Elves on my shelves

When I was in my late teens I had a friend who was one of these admirable people who felt they without a guilty conscience could spend their money on (several) giganticly long series of comic books, you know those series that made your bookshelf look really lopsided if you didn´t have every single issue sorted in order. Well I was one of those friends who didn´t get struck by a guilty conscience borrowing every single one of those issues.

Although we did have a little bit of mutual lending (I was occasionally tempted to buy the odd second-hand X-men of the older generation), I remember one particular hard-back series that he introduced me to, and that I then clinged to his door-bell on an almost daily basis (we had flats in the same building in those days) just to get him to take pitty on me and lend me the next, and the next, and the next...


I`m talking about Elf Quest. I don´t know how many books were published in the series, but I know that I lived, slept and ate them for quite some time. When I was 17-18 I felt rather embarassed to admit that I sort of fancied several male specimens of the Wolfriders and the Sun Folk, embarassed mostly, I think, because apart from my friend Tickan, who lent me all these books, I didn´t have any other friends who were into comics. Much later I have realized that lots of people continue this sort of devotion well past their 30´s, and I can´t help but wonder what my list of merits and interests would look like today, had my social network incorporated more friends of this inclination.

The reason for this slight trip of nostalgia is that I accidentally came across the Elf Quest website this morning introducing the "Complete Digital Elfquest Online project", meaning that during 2008 they intend to publish the entire series (more than 6000 pages) online! It sucks big time to be as sick as me, but there certainly are some advantages of being unable to work...