as an ‘alternative comic’, thus distinguishing it from the mainstream publishing platforms that were still observant of the norms imposed by the Comics Code Authority (1954–2011), which prohibited a variety of content, from zombies to drug-use to ‘wanton sexuality’.

9. An animated television series or feature-length film has long been promised (first mentioned in issue #5 in 1980); however, neither materialised despite reports in 2002 and then 2012 that a film was in development. The Pinis (2017) attribute this to fact that Hollywood is ‘extremely villain-driven’ and ‘overly simplistic in its representations of good-and-evil’ in sff.

10. The noted sff author Ursula K. Le Guin was also a reader of the series, writing a brief fan letter, which was published in 1980.

11. In discussing the political fundaments of her early artwork, Wendy Pini (2017) spoke of her father, an ‘ultra-conservative’ who supported Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign and was a member of the John Birch Society. She recounted her experiences as an adopted child that never fit her father’s ideals, and how she and her brother (who was gay) ‘grew up in a household that in every way tried to repress and essentially kill us’.

12. The EQ role-playing game introduced plains-elves and sea-elves among the kindreds. The rhizomic, tree-like Rootless Ones would be introduced to the WaRP universe after the Original Quest, with the aquatic elves becoming central to subsequent series.

13. After the first issue, a fan wrote in to point out the parallels to the Tuatha Dé Danann of Irish mythology, who sacrificed much of their ethereal essence to be able to convene with the Earth and take power from its attributes.

14. Easily distinguished from humans, elves have three fingers, as well as pointed ears. Likewise, trolls and preservers have three fingers, thus implying a distant kinship with the elves, and distancing all three races from indigenous humans. Reflecting their physiognomy, the elves (and presumably the trolls as well) employ an octal numeral system.

15. Colour (via clothing) is an important tool for expressing class distinction in the series, with white and blue representing higher, effete classes and earthy tones signifying the lower, vivacious groupings.

16. This despite the Pinis being condemned as ‘communists’ by a reader upset with the content of Issue #15 and another fan’s suggestion in Issue #19 that the proto-trolls’ rebellion against the High Ones was a sort of workers’ uprising against the capital-accumulating class and that their descendants fear the ‘return of the old order’ (EQ #20, 1984, 43).

17. The (Alison) Bechdel Test considers whether two female character speak to each other about something other than a man, while Kelly Sue DeConnick’s ‘Sexy Lamp Test’ queries whether the text would be significantly altered by replacing a female character with a curvy light fixture. Taking its name from an incident in a Green Lantern comic in 1994 and associated with artist Gail Simone, the phenomenon of ‘fridging’ (i.e. depicting the murder, maiming or ‘de-powering’ of a protagonist’s love interest) became a popular plot tool in mainstream comics for motivating male heroes into action.

18. Like Two-Edge, Old Maggoty exhibits certain ‘trans’ characteristics. Her monkish, bulky, full-body tunic almost totally obscures her gender, an aesthetic choice that stands in clear opposition to the sartorial norms of all other females in OQ.

19. Wendy Pini was already known to many in the comic book community prior to her success with EQ, having been a staple at industry conventions in Red Sonja cosplay (most famously she appeared in costume on The Mike Douglas Show in July 1977). The character, who gained her own Marvel series in 1975, was a spin-off of Conan the Barbarian.

20. Recognition is the rare event wherein elves of the opposite sex experience an instant ‘knowing’ of one another’s soul names and thereafter are drawn to each other until sexual congress occurs, which is biologically guaranteed to produce offspring.

21. As alluded to earlier, the half-troll/half-elf, while not being described a gay, is clearly marked as ‘queer’ through his trans-body, feminine poses and interstitial status (see Figure 4). Two-Edge’s ‘desperate love/hate relationship’ (W. Pini and Pini 2016a) with his over-bearing and spiteful mother Winnowill also smacks of contemporary pop-culture representations of homosexual men. Later in the series, he takes a (female) lovemate, Ahdri.

22. This was conveniently explained in FQ when it is revealed that Cutter and Timmain are one soul, but manifest in two bodies. In this context, Skywise qua Timmain’s (subsequent) lover is thus made ‘more’ heterosexual, though this can also be read as an allusion to ‘two-spirit’ sexual identity within Native American culture. Not insignificantly, the Pinis have long been open about the fact that Cutter is Wendy’s avatar in the series, while Skywise is a representation of Richard’s persona.

23. Connolly (2002, 34) defines this phenomenon as ‘a culturally mobilized, corporeal disposition through which affect-imbued, preliminary orientations to perceptions and judgement scale down the material factored into cost-benefit analysis, principled judgements, and reflective experiments’.