Johnny Quest #3 // Review
Johnny and Jonathan, our dealing with a mixup in time. But there’s a lot of other things at work that are very mysterious that have to do with other concerns. An old enemy. New conflict somewhere on the edge of the future. That is our present. All of this and more is explored in Johnny Quest #3. Writer Joe Casey and artist Sebastián Píriz continue an update on the classic, old cartoon from the 60s in a way that continues to develop new angles. It’s a fun experiment that also works really well as a straight ahead story.
Johnny and Haji are on their own. They really shouldn’t have gone off on their own like that. But they did. And now they’re being attacked. There’s somebody who looks a lot like Jade but it’s actually Jasmine. Someone entirely different. She might just save their lives as people who look like ninjas are certainly attacking. Things are very complicated. And they continue to be very difficult for everyone involved. All three of them might be captured. All three of them might find out that there’s someone at the heart of this who is very familiar to all of them
While it’s cool to have a situation where Johnny meets up with his future self, in the present, it would have been a lot more interesting to see the two of them work together. Or the two of him working together on some thing. Instead, it’s a more traditional action story that just happens to be placed in a present, which is their future. Casey manages a fun play on the mythology of the series that never quite fits together with everything else that needs to happen. it’s fun, but and it’s remarkably well executed. It would just be nice to see more of a play with the past, and the future in the pages of the series
Píriz’s artwork physically move the action across the page with great force. It can be very difficult to get true sense of movement in combat but the artist is a really good job of that. And there’s also a sense of the action being very well rooted in Japan. This can be difficult to do without making a big production of the location. It is very casually different. There’s a sense of immensity about the world as the hero and his ensemble moves through the series. So it’s very cool to see that happen. Above all, the drama and the mystery are maintain variety of different levels in the visual.
Theoretically, there could be quite a lot of exploration here. And it’s entirely possible that this series could just move on with Jonathan quest as the main character. Or maybe it could be a combination of the two. It would be interesting. There’s a lot of different directions that they could go in. But for right now there certainly going in the direction where they’re playing with the tradition of the series and just making it a bit and bringing it into bed now.
