Debbie Harry

The Elf As Debbie Harry (2010)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(from The Beguiling, 2004)

...The look of the Regency Elf was my shameless peroxide tribute to Blondie lead singer Deborah Harry whom I adored at the time with a passion that surpasseth human understanding. A condition dramatically worsened by the acquiring of our first VCR (Beta, which I was assured was the format of the future) and a commercial tape which collected all the videos from the Eat To The Beat album (at a time when commercial videotapes retailed for around $90 each). "Dreaming" "Eat to the Beat" "In the Flesh". I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

A few years later, when Richard and Wendy were negotiating with Toronto’s Nelvana Productions to do the Elfquest animated film, Nelvana was in the middle of producing their big debut full-length animated film, Rock and Rule -- which would prove to be as lousy as its title and take them out of the full-length animated film game permanently. Anyway, lo and behold, one of the characters in Rock and Rule was voiced by Debbie Harry, who just happened to be at Nelvana on a day when Wendy was there and they met. And sometime later, Wendy is dropping this casually into the conversation over the phone.

My mouth went dry and my heart started pounding. "You met Debbie Harry?"

"Oh, yes," she snorted. "What an awful woman. She is completely anti-art."

I just let it go and we moved on to other subjects. And I always wondered what she meant by that: "anti-art".

But what a weird footnote to the creation of the Regency Elf.