Darwyn Cooke (November 16, 1962 – May 14, 2016) was a Canadian comics artist, writer, cartoonist, and animator who worked on the comic books Catwoman, DC: The New Frontier, The Spirit and Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter. His work has been honoured with numerous Eisner, Harvey, and Joe Shuster Awards.
Early life Darwyn Cooke was born in Toronto on November 16, 1962. Cooke's father was a construction worker and later ran a union.
Cooke's interest in creating comics began after watching Batman starring Adam West. Cooke's grandmother saved some of his earliest drawings, at 5 years old, of Batman and Robin in crayon on construction paper, with Cooke keeping them after her death. He discovered comics as a child, but did not become passionate about them until he was a teenager.
Cooke's desire to be an artist crystallized at 13 years old after reading a reprint of The Spectacular Spider-Man #2 (Nov. 1968), with Cooke purchasing markers and boards the day after reading the comic and attempting to copy John Romita's artwork. The following week, Cooke purchased Detective Comics #439 (Feb./March 1974), featuring the story "Night of the Stalker," and had found his calling. Cooke also recalled tracing panels of Will Eisner's The Spirit as a teenager. He attributed the ability to develop his own style as a byproduct of limited entertainment choices, allowing him to focus on deconstructing the comics that inspired him. His father, however, did not think that comics were a good avenue for a career.
Cooke attended George Brown College, but was expelled after a year.
Career In 1985, Cooke left his family on his own for the first time in order to show his samples at DC Comics' New York City offices. The trip resulted in his first published comic book work as a professional artist in a five-page crime story in DC Comics' New Talent Showcase #19, which was coincidentally edited by "Night of the Stalker" artist Sal Amendola. Economic pressure, however, made Cooke leave comics, as he was only paid $35 per page and produced one page a week. Deciding that comics was not an economically feasible job, Cooke worked in Canada as a magazine art director, graphic and product designer for the next 15 years. He eventually established his own design studio.
Animation DC Animated Universe In the early 1990s, Cooke decided to return to comics, but found little interest for his work at the major publishers. Eventually, he was hired by Warner Bros. Animation after replying to an ad for storyboard artists in The Comics Journal placed by animator Bruce Timm, with Cooke shocked that there were positions available. His successful pitch included 14 pages that eventually would be published in 2000 as Batman: Ego.
Originally freelancing from Toronto, Cooke met his animation colleagues at San Diego Comic-Con and was approached about moving to Los Angeles full-time. Despite no desire to live in Los Angeles, Cooke moved there to take advantage of "an opportunity to be a part of something that was never going to come around again this way," the ability to associate with creators such as Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, Alan Burnett, and Eric Radomski. Cooke worked as a storyboard artist for four episodes of The New Batman Adventures as well as a handful of episodes of Superman: The Animated Series.
In 1999, he designed and animated the opening sequence for Batman Beyond. In contrast to most cartoon openings—which adapt music to a finalized group of shots—Batman Beyond's visuals were specifically cut to suit the music, after Cooke's successful pitch of the concept to Bruce Timm. Surprisingly, Cooke employed his personal Macintosh computer in his spare bedroom and Adobe After Effects for most of the animation, as opposed to Warner Bros.' resources. According to Cooke, the Batman Beyond team created a strong show in light of what he considered "kind of a disheartening mandate from the network," which wanted a show about the Batman of the future. He believed the WB Network ultimately disliked the show's level of violence and prematurely ended the show once it could be syndicated. Cooke then worked as a director for Sony Animation's Men in Black: The Series for a year.
In April 2014, Cooke released a Batman Beyond animated short celebrating the 75th anniversary of Batman.
Justice League: The New Frontier In July 2006, it was announced that Warner Bros. Animation and DC Comics would release a series of direct-to-DVD DC Universe Animated Original Movies based on important DC comic books. Due to the adamance of DC's then-Senior Vice-president of Creative Affairs Gregory Noveck, the second film to be adapted was Cooke's DC: The New Frontier, produced by Bruce Timm.
Due to Cooke's obligations on The Spirit, Stan Berkowitz wrote the film, while Cooke storyboarded ten percent of the film, rewrote and polished dialogue, as well as provided art direction and most of the character design. Cooke praised both Berkowitz and Timm for their ability to preserve many important character moments within the necessary shortening of the story to accommodate the film's runtime, shifting the movie's focus specifically to the Justice League characters. During the scripting process, Cooke intervened to preserve both Wonder Woman and Lois Lane's places in the film, which had originally been eliminated due to time constraints. Without them, Cooke joked that "We might as well just rename this 'White Guys in the '50s,' because everything else is gone," describing the women as "the heart of the story."
Cooke also admitted fearing for the film's outcome until he learned that his former Warner colleague David Bullock would be directing it, praising Bullock as "probably the only person in the world I would have picked ahead of myself to direct it." He also credited his strong previous relationships at Warner Bros. with his comfort on the project.
DC Comics In the late 1990s, DC Comics art director Mark Chiarello discovered Cooke's years-old proposal for a Batman story while throwing out old pitches, and hired Cooke for what became the 2000 graphic novel Batman: Ego, marking Cooke's permanent move from animation to comics at 37 years old. Described by Cooke as "What if Batman and Bruce Wayne were able to sit down and talk about what it is they do?", the internal dialogue of Batman: Ego between Bruce Wayne and Batman was inspired by the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre.
Catwoman In 2001, Cooke and writer Ed Brubaker revamped the Catwoman character. They started with a four-issue serial "Trail of the Catwoman" in Detective Comics #759–762 in which private detective Slam Bradley attempts to investigate the death of Selina Kyle (a.k.a. Catwoman). According to Cooke, he and Brubaker bonded over the re-introduction of Bradley, who first appeared in 1937's Detective Comics #1 and pre-dated the super-hero era of comics. The story led into a new Catwoman title in late 2001 by Brubaker and Cooke, in which the character's costume, supporting cast, and modus operandi were all redesigned and redeveloped. Cooke would stay on the series until issue #4. In 2002, he would write and draw the Selina's Big Score prequel which detailed what had happened to the character directly before her new series.Manning "2000s" in Dougall, p. 262: "Darwyn Cooke was both writer and artist of this hardcover graphic novel...A fast-paced heist set immediately before Selina's second ongoing series, this tale explained how Selina had enough money to embark on a new life as a crime fighter." Cooke regarded Selina's Big Score as the "single thing I did that I liked the most." While developing DC: The New Frontier, Cooke also drew a short Catwoman back-up story within 2002's Just Imagine Stan Lee with Chris Bachalo creating Catwoman. An untold story concept Cooke held onto involved the return and revenge of Catwoman's betrayed ex-lover Stark in a similar manner to the lead character of the film Point Blank.
Cooke was the first-ever signer for CGC's Signature Series, a witness-based authentication system proposed by Paradise Comics owner Peter Dixon where on-site representatives visually verified signings and sketches as an additional form of certification. For Paradise Comics' Toronto event in November 2001, Cooke autographed 80 copies of Catwoman #1 (2001), which he had illustrated.
DC: The New Frontier
Cooke's next project was 2004's DC: The New Frontier, a six-issue miniseries which bridged the gap between the end of the golden and the start of the silver age of comic books in the DC Universe. Cooke began brainstorming The New Frontier after completing Batman: Ego and being steered by Mark Chiarello to do a Justice League story. Preferring not to write a story tied to modern continuity or with short-term consequences, Cooke quickly realized he had little interest in writing about the Justice League unless the focus was on "who they were before they became the Justice League."
The story, set in the 1950s, featured dozens of super-heroes and drew inspiration from the period's comic books and movies as well as Tom Wolfe's non-fiction account of the start of the U.S. space program The Right Stuff and the novels of James Ellroy due to Ellroy's skill in weaving fictional characters into real history. The major DC characters are introduced in The New Frontier in the same order that DC originally published them, even down to the correct month and year in the story's timeline. For the book's visual style, Cooke was inspired by 1950s advertising along with the works of Marvel Comics' Jack Kirby and Hanna-Barbera's Alex Toth.
As Cooke formulated The New Frontier, DC's editorial board pushed major changes from Cooke's original concept including accommodations for DC Comics' present-day continuity; the mandated changes were undone by Paul Levitz, who allowed Cooke to preserve his original intent both by setting the story out of continuity as well as offering Cooke an advance payment on his work. Cooke subsequently worked on Catwoman and Selina's Big Score before returning to work on The New Frontier.
Cooke employed non-linear narrative that increasingly tied together toward the conclusion, likening the approach to films like Memento, Pulp Fiction, and The Limey.
Cooke placed a significant focus on Green Lantern Hal Jordan, intending to illustrate "why the character was cool" in light of the character's dramatic changes in the 1994 "Emerald Twilight" story arc, which he regarded as a wholly out-of-place gimmick for Jordan to merely boost sales. To be accurate regarding Jordan's role as a United States Air Force pilot, Cooke spoke with two fighter pilots as well as fellow comic writer and artist Mike Allred, who had previously been stationed in Germany while serving in the Air Force.
While clarifying that he did not approve of John F. Kennedy's personal flaws, Cooke cited Kennedy's 1960 "New Frontier" speech—which both inspired the title and concluded the book—as "the first time [the promise of modern America] was ever properly articulated."
For 2006's collected Absolute Edition of the series, Cooke proposed including up to 48 additional pages, later negotiated down to 13 in order to hit a 400-page page count. The additional material provided more backstory for the Flash and J'onn J'onnz, as well as the Suicide Squad on Dinosaur Island. Cooke admitted surprise at this deluxe edition being released so soon after the original release due to retailer demand, citing a three-year wait for an Absolute Edition of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
In a 2014 interview, New Frontier co-editor Chiarello named the book as the work he was the most proud of his involvement in, calling it "as pure a comic-reading experience as any comic that's ever been published."
Other projects