The Beat chatted with Casey about the upcoming quest.
DEANNA DESTITO: What attracted you to this project?
JOE CASEY: Well, aside from Dynamite backing the Brink’s truck up to my house, I could see the connections between the two concepts, in their basic, creative construction. That lent itself to a certain kind of crossover, so I figured I might as well do it before someone else beat me to it. As far as I know, it’s never been done before. Not like this.
DESTITO: Were you a fan of Space Ghost and Jonny Quest?
CASEY: Sure, in so far as they both sprung from the minds of Doug Wildey and Alex Toth. Those guys are comic book royalty so the fact that they were doing these animated series was, historically, a big deal. I wasn’t even born when those shows premiered. I saw them in reruns many years afterwards. But they were the closest that animation got to the true aesthetic of comic book art. If you were a comic book fan, as I was from an early age, you recognized that from the minute you saw them on your TV screen.
DESTITO: How does this fit in with Dynamite’s other Space Ghost series, if at all?
CASEY: I guess you could consider it an Event book. It’s not a traditional crossover between two ongoing titles. It’s fundamentally it’s own thing. That way, we don’t interfere with what the regular monthly Space Ghost book is doing and they don’t have to worry about what we’re doing.
DESTITO: How has it been working with this creative team?
CASEY: Sebastian Piriz and I are already in sync, a well-oiled machine from working on the first five issues of Jonny Quest. So we just rolled into this series with no problems whatsoever, firing on all thrusters. In fact, as good as Sebastian is drawing the Jonny Quest characters, his Space Ghost is the best I’ve ever seen, easily on par with Alex Toth, Steve Rude, and Alex Ross (my personal favorites at depicting the character).
DESTITO: If you could add another cosmic character to this book, who would it be and why?
CASEY: God, definitely. I mean, that’s as cosmic as it gets, right…?
DESTITO: Any teasers for fans?
CASEY: Only that we’ve come up with a story that honors both concepts equally, which isn’t always so easy to do when they come from such different milieus. But we happened to tap into something that will actually make your life better. What more could anyone ask for?
Space Quest debuts on March 12.
