The Weird of Wendy Pini

Voices from another world spoke with sublime otherness, helping an indie cartoonist face down prudes, pain and the patriarchy.

By Rob Beschizza

Its night and the trees are whispering. Wendy Pini approaches a young oak, its branches bare in winter. The artist behind the long-running fantasy series Elfquest, she took me here to understand something of our relationship to art.

Though Wendys work flows from the line of beauty, a sinuous aesthetic defined by William Hogarth, the tree is angular, wandering and weird. It embodies natures indifference to our romance of its forms. The artist Eyvind Earle, she says, beautified this paradox.