Pini Takes a Walk on the Dark Side

by Brigid Alverson, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 5/29/2007 12:43:00 PM

After 30 years of elves and trolls, Wendy Pini is getting in touch with her dark side.

Pini, the creator of the long-running Elfquest, is launching a new comic, The Masque of the Red Death, in June. Loosely based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, it's a tale of jealousy and betrayal set in a technocratic future society, drawn in a sensual style that Pini describes as "Erte meets the '80s."

"Elfquest has brought blazing light into my life," Pini said. "It has been a true gift and a blessing, but sometimes you have to step back from the light and look at the dark side."

Poe's original story tells of a prince who shuts himself and his guests away in a castle to escape an epidemic, only to discover that even he can't hide from the outside world. "It's not really so much a story as a mood piece," said Pini, who used Poe's prince and hallucinatory visual effects as the starting point for a new world and a new cast of characters. Her story revolves around the wealthy but morally corrupt Anton, Prince Prosper, a scientist-prince who seeks to conquer death itself, and his assistant and lover, Steffan Kabala. "Prosper and Steffan have a relationship that anyone who has ever been a lover, male or female, will recognize as so intense it is bound to explode," Pini said. "These are people who have very strong hearts and see the world their way. It's the clash of those emotions that really makes the sparks fly."

The manga publisher Go! Comi will publish Masque first as a Web comic and then as three full-color, 160-page print volumes. The Web comic will be partially animated. "If two characters are standing together in a foggy mist, you might see the mist passing between them," said Pini, but the viewer will also be able to stop the action and view the comic as a still page.

Masque is written for women 17 and up, a group that Pini thinks is underserved. "A lot of current manga, even in the boys love category, seems to be high school themed, for the 14- to 16-year-old crowd," she said. "We are aiming at a female audience and what they like to see: a strong emphasis on story, a strong emphasis on complicated characters that definitely have more than one side to them."

Pini described Masque as "R-rated." "There is a lot of adult material in Elfquest that we presented in a subtle way so it goes right over the heads of our younger readers," she said. "But having done that, I'm saying to heck with subtlety. With Masque, it's just going to be right out there."

None of this means that Elfquest is going away, at least not yet. Pini has scripted the final arc, and she promises it will be a surprise. "A lot of things we set up early on in the story are going to be fulfilled in the final quest, and a lot of questions we posed in the story are going to be answered," she said. "A lot of people who have been following Elfquest will be satisfied, but I think they will be intensely shocked."

Pini and her husband Richard recently ended their agreement with DC Comics, which published Elfquest for the past four years. They will now be handling the Elfquest properties through their own company, Warp Graphics, and Pini said the last arc may appear as a Web comic or a print comic.

At this stage of her career, though, Pini said she is ready to start taking some artistic risks, and that is what Masque is all about. "There is that streak in me that loves the perverse and the dark and decadence, and loves to explore that from a safe distance," she said. "At least, I was safe. Now I'm not interested in being quite so safe any more."