Before you stands the simplest, yet perhaps the most complex, of all Quantum heroes: WILD JON! He's a character who will be introduced in one of The Adventures of Lucky Vega, but there's enough to him for adventures of his own to go on forever. Wild Jon is an example of how I sometimes don't draw inspiration necessarily from comics but from media and entertainment outside of comics. The inspirations for this character actually come from the movies--in particular certain Walt Disney movies and, if you can believe it, the musical Across the Universe!
Jon actually dates back to a series of illustrations that I created, that I sold on eBay: Jungle Jon, Prince of the Wild. After I saw the movies Across the Universe and Enchanted I was so touched and moved by them that I wondered if I could capture some of the feelings that I got from them in super-hero form. Across the Universe, if you'll recall, was a musical incorporating Beatles songs, telling the story of a boy named Jude who came from Liverpool, England (natch) to find his natural father in America, and in the process found true love and the social turbulence of America in the 60s. What touched me was the purity and simplicity of Jude's spirit. All he really wanted was love. He wasn't a screwed-up, neurotic character; he was a boy with very pure motives. No one has greater trouble in this world than people with pure motives, a fact well illustrated in the story of young Jude. (And with great music to boot!)
Enchanted, the long overdue self-parody of the Walt Disney company, was another story of a character with pure motives, and one that shrewdly tore down and rebuilt everything that people have ever loved about Disney movies. It was also one of the very essence of Disney-style romance, and I especially admired how they made Manhattan seem like a magical storybook kingdom. I tried to take that feeling on board for my own creation, as well as using elements of other Disney flicks such as the Disney Tarzan (obviously) and Bambi. All of that went into the mix of creating Wild Jon.
Our young hero, Jon Wilde, is more than he appears to be. He is in fact the Prince of a race of human/animal shape-changers from an alternate, perhaps future, Earth that is modeled after those shows you may have seen on cable TV that imagine what Earth would be like if all the humans disappeared. His father is a wealthy Englishman who traveled to that world by means I won't reveal (because it's one of my cleverest ideas!) and became the consort of a wolf/human Princess, giving her a son, Prince Jon. Unlike the rest of his tribe, Jon is not a shape-changer, but he possesses a unity with the natural world, a range of animal-like powers, and the ability to befriend and command all beasts. Through other twists I won't tell you (which include the death of Jon's mother in a twist inspired by Bambi), Jon's father brings him to this world and raises him in what the narration will call "the enchanted kingdom of Manhattan," where he grows up to be the wild but princely boy you see here. (I imagine the whole thing being narrated in the style of an ongoing bedtime story, complete with "Once upon a time...") Jon's one true love, whom he recognizes by scent alone, is Tom Tierney, a law student who represents everything that Jon is not: rational, intellectual, analytical, methodical, orderly. Tom and the animal-like, instinctive, emotional, spontaneous, wild Jon are total opposites, but theirs is a love of two individuals who complete each other by being what the other lacks. And basically, there is a purity and innocence of spirit about Jon that the world cannot touch no matter what it does, which melts Tom's skeptical, clinical heart.
There's a lot more to the stories of Wild Jon: the Museum that his father builds in Manhattan with a penthouse at the top where Jon lives; the evil, jealous Queen Cynbar of the world where Jon comes from, who can become a terrifying harpy; her enforcer, Shaag, who can morph into a murderous Sasquatch Bigfoot with immense strength; the means of travel between the two worlds that I'm still not going to tell you... I'm still working out a lot of it, but the saga of Wild Jon will be one of the most fascinating parts of Quantum Comics.
Yeah, you can never have enough naked or semi-naked hot well-toned bodies. "Go on forever"-- is that like "going on all night"?
ReplyDeleteI've done 2 jungle character over the years, I guess everyone should do one at some point. (That sounds like a double-entendre but wasn't meant to be... heh.)