Drawing a Blank

I realized the other day when this came to mind that I’d never shared it here.

A couple of years ago the idea struck around the birthday of my old friend Paul Storrie, comics writer and bon vivant, who as a fan of The Question used the handle “Quest” back in the early days of Internet boards and chat rooms. Where he shortened the name of Vic Sage’s alter ego for his purposes, I expanded Jonny Quest’s to imagine the mashup Jonny Question.

There’s no… uh, doubt that the piece is on the obscure side, but it wouldn’t get out of my head and I’m happy enough with the result. I built it around the cover of 1968’s World of Wheels #21 — you can view the source, penciled and inked by Jack Keller, at the Grand Comics Database — for reasons that honestly escape me now. My first thought was to use the one-shot Mysterious Suspense from that same year, published as Charlton was folding its Action Heroes line (including Steve Ditko’s eerily masked, plainclothed avenger, introduced not long before in the pages of Blue Beetle); Dr. Benton Quest was going to stand in as the classic version of the character with the cover touting Jonny as his successor-in-training under the blurb “Raising the Question”. I grabbed Jonny, Hadji, Bandit, and the logo from Hanna-Barbera model sheets and promo art done by creator Doug Wildey to bastardize.

For those who for whatever reason might only know The Question’s original incarnation rather than his numerous later appearances over the decades at DC, I’ll mention that Nanda Parbat is a hidden city introduced in the Deadman feature that later figured into The Question’s history in his adoptive universe.

I added the damp stains and kept the cover off-register for verisimilitude, even though I’m second-guessing that decision now, and I belatedly fixed the muddy lettering after posting it on Tumblr.


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