Rio Day!

Doug Wildey was born on this date in 1922, I don't know when I learned just who Doug Wildey was, but when I recognized his name from the old Jonny Quest cartoon, I knew he was among my artistic heroes. It would be later that I learned of The Outlaw Kid. Wildey was not an artist who dominated the shelves, in fact he hardly did any comic book work after his turn to animation. So, when he produced a new series for the independent Eclipse Monthly it was a big deal all around.

Rio was just one series among many in the debut issue of Eclipse Monthly and not even the headliner. Captain Quick and the Foozle by Marshall Rogers was the breakout from this series, if any was. Steve Ditko's Static migrated in from Charlton appearances to find a home. Trina Robbins adapted a bizarre Sax Rohmer novel titled Dope, and The Masked Man was an attempt to update the concept of The Spirit. Alongside them was a realistically drawn western about a lean tall stranger known only as Rio, a many who once was an outlaw but now wore a badge and was on a mission for President Grant.

The adventures of Rio appeared in intermittent issues of Eclipse Monthly, getting a featured cover appearance in the fifth issue.

And doing likewise in the tenth. The three stories told were installments in a larger yarn, though each episode had a relatively satisfactory beginning, middle and end. The artwork was detailed and evoked a west which was both mythic and mundane. Rio was enough of a real man to make him identifiable and enough of a classic western hero to make him admirable.

After that initial outing he disappeared until those three stories were put together for an ove-rsized album from Comico Publishing. To read these earliest Rio stories check out this link.

Then some years later, Rio would ride again in an adventure published by Marvel Comics. Doug Wildey seemed not at all in a hurry to generate these stories, all told with heart and all using to some degree actual historical western figures. Rio was a man everyone seemed to have known, or to have at least heard of. But somehow you got the sense the official history of the west had just forgotten about him. These stories were there to set the record straight.

When Rio appeared again, for the final time it was a Dark Horse Comics. Rio always rode on and each time ended up at a different publisher.  Soon enough Wildey passed away and left unpublished in the United States, two Rio adventures. One had been published in Europe, but the other was not quite finished. Both those "new" Rio adventures were combined with the earlier material produced over nearly two decades and published by yet another comic book house, this time IDW.

They approached the tome as if it were an art book and it's lovely. The techniques that Wildey used to produce his memorable art is evident and as the introduction makes clear, Wildey was an artist completely interested in the result and not the purity of technique as he mixed those at will. Doug Wildey was a master artist and this volume entitled Doug Wildey's Rio makes that clear.

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A Rocketeer Diverse Hands Gallery!

From the very beginning the elegance and masterful design alongside the vivid nostalgia has made many artists eager to try their hand at The Rocketeer. The realism required means it's not for every talent out there. Here some delightful examples which first appeared in The Rocketeer Special Edition form Eclipse Comics which finished the first Rocketeer story. 

(Mike Kaluta)

(George Freeman)

(Murphy Anderson)

(William Stout)

(Bruce Jones)

(Gray Morrow)

(Russ Heath)

(Al Williamson)

(Doug Wildey)

(Dave Stevens)

It's been great fun to revisit once again The Rocketeer by Dave Stevens and others. The character has a delightful evergreen quality which allows me to savor it all over again every few years. I'm already looking forward to the next time I get to see Cliff discover an experimental rocket pack and take to the skies and the next time I get to glom my peepers on the ravishing Betty. Good stuff! 

Next month things get a bit darker for us all here at the Dojo. 

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Jonny's 1960's Quest!

Watching these 1960's Jonny Quest episodes again has made me fall in love with them all over again. The animation though somewhat limited relative to major motion pictures from Disney and elsewhere is still amazing given the budgets and timelines for television. The character designs by the late great Doug Wildey are the core of this serious attempt to bring to the small screen a series of high-octane adventures for the younger eye which still evoke the danger and intrigue found in the then highly popular Bond movies.

There is a direct connection between Jonny Quest and The Rocketeer as well. Dave Stevens worked with Doug Wildey on the Godzilla cartoon. Wildey became something of a mentor to Stevens and to honor that connection he fashioned the character of Peevy in The Rocketeer series after Wildey. Now about the Jonny Quest cartoon itself. 

The balance the creators of the cartoon found between the advance of their narrative and their character moments is exquisite. While in some of the later efforts you might say the story suffers as we watch Jonny and Hadji lounge about, it's hardly a concern as there are just as many if not more episodes in which the hazards are revealed from nearly the first moment. The series is hurt from time to time by stereotypical presentations of indigenous peoples, such as Native American White Feather with his Tonto-esque broken English, but by and large the show avoids these pitfalls with sympathetic presentations of most folks.

Some things which chanced upon my mind as I watched these for the umpteenth time are that Dr. Benton Quest is impossibly smart, a polymath of the highest order who darts across the globe dabbling in disparate studies in physics, archeology, chemistry, metallurgy, botany, and on and on. He seems to be a one-man "Fabulous Five". That's fine with me, but I just never thought about it before. Also he's a bit of a bad parent, constantly putting his kid into all kinds of jeopardy, but then I guess the other option was to be an absent parent and that's hardly ideal either.

Another thing which I noticed more this time was the attention to the natural world. Usually I'm so swept up in the adventure these details sail right by me, but everywhere the Quest team goes, they usually find a moment or two to engage the local fauna. Whether it be a toucan, a porpoise, a polar bear, a panther, a sea turtle, a monkey, a gila monster, a jackrabbit, a mongoose, a skunk, there always seems to be a critter around to bring out the wonder of the boys. It's a nifty trope that the show does a great job of using but not overdoing. Bandit is a great creation, mostly just a realistic dog who borders on the edge of the anthropromorphic and occasionally crosses it.

The strength of any Hanna-Barbera production are the voices and Jonny Quest is no exception. Mike Road as Race Bannon is a standout, his virile baritone adding hefty machismo to a show already shimmering in testosterone. Tim Matheson as Jonny has a bright engaging manner and Danny Bravo as Hadji, though at times a bit forced, still sounds like a friendly bloke. Don Messick and John Stephenson taking turns as Doctor Quest offer up warm friendly manners which make the team seem credible. Other voices show up in the series such as Jesse White as the memorable Pasha Peddler, Vic Perrin as pernicious Doctor Zin, and Cathy Lewis as the exotic and alluring Jezebel Jade (as close as the show ever gets to actual sex). One voice I noticed this time which I've never taken note of before is the amazing Nestor Paiva as a range of Hispanic characters, some quite close to Paiva's screen personas.

The way this series holds up so long after its 1964 debut is stunning. It remains, not unlike the Bond movies which inspired it, at once a time capsule of a romantic era of adventure and a story so true to its mythic elements that it never loses its allure. Whenever you hear that amazing opening by composer Hoyt Curtin you are swept away into a super-science fantasy land of high adventure, moral courage and pure entertainment.

It would take decades before more Quest episodes were made. More on those next time.

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Mars Is Wildey!

Before it was mentioned to me as a recommendation for this month I didn't know that Doug Wildey had done an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. In point of fact he seems to have done an adaptation of one of the stories which comprise the collection -- "Mars is Heaven". It's the gentle but yet brutal story of how the Martians use powers of illusion to protect themselves from what they understand to be invaders from Earth. I could find very little about how Wildey came to be on this project, but the results are still quite impressive. 

Here's the three-page story in its original artwork form. 

To read this story in its full-color form with the blessing of a cover to boot check out this link. Later this week, there will be more on The Martian Chronicles. 

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Godzilla Animated!

It seems that every twenty years or so there's a need for some new Godzilla cartoons. I had the distinct pleasure of recently watching a trilogy of feature-length Godzilla movies from Japan made in 2017 and 2018  which put the story far into the future. It's essentially the story of mankind attempting to reoccupy the Earth after having to abandon it because of the influx of monsters, the most powerful of which was Godzilla. The people of Earth were helped to make the faster-than-light quest by two alien races -- the technological and warlike "Bilasaludo" and the extremely religious "Exif". While it has been twenty years in space for the people aboard their space ship nearly twenty thousand have passed on Earth and it's a much changed environment the humans find on their return. This is a Godzilla movie unlike any I've ever encountered with the titular "King of Monsters" portrayed as something beyond the ken of people both in scale and purpose. Godzilla reminded me most of Mount Fuji in fact, a dominant part of the landscape and central to the understanding of the world itself for the people who live there. There are three movies in this series: Godzilla - Planet of Monsters (which tells of how Godzilla has changed), Godzilla - City on the Edge of Battle (which offers a different take on MechaGodzilla), and finally Godzilla - The Planet Eater (which brings Ghidorah into the epic tale). 

Twenty years before in 1998-1999 following on after the American Godzilla movie which is so much decried in these modern times, came Godzilla- The Series. This was a joint venture from both American and Japanese producers and featured the more nimble Godzilla seen in that movie starring Matthew Broderick. One change though is that this Godzilla has imprinted on the lead character and can also spew flames unlike the original film which so many people disregard. This band of researchers called H.E.A.T.(Humanitarian Environmental Analysis Team) travel the globe aboard the high-tech ship "Heat Seeker" which is provided by the French government. These are sturdy adventures with some real range on the kinds of threats that the team with the help of Godzilla face. The monster designs are really creative and evoke memories of the classic Toho beasts just barely here and there. We have spins on giant bugs (beetles, bees, mosquitos, scorpions, etc.) , the Loch Ness Monster, the Mexican Firebird, an ancient sphinx, an enormous armadillo, and giant fish, others I cannot figure out how to describe, and even a cyborg "Godzilla". One funny ongoing gag is the destruction of NIGEL, a robot used for analysis and such who gets destroyed in just about every episode.  For many Godzilla fans this era of the King of Monsters is one they would  like to forget. Me, I rather enjoy it. And watching after seeing the most recent Japanese films, I get the sense I am seeing the mutation monster plague begin which drove humans away from Earth finally as reflected in the movies discussed above.  

 

Twenty years before the original Godzilla -The Animated Series I know of dropped onto television screens. This was a joint venture between the Hanna-Barbara studio and Henry G. Saperstein and featured character designs by Doug Wildey of Jonny Quest fame among other things. This is a story in which Godzilla works in league with a team of humans who live aboard the Calico, a hydrofoil research ship. Also on board is "Godzooky", a humorous small-time version of Godzilla. The team travels the globe and manages usually to scare up a giant monster here and there for Godzilla to rise from the depths of the ocean to confront. But the show was mired in a TV environment where any sort of violence was virtually forbidden so Godzilla couldn't even step on a building. Not much for a giant monster to do after that edict has dropped. Sadly only the first season has been presented in DVD and those are hard to find. 

And before I sign off a final time for this month filled with Godzilla let me remember the first Godzilla cartoon of them all from 1969, the totally awesome Bambi Meets Godzilla!  

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Favorite Comic Artist Countdown #5 - Doug Wildey!

It all began with Jonny Quest. And by that I mean my fascination with weird science adventure and that led to paperbacks, and big little books, and to comics. The man behind Jonny Quest was the great Doug Wildey. Doug Wildey was not only a great producer of cartoons, it turns out he was a magnificent comic book artist with a yen to do westerns. He'd drawn many a western for Atlas and others, most famously The Outlaw Kid during the days when the West ruled and superheroes were few and far between. A Wildey western immediately had a realistic sense that no other western I've ever read in a comic. His horses were beautiful and I've long considered the ability to draw a horse one of the great tests of an artist's skills, that and hats. Getting the odd symmetry of a horse, at once elegant and awkward  to flow across a page is demanding and no one did it better than Wildey. His heroes were men, not just of the male persuasion, but "men" in that old-fashioned sense of rugged and capable. And somehow Wildey's people always looked like they really lived in a real world, rooted on the ground and between the buildings. Doug Wildey won me over all over again with his western hero Rio, a character who embodied all that I've described and also brought a sense of humility to work. Rio like his creator made it look easy and never called attention to the process, but just got a job done and done well. I like to think that Rio was an alter-ego for Wildey, a bit of wish fulfillment which at the core most all heroes are, that which we seek to be, in this case the calm capable quiet keeper of justice -- a man who made the world better. Doug Wildey did just that.

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