Artist Profile
Wendy Pini
by Ariel Wulff

Wendy was born on June 4, 1951 in San Francisco, California, and was one of two children adopted into the Fletcher family. She grew up in Santa Clara County, where her artistic talent was recognized and encouraged at an early age. Wendy had a fairly typical school experience, her favorite classes being any that allowed her to express herself artistically.She developed an appreciation for fantasy literature and art at a tender age, admiring a diverse variety of talent including the artwork of Arthur Rackham, Walt Disney, Chuck Jones, and Jack Kirby. She soon began to fine tune her own art to the fantasy genre, spinning original tales of elves, aliens and sorcerers.

Wendy recieved classroom honors for her artwork throughout the course of her education, and was the illustrator of her high school yearbook. During her high school years, she was active in the debating society, attending various regional and state competitions. Her first "professional" art job was decorating the windows of various stores along the main street of her home town.

It was during her teen years that Wendy discovered comics. The title she liked most had appealing characters and solid stories, such as Marvel's Fantastic Four and The Avengers. Wendy had considered a career in animation, and viewed comics as a way of approaching animatioon without having to get a job in Hollywood. She submitted samples of her artwork to Marvel Comics when she was about seventeen, but was told to finish school before trying to break into the comic industry.

After high school, Wendy went on to Pitzer Collge, a Claremont College near Los Angeles. Pitzer is an experimental college where students can create their own curriculum, and Wendy enjoyed creatively different art courses while she worked toward a liberal arts degree.

Outside of school, Wendy joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. At the age of eighteen, she wrote a letter to the original Silver Surfer comic published by Marvel, which was printed in Issue #5 of that series. Her letter took writer Stan Lee to task for portraying all the human characters in a poor light. Her letter caused such a stir that there were roughly 300 replies — one of which was from a young man in Connecticut named Richard Pini.

Wendy and Richard began a years-long cross-country correspondence. They were married in 1972, and settled in Massachusetts. Wendy began her professional career as an illustrator for science fictoin magazines, with work appearing in issues of Galaxy, Worlds of If, and Galileo, among others. The themes of "tribe" and "quest" always pervaded her work.

Wendy continued to devise stories involving characters in search of a home, and by the mid-1970s she had written several using different characters and situations. Early in 1977, she and Richard began talking about using a group of elves to carry the theme, and a new, original quest story started to take shape over time, via a number of impromptu discussions.

Later that year, Wendy and Richard decided to spin Wendy's tale into the self-published ongoing comic book series Elfquest, and they created Warp Graphics to be the publishing company. As the first continuing fantasy/adventure series created, written and illustrated by a woman, Elfquest bcame a phenomenon in the comic industry.

In 1979, the Pinis moved to Poughkeepsie, New York, and the rest, as they say, is history. With Warp firmly established in the publishing industry, Wendy continued to weave her tale of Elfquest, attracting fans from around the world.

Although she's never really tired of drawing the elves of Elfquest, at various times Wendy has taken on different projects. She did an issue of Jonny Quest for Comico in 1986; some pre-Elfquest work of hers was gathered together and published by Warp as the book Law and Chaos in 1987; and in 1989, she wrote and painted two graphic novels based on the television show "Beauty and the Beast."

In 1994, Elfquest finally came full circle. Edward Pressman Film Corporation reached an agreement with Warp to develop Elfquest as an animated movie — which, after all, was Wendy's original concept for presenting the story of her elves. In March of 1999, a release stated that Wolfmill Entertainment is working on the feature, which will be entirely CGI animated.

Sendings Issue #1, March 1997
Updated Spring 2001

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