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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