Doug Wildey's Rio - The Complete Saga [2012] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Doug Wildey's Rio - The Complete Saga [2012]

Doug Wildey was best known for his animation work, in particular the creation of the 1964 show JONNY QUEST. He had a few stints in comics, including a lot of well-regarded western stories published by Marvel in the 1950s. He had a few minor returns to comics, the major one in later years being the adventures of Rio, a wandering gun-for-hire in the old west.  First published by Eclipse in their ECLIPSE MONTHLY anthology, it would later be published by Comico, Marvel and Dark Horse. At the time of his 1994 death Wildey had an unpublished book featured the character completed and another one in progress.

This large hardcover collection from IDW brings in everything available from Wildey's work, almost 300 pages, including those two unpublished books, with all but ten pages photographed from Wildey's original artwork.  The first three stories (from ECLIPSE MONTHLY) were done with traditional comic book colours, so are black and white here (except for the pages that had to be sourced from printed comics). After that Wildey did fully painted artwork, so the stories are full colour as published, but without some of the production clean-up. Pretty much like one of the publisher's "Artist's Edition" line, except not the full size of the original art.

I was a big fan of Wildey's RIO back when I encountered it getting back issues of ECLIPSE MONTHLY, where it was definitely the highlight, and was lucky enough to still be able to find the subsequent books. It was one of the best realized western comics I've ever read, with lush realistic rendering and complex stories with a lot of plot twists and humour. I was thrilled to discover two decades later that there were two more stories to read, and made the uncharacteristic decision to spring for an oversized hardcover brand new, figuring a softcover was unlikely (I lost that bet, a smaller softcover came out in 2014, but I'm still glad I got this one).

The original stories are better than ever in this format. The early ones look sharp without the colour. In fact, Wildey does enough shading and tone work that it's hard to believe he drew it for colour (I'll have to check if it was announced for the black and white ECLIPE MAGAZINE before that was converted to the colour ECLIPSE MONTHLY).  The painted stories look as good as ever.

The completed unpublished story is "Red Dust In Tombstone", featuring some of the famous residents of that town, might be my favourite Rio story.  Lots of nice touches in it.

"Reprisal" is the unfinished story, although the level of unfinished varies from page to page, sometimes wildly within panels of the same page. Almost half the pages are pretty much done, while a few are in layouts, with penciled in dialogue and a few pages more tightly rendered. You can still read the whole thing, and it's another great story, part of me wishes he was able to get it done while another part is glad to have it in this form, just to see how he worked.