Wednesday, March 12, 2025

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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2 comments:

  1. I don't think Jonny Quest was shown in the UK ( certainly not in Scotland) in the 1960s, I think a new series was on TV in the 90s(?) or later but I have never seen the cartoon. I did however pick up a couple of his comics and the were pretty decent ( nice Doug Wildey art) The Free Conic Book Day cover is by Chris Sambee looks nice.

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    1. I'm a huge fan as if you can't tell and I've followed the character in comics from Gold Key to Comico to DC to Dynamite. This series with its time travel gimmick spoke to me as I'm sure it did to other fans.

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