Jonny's Future Quest!

I'm a nut for Jonny Quest. I fell in deep love with the series back in the 60's as it played on the television, an adventure series which blew its competition out of the water. Truth told, Jonny Quest never had any competition. This Hanna-Barbera cartoon was the brainchild of Doug Wildey who tapped into the zeitgeist of the era and beyond. The series while decades old, still feels futuristic at times and in this story from Dynamite that's exactly what happens to the Quest team. 

It kicks off in the Free Comic Book Day edition of the book and we find the Quest team in 1964 on the sea doing some experiments with quarks when a storm comes up. A little lightning bolt later they set sail for home and find it not how they left it. They eventually figure out they have traveled in time to the year 2024. They meet a seventy-year-old Jonny who tells them that the battle against Dr. Zin still rages after all these decades. Both Race and Dr. Quest have died though little is said about that detail. There is a schism of some kind between Jonny and Hadji who has returned to India. 

In the five issues of the series, we follow the team as they gather resources to return home. We learn that Jonny and his Dad have had a falling out, though we are not privy to the details. One great detail though is that Jonny calls Race by the name Roger. Joe Casey does a great job of giving us hints about how life has unfolded for the Quest team while keeping precious secrets under wraps. Sebastian Ruiz's artwork suits the series well and has a fragility to it that reminded me of classic Silver Age Carmine Infantino. 

Below are the covers of the issues I picked up. I work mightily to ignore the avalanche of alternates that Dynamite floods the zone with. None of the covers have much if anything to do with the story inside. 

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Jonny's Comic Book Quest!

When Jonny Quest first hit the national airwaves it sparked a good deal of interest and exactly one comic book, predictably from Gold Key.  The story they chose to adapt is the very first one to air, The Mystery of the Lizard Men. This is one of my favorite episodes, it's perfectly paced. According to what I've hear Double Danger was the first episode produced. I'm a little skeptical of that since the latter has Hadji in it and the the story about lasers in the Sargasso Sea does not, the only episode which doesn't.

There is no indication at GCD who produced this one-issue Quest fest, but if you like to read it for yourself, it's available online thanks to the Dojo's very good friend Britt Reid. Just follow this link for Part One, then this one for Part Two and then wrap it all up with Part Three.

There's no doubt to my eye that Jonny Quest creator Doug Wildey produced the artwork for this back cover for the effort. Too bad they didn't get Wildey to the do the front cover as well.

But there was a Jonny Quest comic book series, it would just take a few decades to arrive. More on that tomorrow.

I do not know why after so many years that Jonny Quest finally at long last got a comic book series, but thanks to the little company Comico he did. And it's a cracker too. Doug Wildey was involved deeply with the early days of the strip, drawing amazing covers and even giving Quest fans three lush and beautiful adaptations of vintage Quest episodes in Jonny Quest Classics. Oh that he had been able to do a comic adaptation for all of the original twenty-six, but I'll enjoy what I have in all its beauty and be thankful.

The main comic book was handled by a who's who of comic book talent from the era with covers by Dave Stevens, Ken Steacy, Dan Spiegle, Ernie Colon, Wendy Pini, Carmine Infantino and others gracing the comic. The interiors were done for the most part by the team of Marc Hempel and Mark Wheatley. I'll confess that at the time their offbeat and kinetic style was not my ideal of how to present the Quest universe, but over time I have more and more appreciated the light and fresh approach they brought to the book. They managed to tap into the luster of Wildey's world without mimicking it in a mawkish or constrictive way. The series ran for several years, thirty-one regular issues with two special editions. All of it had at least a mote of the classic Quest magic and it opened the Quest universe up in a number of creative ways. It's astounding that these comics have never been reprinted in any way, especially in a world in which nearly all comics have been reprinted. They certainly deserve to find a new audience. For now, we have only the back issue bins. Me, I was lucky enough to be there when they arrived on the stands and I was savvy enough never to let them leave. They are worth the quest.

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Jonny's 1990's Quest!

What is referred to as "Classic Jonny Quest" came to an end in the 1990's with two feature-length animated adventures from Turner Broadcasting. In both we see some of the grandeur and gloss of the classic 60's series by Doug Wildey and others recovered, but we also see that the magic which happened all those many decades before can never be recaptured. Spoilers below, so tread with care.

Jonny's Golden Quest is a giant adventure which takes the Quest team across the globe to defeat the latest schemes of the evil Dr. Zin. The story opens weirdly with Jonny's Mom Rachel Quest still alive. Not surprisingly she appears to die in the early part of the story and that death proves sensibly both tragic and damaging to the team. Jonny holds great resentment against his Dad who he sees as somewhat culpable in his Mom's death and Dr. Quest himself feels guilty about his decisions. Race and Hadji try to heal the rift between the two all the while attempting to track down the father of a young girl named Jessie who seems to be at the heart of a scheme to create synthetic gold using ancient techniques developed by Leonardo Da Vinci. They are battling (it will come as no surprise) the vile Zin and his rather creepy agents, mutated creations from his genetic vats. There are a number of secrets in this one. The animation is pretty decent, much better by a great measure than the 80's episodes, and there is a clear attempt to ground the story in real world locations as the story moves from the jungles of Brazil to the streets of Tokyo to museums of Paris to the sewers of Rome to deserts of Australian outback. That's all good stuff, but frankly the story itself and Jonny's internal struggle all seem a bit overwrought as the writers feel the need to constantly bang away at feelings which simmer underneath the action. All in all an above average adventure with a decent Quest vibe, though it plays hob with any sense of continuity we might have tried to have in the Quest backstory. This is especially evident in the addition of Jessie who turns out to be Race's daughter by a woman named "Jade" but who looks nothing like the beauty from the classic series, though I guess she's supposed to be her. It's likely best to imagine that this movie happened on whatever passes for Earth-2 in the Hanna-Barbera universe.

A few years later we get Jonny Quest Vs. The Cyber-Insects  which visually is a festival. This time the story involves highly developed bugs (human size and much larger) who appear on the Earth at the same time that the weather across the globe goes completely crazy. To get to the bottom of the threat, Doctor Quest rides a shuttle into orbit to check with his team aboard an orbiting satellite which appears to be merely part of the sprawling Quest operation. It turns out that Dr. Zin is again the villain of the day and his insect hordes take Quest and the space station itself hostage while the threats on Earth rage on. Jonny, Race, Jessie, and Hadji all fight to deal with the problems and eventually it all shifts into space as they get aboard an asteroid Zin uses as a base for his defacto invasion of the planet. The action is set on an enormous scale and the notion that the fate of the planet rests in the hands of these kids is as scary as a thought as you might imagine it would be. The story frankly is not a Quest story, being far too large in scope and scale and being set in space requires way too much tech to make it a real human-sized story. If this were Flash Gordon or even Star Wars it might be okay, but as a Jonny Quest yarn it feels too big and sprawling by far. The animation is pretty impressive with some mighty bug monsters being revealed on a regular basis, but still it's just too much. Like its predecessor, any attempt to tie this into the classic shows will only make your head hurt. Take it for what it is, a high fantasy which features characters who look remarkably like the people from Palm Key.

My opinion on both these flicks is that they tell large stories which seeks to showcase big emotional moments for Jonny, but in both cases the emotional story gets overwrought and redundant. The large stories are just too mammoth for these to have anything remotely like the classic Quest vibe. Golden Quest is a worthy effort that falls a bit flat, but Cyber-Insects is off course from the get-go confusing hectic activity for plot development. Doug Wildey passed away in 1994 and this movie landed on screens in 1995, the last "classic Jonny Quest" movie. It's not, but it's neat they remembered Wildey in the closing credits. His magical touch was sorely missed in both these movies, but it will always be remembered in the exalted episodes from the 60's.

But there were also some comics. More on that next time. 

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