Wendy Pini

Wendy Pini
Richard and Wendy Pini at FanimeCon 2010 in San Jose, California
Born	Wendy Fletcher (1951-06-04) June 4, 1951 (age 65) San Francisco, California, United States
Nationality	American
Area(s)	Writer, Penciler, Inker
Notable works	Elfquest, Wendy Pini's Masque of the Red Death
elfquest.com

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).

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.

Wendy Fletcher and Richard Pini met when Pini read a letter of Fletcher's that had been published in issue #5 of the Silver Surfer comic book. A correspondence began, spanning a period of four years. The two eventually married in 1972, and Wendy embarked upon a career as an illustrator for sci-fi magazines. A degree in astronomy from MIT led Richard to a position at Boston's Charles Hayden Planetarium as lecturer, photographer, script writer and special effects technician. Later, he taught high school astronomy, then worked for IBM until Elfquest became a full-time occupation.