Comic Book Nostalgia

I had the excellent pleasure of meeting up with a few awesome women from the goodreads m/m group this weekend. Many fun things were discussed, mostly books, but other, um, interesting subjects as well. As one might imagine. Fabulous reviewer Jay, who was there, posted a picture, even! Check us out. Hot, I know. Hot enough for free shots! Well, we didn't get them for being hot, but for knowing where to find hotness, but that still counts.

Of course we talked about alllll flavors of romance and/or smut -- sometimes they crossover, but sometimes not, as we all know. And one of the questions we were all meant to answer was "What was your first experience reading dude-on-dude." Let me tell you, I got some book recs out of that. We all now have even more massive to-read piles.

But mine was -- I guess predictably -- more a general queer reading kind of experience, and talking about it made me all nostalgic. When I was like 12 or so, my Aunt Tricia (who gave us the fine Honeyed Fox logo -- the official beer of Superpowered Love!) gave me, my cousin Brian, and my brother some of her graphic novel collections of Wendy and Richard Pini's gorgeous ElfQuest.

Which is about elves. With a quest. Go figure.

Anyhow, these were originally done in black and white, and I have a bunch of the "Reader's Collection" books in B&W. But my first experience was with the colorized ones. I mean love. at. first. sight. The art is totally gorgeous, the characters awesome, and the story is at once simple and really touching. I still love them after all these years. I met up with my cousin in Cleveland a few months back and he was going, "Did you see they're all free online now? I've been re-reading that shit! So good!"

Yeah. All of them. Online. For free. It's a thing.

They're not particularly gay -- there's a kind of forced bonding thing for the sake of reproduction, even. The society is just very free love, and I remember falling in love with that aspect of it even at a really young age. It's definitely been a longtime influence on me, as anything we connect with on that level usually is, so I thought while I was being nostalgic I'd do a shout out for it here.

This is one of the posters on the wall in my office:



It's the main elf dude and his soulbrother (which is sorta code for fuckbuddy but with looooove -- but that's about every relationship in these books) and his mate and their twins. Awwwww.

And yeah. I just felt like getting all comic nostalgic. Woohoo.