| Birth Name: | Douglas Samuel Wildey |
| Birth Date: | 2 May 1922 |
| Birth Place: | Yonkers, New York, U.S. |
| Death Place: | Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. |
| Pencil: | y |
| Ink: | y |
| Signature: | Doug-Wildey-signature.jpg |
| Notable Works: | Jonny Quest Outlaw Kid |
| Subcat: | American |
Douglas Samuel Wildey[1] (May 2, 1922 – October 4, 1994) was an American cartoonist and comic book artist best known for originally conceptualizing and co-creating the classic 1964 American animated television series Jonny Quest for Hanna-Barbera Productions.
Wildey was born and raised[2] in Yonkers, New York, adjacent to New York City. He did World War II military service at Naval Air Station Barbers Point in Hawaii, where he began with his artistic talent and creative animation career as a cartoonist for the base newspaper.[3] He recalled his professional start as freelancing for the magazine and comic book company Street & Smith in 1947.[4] Because comic book writer and artist credits were not routinely given during this era, the earliest confirmed Wildey works are the two signed pieces in this publisher's Top Secret #9 (June 1949): a one-page house ad and the 10-page adventure story "Queen in Jeopardy", by an unknown writer.[5]
He went on to draw primarily Western stories for Youthful Magazines comics including Buffalo Bill, Gunsmoke (unrelated to the later television series), and Indian Fighter. He also contributed to the publishers Master Comics, Story Comics, Cross Publications and possibly others, puckishly observing that he'd worked for every publisher except EC, "the good one".[6]
In 1952, Wildey moved, with his whole family—wife Ellen and oldest daughter, Debbie and —to Tucson, Arizona. Two years later, he began a regular stint at Atlas Comics, the 1950s forerunner of Marvel Comics, where he drew dozens of Western stories through 1957, primarily four- to five-page tales in such titles as Frontier Western. His art also appeared in the Atlas horror-fantasy comics Journey into Unknown Worlds, Marvel Tales, Mystery Tales, Mystic, Strange Tales, Uncanny Tales, and others.
Animation historian Ken Quattro favorably describes Wildey's most "noteworthy" Western classic style as the 19-issue Atlas Comics series Outlaw Kid, "his take on the classic Western antihero", in which Wildey had creatively illustrated a three- to four-story arc per comic book issue:
Much of this work was reprinted by Marvel from 1970 through 1974, exposing Wildey's work to a younger generation.
After an Atlas Comics retrenchment in 1957—during which the company mixed a trove of inventory stories by Wildey and many others with new material for about two to three years—Wildey freelanced on a small number of standalone anthology stories for two other publishers: Harvey Comics, in the science fiction/fantasy titles Alarming Tales #3-5 (Jan.-Sept. 1958), and Black Cat Mystic #62 (March 1958), Hi-School Romance #73 (March 1958) and Warfront #34 (Sept. 1958); and DC Comics, in Tales of the Unexpected #33 & 35 (Nov. 1958, March 1959), House of Secrets #17 (Feb.1959), My Greatest Adventure #28 & 32 (November 1958 & June 1959), and House of Mystery #89 (Aug. 1959). He also later drew the first issue of Dell Comics' TV series spin-off Dr. Kildare (a.k.a. 4 Color #1337, June 1962).
In either 1959 or 1961[7] (sources vary) he took over the art for writer Leslie Charteris' long-running New York Herald Tribune Syndicate comic strip The Saint. Some of their strips were inked by Dick Ayers as the deadlines of producing a daily and Sunday strip proved daunting. The strip ended in 1962. Adding credence to the latter date is Wildey spending part of 1960, possibly only a month, penciling his idol Milton Caniff's famed Steve Canyon comic strip[8] and trying unsuccessfully to launch his own syndicated strip.
Two such proposed strips would help provide a character name and some narrative background to Wildey's later animated television series, Jonny Quest. As he described in 1986,
Following the end of The Saint comic strip in 1962, Wildey found, through an ad in the National Cartoonists Society newsletter, what was initially a one-week television animation job in Los Angeles, California, working under artist Alex Toth on Cambria Productions' 1962 animated series Space Angel. Wildey eventually worked on the animated series for about 12 to 14 weeks, after which, he then recalled and carried on and over in 1986.