ElfQuest Creators Wendy and Richard Pini Create Landmark Endowment for Future Comics, Collections, and More

Wendy and Richard Pini are responsible for one of comics’ most beloved franchises in ElfQuest, and fans from all over can see their work up-close in Columbia University’s growing collection and archive. Now Wendy and Richard have teamed up with Columbia University once again, donating $500,000 and creating the Wendy and Richard Pini Comics and Cartoon Endowment, which will allow even more comics, collections, and creators to have their work showcased and preserved. ComicBook had a chance to speak to Wendy and Richard Pini about the new endowment, how these conversations started, and the importance of preserving media for future generations, and it all began at Comic-Con.

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“At San Diego Comic-Con in 2012, a vivacious, charming woman named Karen Green came up to our table and introduced herself and identified herself as the archivist at Columbia University Library archives,” Wendy said. “And she just came right out and asked us if we would be interested in donating our collection of architect artwork and papers and so forth to the Columbia Archive.”

“We were absolutely blown away by this request. No one had ever come to us with something like that before, and it was, I’m going to use the word relief. It was a tremendous relief to us to have her ask that of us because we had been taking the care of the artwork for so many years,” Wendy said. “And we had been concerned about what was going to happen to it. And all of a sudden, like a gift from the universe, here comes Karen with the absolute best opportunity we could ever have been offered people.”

“It was all stored in our house, in my office, in the basement of our house, and even though it was insured to the hilt, if the house burned down, that wasn’t going to bring the artwork back,” Richard said. “And that worry was constant. Low level all the time, as Wendy said. 2012, Karen Green came up to us at Comic Con, and she said they were building an archive of comics and graphic novel material, and they had already acquired Chris Claremont’s papers and his scripts. And so that was the first donation to this budding archive, and we would be the second. I remember the sense of relief was palpable. Absolutely. Let’s get this thing. Let’s get the artwork out of the house. Columbia is a lot more stable in terms of safety and preservation than our little basement. So over the next couple of years, a majority of the material went to Columbia.”

While he was ecstatic about having the work stored in a place like Columbia University, it was also about making sure that ElfQuest would continue to have a home and that people would be able to discover the franchise for years to come. That led to the first steps towards a huge donation and the creation of the Wendy and Richard Pini Comics and Cartoon Endowment.

“And it put me in the frame of mind that I want to make sure that ElfQuest goes on after we’re no longer here. Now, ElfQuest has been reprinted many times, and we’re very happy with our current publisher, Dark Horse Comics. They’re coming out with a new edition of the classic original Quest. That’s the story that many people got hooked on, and we want to keep getting people, people hooked on this wonderful story. It occurred to me that since Columbia had all of Wendy’s material and our written material, and since students were coming in in their classes to look at this stuff, to learn from it, because we visited a couple of times and we watched it happen. I wanted the function of the archive to continue as well as the preservation of the material,” Richard said.

“So I posed the question to Karen Green. I said, you know, we want what you’re doing to last. What can we do? And she came up with a number of suggestions. and one of them was a donation,” Richard said. “And if the donation was of a certain size, we could name the fund, and I said, oh, that kind of sounds interesting. We did the paperwork and put together the money, and actually, in April of last year, it’s been almost a year, we made that donation but For a number of reasons, not the least of which was Columbia University was undergoing a lot of political unrest, unrest and turmoil on campus. We had not been able to announce this until just now, and so we’re really, really pleased to be able to do so.”

“Yeah, this is a very special day for us. We’ve been waiting to make this announcement for a number of months and the, the feeling of pride and joy is, is just as powerful now as it was when we made the donation back in April,” Wendy said.

ElfQuest continues to be discovered by new fans, but this is also about creating a space and spotlight for other collections, as well as the needs of the archive to make sure it’s maintained and preserved.

“Yes. This is, this is our way of paying it forward over the many years,” Richard said. “ElfQuest has been good to us. It has been successful enough that we have, A, been able to hang onto the original artwork, and B, we have been able to put aside, over a long period, funds unspecified. Funds unspecified by us. And when we approached Columbia with this suggestion, part of the agreement between us and Colombia is that this investment, which will have returns, it will make interest, those funds will not be restricted to just taking care of ElfQuest. They will be made available to any purpose that the archive feels is necessary. If they need to, for example, get a new scanner, those funds are available for that. If they need to hire an assistant, those funds are available for that.”

“And it’s also be involved in the maintenance of other properties that they acquire,” Wendy said. Richard added, “It’s all in the service of whatever the archive goes after. I mean, they already have Chris Claremont, they have us, they have Al Jaffee, they have probably a dozen or two dozen different creators in the archives now. And this donation, this gift, will help preserve all of those, plus whoever else Karen or her successor decides is worthy to be in there. And so we are helping to take care of works and people we don’t even know yet.”

Preservation is incredibly important to Wendy and Richard, both in terms of the industry and media and art in general. “Yeah, digital preservation is absolutely invaluable, but nothing, absolutely nothing compares to preserving the existing art,” Wendy said.

“We’re very happy that Columbia is looking at both directions. They have the physical artwork. They can bring out a page that Wendy painted and they can show it to a class of art students and, and they can get what they get from it. But they are also making a digital archive of everything that we have donated to them,” Richard said.

“Well, it all has to do with the L Word and the L word is legacy. We, but mostly Wendy have created an amazing story that resonates through generations of readers, and as a co creator and a sometimes publisher, I want that story to be available forever, both to read and enjoy and to take things from and as the source material for students and scholars and whoever else to be able to study,’ Richard said.

“We want ElfQuest’s legacy to live on well after we’re no longer here, and I think that is what it all boils down to. For why we’ve done this, why we’ve done the things, why we’ve made the decisions we’ve made about publishing and partnering and owning or licensing whatever it is, it’s all about making sure that the story of ElfQuest is available,” Richard said.

Are you excited for the future of the archive, and what collection of work should be added to it next? Let us know in the comments, and you can talk all things comics with me on Bluesky @knightofoa!