Doug Wildey's Rio!

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. Wildey was not an artist who dominated the shelves, in fact he hardly did any comic book work. 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  Soon enough Wildey passed away and left unpublished in the United States, two Rio adventures.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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