I will be perfectly honest with you: the sole reason I started Defenders Week - heck, the sole reason I went back and started reading The Defenders from the start in the first place - was because of Steve Gerber's classic nihilistic, existential theater of the absurd interlude drama,
The Elf With A Gun Saga.
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| "Enough with the John Denver, Tom, don't make me call the elf." |
Intermittently throughout his groundbreakingly awesome run on The Defenders, Gerber would draw attention away from the primary plot for a seemingly unconnected series of vignettes in which otherwise ordinary people caught in the midst of doing nothing spectacular were suddenly set upon by a homicidal mythical midget intent on shooting them down like wooden ducks on a fairway ...
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| Look for our secret midgety murder surprise inside every Native American chief... |
The implication was, of course, that the Elf With A Gun was ultimately to somehow cross over into the primary Defenders storyline, and frankly wouldn't have seemed out of place considering that Gerber's other contributions included an evil possessed deer, a personality cult centered around a cosmic being masquerading as an abusive schlep, and about all the Jack Norriss you can handle.
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| Complicating matters, Charles had bet their return ticket money on 'I WON'T be killed by an Elf tonight' ... |
In fact, the one occasion when the Elf got within some sort of proximity to the main story seemed to be teasing a confluence.
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| He wasn't even going to kill her until she insulted him like that. |
Fantastically though ... IT NEVER DID. The Elf snuffed it suddenly (see below) in its final appearance.
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| The Satisfying Conclusion |
A hundred issues after the Elf's debut, series writers J.M.DeMatteis and Peter Gillis revisited the idea with something approaching a conclusion. As an authority in the overwhelming epic that is the Elf With A Gun saga, I give it a thumbs-down. The original saga is the amazing story about a serial killer master-of-many-disguises elf and how he got smooshed by a truck, and I dare anyone to put a better coda on it than that.
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