Elf-Fin: Review of the Preview
I don't often review things, unless they're so deliciously awful that it must be shared. Things I like I keep to myself, the habit of a lifetime of having first my family and then a former roommate deriving great joy out of ridiculing the things I loved, and denigrating me for liking them, until my associative mind connects the things I love with the terrible feeling they instilled in me.
Example: on my 30th birthday I wanted to watch a triple feature of some of my favorite guilty pleasure films with a bunch of my friends: Logan's Run, Buckaroo Banzai, and Alien Nation. Her first response was "one out of three ain't bad" but then it got worse because she stayed during the screenings and acted like she was MSTing the movies (which done well is hilarious, but she was just plain vicious and nasty and unfunny and made everyone else in the room uncomfortable). Needless to say she ruined the day. I am well rid of her. So the things I love, I keep close.
I do admit to reviewing as many Les Misérables adaptions as I can find, because it's a useful database for people to understand the differences in the adaptions, and also because usually they're hilariously bad, but the good ones are awesome. I have gotten letters from people who have worked on some of the less well done versions that boil down to "our intent was good" and "how dare you make us feel bad about our shoddily constructed project!" and of course I laugh and post them and that's that.
I just want to say that intent does not equal quality. The path to hell, and all that. And I'm not a professional reviewer by any means, but I am a reader, and so entitled to write up my reactions as such.
So it's with a heavy heart that I have to write out a review like this, something I have loved for years, waited for for years, and found... disturbingly lacking.
But first, the backstory: In the early 90's, back when I was still reading Elfquest, there was a miniseries called Wavedancers. Arguably (and I still refer to it as such) the last great EQ story before the series imploded on itself and became a wreck. I liken it to Michael Jackson's plastic surgery. Once it started going bad every attempt to fix it made it worse.
It ended, in a massively complicated dustup, with both the creators of the series and the publishers unable to reprint the book or continue it. So for fifteen years or so, the creative team behind the book has been trying to salvage what they could from the concept and create a new work of it.
(in the interest of full disclosure, I have considered many times taking my own EQ fanfic and retooling it so that it stands alone, but there are catastrophic and fatal problems with doing that which I will detail later on as it pertains to this review.)
Which brings us to this summer, when at long last a preview issue of the first issue of the New and Improved and Finally Here book "Elf-Fin" came out, and I snapped up a copy with, to quote James Burke, "all the abandon of an alcoholic in a brewery."
And I am stunned. And not in a good way. Not even in a slightly disappointed way. I am stunned in a "sitting in the audience of Criss Angel Believe with horror and confusion and wondering WTF I just spent $200 on" kind of shellshock.
It never would have occurred to me that this could have happened.
First, the basics. Other than two characters (one of whom doesn't even appear in the preview, only the cover) the cast is new. Fine, great, love it, no problem. But the characters are flatter than halibut. Names are thrown out, with no real explanation of who these beings are, and their relationship with one another. I get immersion, when you just throw a reader into a story and they have to piece it out themselves and thus gain an insider's view of the story. But I must have been dumped into a world with 30 ish characters and I couldn't tell you, besides the one carried over from the original series, who or what any of these guys are or why I should care about them. I know it's a preview, but the infodump is crushing me. Several readings later I still can't suss out more than a few, and frankly I don't care about any of them.
The art is beautifully rendered (edit: let me fix that, I should say painstakingly rendered, but beauty must remain in the eye of the beholder). It's almost an exaggeration of its former look. I realize that fifteen years have passed and art styles change, but the clean, almost animated lines of the first series are gone and replaced with a blocky, Cartoon-Network kind of approach. Some of these charaters are impossible to look in the face because the eyes, my god the eyes, they're all over the place, and the profiles... there are so many profiles, and all of them flat. This looks more like it belongs on DeviantArt than professionally produced print. On DA this would be one of the better series. But for what it should have been, it's phoned in.
Which brings me to the writing. There's a MST3K episode called "Moon Zero Two", which is awesome in its badness. During the film it's noted that everything begins with the word "moon" or "space," like things cost moon dollars (as opposed to Earth dollars? And what's the exchange rate?) or drinking in a moon bar, leading up to one of the worst groaners in history when you see some characters playing "Moonopoly". This is bad writing, the idea that everything needs that world specific tag on it in the belief somehow that the audience will, IDK, forget they're in space? Or even worse that the characters themselves somehow need to be reminded they're in space?
This comic preview has the same problem, only for "moon" and "space" read: "water". One character asks for "spiced sea plums" (as opposed to? Spiced LAND plums?) A clairvoyant is called a "seer-sea" (a pun that would get you thrown out of Callahan's, seriously). Dancing is called a "water-whirl" (again, as opposed to? Why not just a "whirl"? Don't they know they're in water?) and in the grand Mercedes Lackey tradition of "but I thought I was being paid by the syllable?" a year is a "sphere-breacher migration." I get what it's supposed to mean, but come on. There's tides, there's lightfall and darkfall, there's more time-marking words than necessary for a race that has no need for watches. Marking time is the purview of the mortal, not the immortal. It's a distraction.
But the worst literary offense is the fact that every possible pronoun has the suffix -fin on it, including some that haven't been invented yet (sire-fin, dam-fin, elder-fin, young-fin, he-fin, she-fin... a friend is not just a friend, but a fin-friend, etc etc, ad infin-item*). They call themselves in turns "Waverin" (good) and "Elf-fin" (not so good, but it's also the title of the series so it's kind of expected I guess, although, why use the word "elf" at all?) and the one line that made me literally throw the book across the room and not pick it up again for a few days: "you're exactly what every elf-fin he-fin yearns for." You could make a nasty drinking game out of looking for the word "fin" in this book; death by alcohol poisoning would occur around page 12.
Let me put it another way: what you don't see in the Harry Potter books is everything with the word "magic" attached to it. A wand is a wand; a wizard doesn't need to call it a "magic wand" because duh, he knows it's magic. Chocolate frogs are magical, but they're not called "magical chocolate frogs" because it would never occur to the consumer, a magician, that there were any other kind. That's how you create world specific terminology that does not insult either the characters or the readers. Wizards mean magic, and mermaids mean water.
And here's the worst part of all: the book may have all new characters, new world, new ideas, new setup, new story... but it is still so painfully stuck in the EQ universe that it is impossible to look at it as other than a shadow of a reflection in a broken mirror. And here we come to the same problem I have with wanting to redo my EQ fanfics into something no longer tied to the EQ universe, because although I still think the basic stories themselves are solid, there are some seriously EQ-specific worldbuilding keystones that cannot be taken out of the story without pulling the whole thing down. It would in fact be easier just to write something new than to try and piece it back together once the EQ-specific bits are excised.
The two biggest keystones that make an EQ story what it is are the magic based abilities, most commonly the ability to "send," or speak telepathically, but which also incorporates the classic healing, rockshaping, treeshaping, and gliding abilities, and the even bigger issue of Recognition, the biological and unstoppable sudden urge to merge (which in a slow breeding race is necessary to ensure that not just the fittest survive, but only the fittest are born in the first place). Neither general idea is particularly original or specific to EQ, but the manner in which both are used are very specific in terms of storytelling.
The first thing I saw was that the traditional four pointed sending star of EQ was replaced in Elf-Fin by a six pointed icon that is either an asterisk or a snowflake; I'm not sure which it's intended to be. Here's my question: why use an icon at all? Why not a bubble with no voice arrow, for example? More to the point, why use an icon so closely resembling the other icon if you don't need it?
And then while reading, when the plot started to kick in, I discovered a word that made me very sad. That word is "Irresistence." And it is used in exactly the same context as Recognition. In fact, you could search and replace the story and it would read exactly the same. I noticed myself doing that while reading, my eyes saw one thing, but my brain read something else. That is not something you want when trying to distance yourself from the original version. You don't want to be calling back every page. You want to move past the original if you want to break away from it. You don't want to keep reminding the reader, who in the beginning presumably came to find your work because of the earlier version, what things were like before.
I could handle not so great writing with great art; I could handle not so great art with great writing. I can't handle not so great art coupled with not so great writing. I'm standing in the middle of a crime against reading, putting up yellow tape around it and wondering what the hell happened.
I put off doing anything with this review to make sure I wanted to do it. I was just so disappointed in the outcome of the finished piece I couldn't really process it. I had to make sure it wasn't just my fangirl projections getting in the way. I wanted this to be awesome. I expected it to be. I could still be wrong and this could be just a rough sample and the final version is actually much better. But I'm not sure I want to look at it. I've reread the thing several times trying to see what I'm missing or trying to get it to engage me, but it's like Oakland. There is no there there.
And the worst part is, I couldn't tell you if I liked the story, because there wasn't enough story to judge. But what was there, was not enough to make me want to read further. Which is sad, because I really wanted this series to rise above its former identity, like some other properties Warp printed once upon a time. Maybe this one more than most.
I'm sure it will find fans, everything does, and if you like it, hey, who am I to tell you otherwise? This is just what I saw. And some people do actually pay good money to go to see Believe over and over, so de gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum** and all that. But for me, this story is ended.
Fin.***
____________
* this one is mine, sorry, got carried away, won't happen again.
**From the Latin "About taste and color there's no arguing" aka "to each his own" or more specifically "there's no accounting for taste"
***I lied.
Example: on my 30th birthday I wanted to watch a triple feature of some of my favorite guilty pleasure films with a bunch of my friends: Logan's Run, Buckaroo Banzai, and Alien Nation. Her first response was "one out of three ain't bad" but then it got worse because she stayed during the screenings and acted like she was MSTing the movies (which done well is hilarious, but she was just plain vicious and nasty and unfunny and made everyone else in the room uncomfortable). Needless to say she ruined the day. I am well rid of her. So the things I love, I keep close.
I do admit to reviewing as many Les Misérables adaptions as I can find, because it's a useful database for people to understand the differences in the adaptions, and also because usually they're hilariously bad, but the good ones are awesome. I have gotten letters from people who have worked on some of the less well done versions that boil down to "our intent was good" and "how dare you make us feel bad about our shoddily constructed project!" and of course I laugh and post them and that's that.
I just want to say that intent does not equal quality. The path to hell, and all that. And I'm not a professional reviewer by any means, but I am a reader, and so entitled to write up my reactions as such.
So it's with a heavy heart that I have to write out a review like this, something I have loved for years, waited for for years, and found... disturbingly lacking.
But first, the backstory: In the early 90's, back when I was still reading Elfquest, there was a miniseries called Wavedancers. Arguably (and I still refer to it as such) the last great EQ story before the series imploded on itself and became a wreck. I liken it to Michael Jackson's plastic surgery. Once it started going bad every attempt to fix it made it worse.
It ended, in a massively complicated dustup, with both the creators of the series and the publishers unable to reprint the book or continue it. So for fifteen years or so, the creative team behind the book has been trying to salvage what they could from the concept and create a new work of it.
(in the interest of full disclosure, I have considered many times taking my own EQ fanfic and retooling it so that it stands alone, but there are catastrophic and fatal problems with doing that which I will detail later on as it pertains to this review.)
Which brings us to this summer, when at long last a preview issue of the first issue of the New and Improved and Finally Here book "Elf-Fin" came out, and I snapped up a copy with, to quote James Burke, "all the abandon of an alcoholic in a brewery."
And I am stunned. And not in a good way. Not even in a slightly disappointed way. I am stunned in a "sitting in the audience of Criss Angel Believe with horror and confusion and wondering WTF I just spent $200 on" kind of shellshock.
It never would have occurred to me that this could have happened.
First, the basics. Other than two characters (one of whom doesn't even appear in the preview, only the cover) the cast is new. Fine, great, love it, no problem. But the characters are flatter than halibut. Names are thrown out, with no real explanation of who these beings are, and their relationship with one another. I get immersion, when you just throw a reader into a story and they have to piece it out themselves and thus gain an insider's view of the story. But I must have been dumped into a world with 30 ish characters and I couldn't tell you, besides the one carried over from the original series, who or what any of these guys are or why I should care about them. I know it's a preview, but the infodump is crushing me. Several readings later I still can't suss out more than a few, and frankly I don't care about any of them.
The art is beautifully rendered (edit: let me fix that, I should say painstakingly rendered, but beauty must remain in the eye of the beholder). It's almost an exaggeration of its former look. I realize that fifteen years have passed and art styles change, but the clean, almost animated lines of the first series are gone and replaced with a blocky, Cartoon-Network kind of approach. Some of these charaters are impossible to look in the face because the eyes, my god the eyes, they're all over the place, and the profiles... there are so many profiles, and all of them flat. This looks more like it belongs on DeviantArt than professionally produced print. On DA this would be one of the better series. But for what it should have been, it's phoned in.
Which brings me to the writing. There's a MST3K episode called "Moon Zero Two", which is awesome in its badness. During the film it's noted that everything begins with the word "moon" or "space," like things cost moon dollars (as opposed to Earth dollars? And what's the exchange rate?) or drinking in a moon bar, leading up to one of the worst groaners in history when you see some characters playing "Moonopoly". This is bad writing, the idea that everything needs that world specific tag on it in the belief somehow that the audience will, IDK, forget they're in space? Or even worse that the characters themselves somehow need to be reminded they're in space?
This comic preview has the same problem, only for "moon" and "space" read: "water". One character asks for "spiced sea plums" (as opposed to? Spiced LAND plums?) A clairvoyant is called a "seer-sea" (a pun that would get you thrown out of Callahan's, seriously). Dancing is called a "water-whirl" (again, as opposed to? Why not just a "whirl"? Don't they know they're in water?) and in the grand Mercedes Lackey tradition of "but I thought I was being paid by the syllable?" a year is a "sphere-breacher migration." I get what it's supposed to mean, but come on. There's tides, there's lightfall and darkfall, there's more time-marking words than necessary for a race that has no need for watches. Marking time is the purview of the mortal, not the immortal. It's a distraction.
But the worst literary offense is the fact that every possible pronoun has the suffix -fin on it, including some that haven't been invented yet (sire-fin, dam-fin, elder-fin, young-fin, he-fin, she-fin... a friend is not just a friend, but a fin-friend, etc etc, ad infin-item*). They call themselves in turns "Waverin" (good) and "Elf-fin" (not so good, but it's also the title of the series so it's kind of expected I guess, although, why use the word "elf" at all?) and the one line that made me literally throw the book across the room and not pick it up again for a few days: "you're exactly what every elf-fin he-fin yearns for." You could make a nasty drinking game out of looking for the word "fin" in this book; death by alcohol poisoning would occur around page 12.
Let me put it another way: what you don't see in the Harry Potter books is everything with the word "magic" attached to it. A wand is a wand; a wizard doesn't need to call it a "magic wand" because duh, he knows it's magic. Chocolate frogs are magical, but they're not called "magical chocolate frogs" because it would never occur to the consumer, a magician, that there were any other kind. That's how you create world specific terminology that does not insult either the characters or the readers. Wizards mean magic, and mermaids mean water.
And here's the worst part of all: the book may have all new characters, new world, new ideas, new setup, new story... but it is still so painfully stuck in the EQ universe that it is impossible to look at it as other than a shadow of a reflection in a broken mirror. And here we come to the same problem I have with wanting to redo my EQ fanfics into something no longer tied to the EQ universe, because although I still think the basic stories themselves are solid, there are some seriously EQ-specific worldbuilding keystones that cannot be taken out of the story without pulling the whole thing down. It would in fact be easier just to write something new than to try and piece it back together once the EQ-specific bits are excised.
The two biggest keystones that make an EQ story what it is are the magic based abilities, most commonly the ability to "send," or speak telepathically, but which also incorporates the classic healing, rockshaping, treeshaping, and gliding abilities, and the even bigger issue of Recognition, the biological and unstoppable sudden urge to merge (which in a slow breeding race is necessary to ensure that not just the fittest survive, but only the fittest are born in the first place). Neither general idea is particularly original or specific to EQ, but the manner in which both are used are very specific in terms of storytelling.
The first thing I saw was that the traditional four pointed sending star of EQ was replaced in Elf-Fin by a six pointed icon that is either an asterisk or a snowflake; I'm not sure which it's intended to be. Here's my question: why use an icon at all? Why not a bubble with no voice arrow, for example? More to the point, why use an icon so closely resembling the other icon if you don't need it?
And then while reading, when the plot started to kick in, I discovered a word that made me very sad. That word is "Irresistence." And it is used in exactly the same context as Recognition. In fact, you could search and replace the story and it would read exactly the same. I noticed myself doing that while reading, my eyes saw one thing, but my brain read something else. That is not something you want when trying to distance yourself from the original version. You don't want to be calling back every page. You want to move past the original if you want to break away from it. You don't want to keep reminding the reader, who in the beginning presumably came to find your work because of the earlier version, what things were like before.
I could handle not so great writing with great art; I could handle not so great art with great writing. I can't handle not so great art coupled with not so great writing. I'm standing in the middle of a crime against reading, putting up yellow tape around it and wondering what the hell happened.
I put off doing anything with this review to make sure I wanted to do it. I was just so disappointed in the outcome of the finished piece I couldn't really process it. I had to make sure it wasn't just my fangirl projections getting in the way. I wanted this to be awesome. I expected it to be. I could still be wrong and this could be just a rough sample and the final version is actually much better. But I'm not sure I want to look at it. I've reread the thing several times trying to see what I'm missing or trying to get it to engage me, but it's like Oakland. There is no there there.
And the worst part is, I couldn't tell you if I liked the story, because there wasn't enough story to judge. But what was there, was not enough to make me want to read further. Which is sad, because I really wanted this series to rise above its former identity, like some other properties Warp printed once upon a time. Maybe this one more than most.
I'm sure it will find fans, everything does, and if you like it, hey, who am I to tell you otherwise? This is just what I saw. And some people do actually pay good money to go to see Believe over and over, so de gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum** and all that. But for me, this story is ended.
Fin.***
____________
* this one is mine, sorry, got carried away, won't happen again.
**From the Latin "About taste and color there's no arguing" aka "to each his own" or more specifically "there's no accounting for taste"
***I lied.