Wendy and Richard Pini

Wendy Pini née Fletcher, (born June 4, 1951) and Richard Pini (born July 19, 1950) are the husband-and-wife team responsible for creating the well-known Elfquest series of comics, graphic novels and prose works. They are also known as WaRP (as in Warp Graphics).

Early life

Wendy Fletcher was born in San Francisco in 1951, and from an early age demonstrated the talents later to come to fruition as a professional illustrator, and eventually as the creator of Elfquest.

Wendy's youthful interest in fantasy was inspired in part by such luminaries as Shakespeare and Kipling. She took artistic inspiration from Victorian illustrators such as Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, designers such as Walt Disney, Doug Wildey, and Erté, as well as comic book greats such as Jack Kirby and Japanese manga artist Osamu Tezuka.

Richard Pini was born in 1950, in New Haven, Connecticut. After an exemplary academic performance at school, he was accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for an astrophysics degree. Always a fan of science fiction, at college he found a new diversion in comic books.