The Complete ElfQuest Volume 8: FutureQuest

The Complete ElfQuest #8

by Wendy Pini, Richard Pini

In the distant future, humans have come to know the truth—they were not alone on their world. Now, one compelling mystery remains—why did the ElfQuest elves disappear and where did they go?

Cutter’s quest is complete, but now stargazer Skywise and his daughter Jink set out on separate quests of their own to recover something precious that has been lost—or stolen. Their journeys span both space and time, bridging the past and the future of the World of Two Moons, now known as Abode.

Meanwhile the planet’s human inhabitants have entered their own technological age and have come to face the they were never alone on their world. One perplexing mystery remains unsolved—why did the elves of Abode disappear, and where did they go? Jink makes the answer her personal quest, even as she crosses paths with a rowdy group of space-faring misfits, the Rebels, on their own search for answers.

Collects Jink #1-#12; Rebels #1-#12, Stargazer's Hunt

Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Comics

816 pages, Paperback

Published January 21, 2025

About the author

Wendy Pini is one-half of a husband and wife team with Richard Pini that created, most notably, the Elfquest series.

Wendy was born in California and adopted into the Fletcher Family in Santa Clara County. Early on, she developed as an artist and was the illustrator of her high school year book. She submitted samples of her artwork to Marvel Comics at 17 that were rejected.

Pini attended Pitzer College and received her B.A. in the Arts and joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society.

In 1972, she married Richard Pini and began illustrating science fiction magazines, including Galaxy, Galileo, and Worlds of If. In 1977, Richard and Wendy established a publishing company called Warp Graphics to publish their first Elfquest comic. Elfquest was self-published for 25 years and in 2003, licensed to DC Comics. The comic series has won several awards, including the Ed Aprill Award for Best Independent Comic, two Alley Awards, the Fantasy Festival Comic Book Awards for Best Alternative Comic, and the Golden Pen Award.

Wendy has illustrated other works, including Jonny Quest in 1986, Law and Chaos in 1987, and in 1989, two graphic novels of Beauty and the Beast. Recently in 2007, she completed a graphic novel entitled The Masque of Red Death.

Wendy has received several awards over the last four decades, including the San Diego Comic Convention Inkpot Award, the New York State Jaycees Distinguished Service Award, the Balrog Award for Best Artist, and was inducted into the Friends of Lulu Women Cartoonists Hall of Fame in 2002.

Wendy and her husband currently reside in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Space Opera meets ElfQuest and...the results were actually pretty great!

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stargazer's Hunt. In many ways, this is an entirely bizarre book, first with the elves zipping around the universe in crystal pods, second with heavily captioned narration filling in gaps to create an extremely compressed story.

But the emotional story is compelling, and it's great to finally have a bridge between ElfQuest and FutureQuest. And it's great to have another story of not Skywise, but of Jink too. (But read it in the color hardcover, not this grayscale reproduction.) [4/5]

Jink. I read Jink when it first came out, and rereading it now, I'm thrilled to see it lives up. This is a great merging of ElfQuest with a science-fiction ethos, more successul IMO than the more recent Stargazer's Hunt. (Having John Ostrander aboard as co-writer likely helped.) And speaking of which, I'm surprised they don't reveal Jink's parentage here, but simultaneously hint at the inciting event for that series, 30 years before it was written!

The first arc in this volume introduces Jink and a few other major characters and focuses its conflict on the science-fiction element of the story: the Neverending aliens who are a threat. They're an intriguing people with a fun backstory, and this arc is generally OK. [3+/5]

The second arc deals with unearthing evil old magic, and it really shows off the potential of the Jink time period to combine the deep backstory of ElfQuest with science-fiction. Its depiction of psionics is also very compelling. Overall, a great story, so it's sad that Jink came to an end here [5/5].

The Rebels. The Rebels was definitely the weaker part of FutureQuest. The characters are enjoyable, but the plotting is really all over the place. It feels very anime (heck the whole thing does, with a crew of five aboard a spaceship including the little guy, the weird guy, the hero, the woman, etc) strangely running the gamut from space opera to Speed Racer. It's very episodic, pretty repetitive as they're constantly on the run, and gets muddier the further we get into the story. (I'm really not convinced the author knew what they were doing.) The connections to the rest of ElfQuest were also too shallow. Then at the end we don't even get a proper ending, unlike the Jink story that ran the same length. I know it led into "FutureQuest" stories in other volumes, and that those weren't finished either. Maybe someday? [2+/5]

[Mitchell Friedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nearing the end of my great read/re-read of Elfquest with a book group. These volumes are almost two big to read. This one was 800+ pages and heavy.

So there were three big sections - Stargazer's Hunt, Jink and Rebels.

Stargazer's Hunt was essentially new. And was pretty good. And it kind of set the stage for Jink. I have my copies of Jink and Rebels in comic book form but they are just slightly too much trouble to unearth from my comic book boxes. But I remember both those series being weak and I didn't remember if I read them up to the end. But I kind of remember that they were going to crossover. And they almost did.

Jink was definitely better than I remembered, but it benefited by having Stargazer's Hunt.

Rebels. Sigh. Really it could have been worse. And perhaps it should have been worse. Looking at the after material, it was cool that Wendy was doing art for the Rebels including a small human sized preserver, back in the 60's when she was still a teenager. And it was cool to see a version of Jink that old.

But Rebels was just kind of pointless, kind of lame. It had hints of story points and characters that had potential. It was too big of a jump from Elfquest. But I'm glad it exists and it makes sense that something like that world would exist.

3.5 of 5

[Online Eccentric Librarian · Rating 3 out of 5]

More reviews (and no fluff) on the blog http://surrealtalvi.wordpress.com/

Although the last volume in the series, this is definitely the weakest. The first part creates a closure of sorts for Skywise while also giving us a update of the elves and how they have grown/changed. The next two sections are two series published in the early 1990s and were stories Wendy had created in her teens that were then pigeonholed into the Elfquest universe. There's not a lot of Wendy's art here - nearly the entire book was from other illustrators.

Story:

Stargazer's Hunt: Skywise is in pain from the loss of Cutter - something his very talented 3-year-old would fix. She innocently removes his memories of Cutter, fueling a need in Skywise to find what he has lost in the stars. Decades later, daughter Jink has grown and decided to learn more about Cutter so she can use those memories to find her father and heal him/bring him home.

Jink: The world of Two Moon, called Abode by the humans, is technologically advanced. Jink disguises herself among the space-faring humans and is the last of her kind left on the planet. She falls in love with a human while helping to prevent an interspecies war.

Rebels: A team of misfits from various human colonies have banded together out of circumstance. They help a group of humans who are studying the mythical elves - and discover a Preserver test subject created from the DNA of an original preserver. They save her along with an android, while also finding a piece of the Elven crystal palace. Can they stop an interspecies war?

The first set of stories, Stargazer's Hunt, was enjoyable for the various cameos. We get to see Leetah and Cutter's third child grown up, Venka's daughter, Leetah, Ember, Strongbow, Pike, and more as Jink travels around gathering memories of Cutter. At the same time, Skywise is travelling the stars and has found a planet where the elves sacrificed themselves to save the trolls from a devastating human nuclear war. Artist Strait does an excellent job of recreating Wendy Pini style of art and it feels like an Elfquest book.

The second set of stories, Jink, was originally published in the early 1990s and feels VERY dated. The illustration work is clunky, lacking detail, and especially missing the elegant details that Pini brought to the table. The story itself doesn't really go anywhere, the characters lack charisma, and the plot falls flat and feels childish. As with the next set of chapters, this is a story that Wendy originally dreamed up in her teens and was later retconned to fit into the Elfquest world. Unfortunately not very successfully.

The third set of stories is also a tale Wendy Pini originally dreamed up before Elfquest - a group of misfits working together to save the universe. Once again, the Elfquest world was pigeon holed into the story as it was expanded, though there are only one or two panels with elves in it. There are a lot of Easter eggs to the original story but again, not much here to be compelling. The artwork is also very 1990s/late 1980s, almost painfully so.

This final volume is about taking Elfquest from fantasy to science fiction and is also a closure to the series in the form of Stargazer's Hunt. The artwork is honestly not good (except for the Stargazer's Hunt chapters) and the stories/characters never feel compelling. I read the Jink and Rebels series in the 1990s when they came out and never gelled with them then; sadly, things have not changed now that the Elfquest series has ended. Reviewed from an advance reader copy provided by the publisher.

[Ángel Javier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es triste que una gran serie termine languideciendo y muriendo por falta de ideas, y porque sus creadores la dejen en manos poco o nada capacitadas para continuarla. Y eso que el volumen comienza bastante bien, con la historia de Skywise, o más bien, de su búsqueda de los recuerdos que su hija Jink le ha arrebatado pretendiendo hacerle un bien, ya que el elfo no ha podido superar la muerte de Cutter, el cual (de manera obvia pero delicadamente desarrollada a lo largo de la serie) ha sido siempre su verdadero amor.

Como digo, esta es una buena historia, aunque el arte de Wendy haya conocido tiempos mejores. La serie de Jink, sin embargo, y a pesar de contar con un muy buen co-guionista, como es John Ostrander, comienza a flojear. La historia de los bichos espaciales enfrentados al imperio galáctico de los humanos del Mundo de las Dos Lunas recuerda demasiado a la de los propios High Ones, y, aunque su desarrollo no carece de interés, presenta demasiados altibajos y termina de manera un tanto abrupta. Además, los secundarios son más bien flojitos, sobre todo comparados con los soberbios secundarios de la edad dorada de la serie, y, en fin, se pierde la coralidad que era santo y seña de la historia. Jink no resulta un personaje lo suficientemente interesante como para aguantar ella sola el peso de la serie: no es Cutter, ni Skywise, ni Winnowill, ni Leetah. En fin, que le falta carisma y le sobra superficialidad. Pero vamos, comparada con los Rebeldes que protagonizan la última serie incluida en el volumen, es Cutter rediviva.

Y es que, lamentablemente, esta maxi no hay por dónde cogerla: es un bodrio, un lío, los personajes son totalmente planos... sinceramente, cuando uno lee Elfquest, lo que busca es... elfos. Y no. Se trata de un grupo de humanos, un robot y un bicho creado genéticamente a partir del cadáver de un preservador, que luchan de manera confusa contra un imperio espacial que tampoco parece tan malo, sinceramente, uniéndose con el tiempo a un grupo de rebeldes que, curiosamente, parecen bastante peores que los tipos contra los que luchan. Al final de la serie se insinúa un «continuará» que —me temo que para bien— parece ser que nunca se materializará.

Y ya. No quiero extenderme más, porque este tomo me ha dejado bastante mal sabor de boca, la verdad. No esperaba un final tan irregular para una saga tan consistentemente excelente, pero bueno, así son las cosas. Moraleja: no les dejes tus juguetes a nadie, porque vaya destrozo pueden hacer...

[Villain E · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the '90's, the Elfquest team published two series set in the future of the World of Two Moons: Jink and The Rebels. The two are roughly concurrent with each other. Then, many, many years later, after the popularity of The Final Quest, they did another series called Stargazer's Hunt, which serves as an origin story for Jink, who was a mystery in her own series.

In Stargazer's Hunt, Jink send Skywise on a search for his past. In Jink (the series) we see the spacefaring future of the world now called Abode. The human have a uneasy truce with an alien species called the Neverending. Except for Jink, the elves are nowhere in sight. And an upstart young military officer explores the forbidden depths of Blue Mountain. In The Rebels, three teenagers, a robot, and a human-sized preserver are on the run from the military while trying to be do-gooders.

The writing and art are a mixed bag.

[Yuuto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now I remember why I didn’t read the Rebels comics back when they were new. That is THE most boring series in this universe.