JON AND TOM

When we look for love--or even friendship--we tend to look for the one with whom we have the most in common.  Which makes perfect sense; compatibility is a highly desirable thing.  But such are the curious twists of human nature that sometimes what pleases and charms us most in others is the thing that we are not, as witness the most unlikely lovers who make the most perfect sense:  Jon Wilde, nicknamed Wild Jon, and Tom Tierney.

Consider the tale of Tom.  His father, attorney Kevin Tierney, wanted a son with whom to share all the typical Dad-son things in life.  He finally got one after two daughters--but Kevin was surprised one day when he walked in at an inopportune moment on Tom and his high-school boyfriend.  Bewildered, Kevin got into his car to think and drive and ran afoul of someone who had chosen to drink and drive, which left a world of things unsaid between Tom and his father.  Bereft of his Dad and fearing that Kevin was ashamed of him, Tom embarked on a life of denying himself love, dumping every boyfriend and sabotaging every relationship out of a need to be unhappy and punish himself for what happened to Kevin.  He even went so far as to move from California to New York and enroll at the same Manhattan law school his father attended, as if to keep Kevin’s ghost with him forever.  And it’s while he’s a student in New York that Tom meets Jon.

Jon couldn’t be more different from Tom.  Jon’s father is a wealthy Englishman; his mother was the Princess of a tribe of shape-changers from an alternate Earth called Greenworld.  The son of a captain of industry and a noble werewolf, young Prince Jon is a hybrid belonging to neither of his parents’ species and is effectively the child of nature itself.  Possessing superhuman strength, senses, and reflexes, animal-like powers, and a communion with the natural world, Jon is a creature of  instinct:  intuitive, uninhibited, innocent--as “wild” as his name implies.  He recognizes Tom as his destined mate by Tom’s scent!  Tom is Jon’s 180-degree opposite.  While handsome and athletic (as the boyfriend of a gay comic book hero should be), Tom is thoughtful, circumspect, analytical, intellectual--everything that is “civilized”.  The two should not get along and should even repel each other, and yet they prove to be the perfect fit, each possessing the qualities that the other lacks.  It is under the influence of the wild and primal but sweet and innocent Jon that Tom’s carefully guarded heart finally melts and he accepts his need to love and be loved.  In the bargain Tom gets the responsibility for helping Jon’s father protect him and all his secrets from the world.  In effect, the civilized Tom takes up the cause of conserving the part of nature that is most precious to him:  the wild and innocent boy he loves.

Jon and Tom together are an old song lyric expressed as two boys in love:  “Wild thing, you make my heart sing...”

WHEN WE RETURN...

Quantum Comics Blog will be back soon with the color version of this drawing and some story notes about it.  Keep checking in!

WILD JON!

I don't know how I managed it, but somehow I actually forgot to create a new post for this week!  Well, let's make up for that straight away, shall we?


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.