Almost forgot: read The Searcher and the Sword, the first new ElfQuest book by creator Wendy Pini in I'm not sure how long. When I was a kid, I was a huge ElfQuest fan, at least for the first couple of series that the Pinis (Wendy and her husband Richard) did. Once they began capitalizing on their success and publishing more and more stories by other creators, I began to lose interest. DC Comics has been reprinting the earlier material, so I've been getting reacquainted with that, and I've had the chance to read some of the stuff not done by the Pinis, that they've chosen to include in the DC collections. It's much better than I had expected, and I don't mind reading it in this new format, with them weeding out the stuff that I don't need to read to get the whole story.

Having said that, while the reprints are neat, this new book is something to get particularly excited about. In its way, it's a fairly low-key story, which will disappoint the "I've been waiting however many years for this!" crowd, but was fine for me. It's got all the qualities I remember liking in the series all those years ago, without feeling like a big, blow-out reunion-movie-type story. Her art has certainly evolved. She seems to be taking the same "less is more" approach so many other maturing artists take with their inking, taking out unnecessary fiddly detail and focusing on clarity of storytelling. I'm not sure how much of the actual drawing--as opposed to just the coloring--is done on the computer, but apparently this is a tool Mrs Pini has embraced, and regardless of her medium of choice, it mostly works. (There are one or two instances of CG-elements that don't integrate well, but otherwise, it looks fine.)

The story apparently picks up some time after the last comics left off, but I never read those. There's enough information to catch me up on what's going on, but I obviously can't judge how accessible it would be for a newcomer. I appreciated the way this story eased me back into the series by telling smaller, more personal tales of the characters. ElfQuest, to me, was always about the personalities first, and that's what made it special. It's nice to have it back, to see that it's grown with the passage of time, but it's still the series I remember.