For those of you who don’t know, he’s a talented, innovative writer/artist and former BATMAN:THE ANIMATED SERIES storyboard artist who recently completed the best mini-series of this young decade, DC: The New Frontier.
Here’a few intriguing snippets.
[The Reason Marvel and DC don’t try and regain the mass market]…
“Comic creators, editors and publishers would actually have to do their jobs — sell populist fare by the truckload that appealed to the mass market… The precious superhero would have to share the stage with other more relevant genres like Romance, Crime, Horror, Humour and the like. Dicks like Kevin Smith would have to save their juvenile, oral-sex innuendo for something other than a mainstream DC comic.”
[On Hal Jordan, Green Lantern]
“…my personal attachment to Green Lantern and Hal, coupled with the Mercury and Apollo Space programs. These were the stuff of my childhood imagination…— Astronauts…good fuck, they strapped in on top of huge jerry-rigged tubes of unstable fuel and fired themselves toward the heavens!”
[On why THE ULTIMATES scribe, Mark Millar, is a creative fuckwit]
“I put it this way: If you change the core character — not the costume, or color, or powers — if you change the core character, then you are denigrating something you didn’t create.”
[On his take on Batman]
“I had decided we’d only see Batman on the case he was working. No moaning in the cave, no Alfred, no 13 teenagers clogging the cave in pornstar spandex. Just Batman, the cops, the city and the psychos.”
I read this interview a few days ago, and I agree, Darwyn Cooke is one of the most creative and exciting people working in comics. He really GETS it, and I love the fact that he speaks his mind and isn’t afraid to call things like he sees them. I believe in another interview, Cooke called Frank Miller a “thief” for taking a $1,000,000 paycheck from DC and turning in some senseless doodles he did while drunk (referring to The Dark Knight Strikes Again, the much-hyped and horribly-disappointing sequel to Miller’s genre-defining '80s masterpiece, The Dark Knight Returns). I’d love to hear Kevin Smith respond to Cooke calling him a “dick” (rightfully so, IMO). Comics need more beefs like the hip-hop industry! I think another time, Cooke made an offhand comment on a message board (possibly MillarWorld) that if creators keep upping the perverse sexual and violent content in comics, everyone will expect it every time and get desensitized. He drew a vivid parallel to people who can only “get off” watching bukkake gangbang pornos, and can no longer appreciate just seeing a beautiful woman in an everyday situation. Normally I’m all for making comics for “mature readers” and leaving the silliness of the Silver Age behind, but I don’t want the sense of wonder abandoned in favor of more and more shock value. (coughmillarcough!)
And Askia speaks true and shows his fine taste once again: Cooke’s New Frontier miniseries was the greatest story I’ve read in a long time, superhero-related or otherwise. His Catwoman work was damn fine too. I can’t wait for his issue of DC Solo, and anything else he has in store.
I read that interview the other day and also liked it quite a bit. That said, although I do agree with almost everything Cooke said (bashing Kevin Smith earns him ten million goodness points) and like his work a lot, he is kind of an asshole, which I have very little tolerance for cough Alex Ross cough).
I also disagree with his assessment of The Ultimates (which I don’t even like). I think that drastically changing a character is fine when you make it perfectly clear that that’s what you’re doing, you start from scratch, and the reguilar version of the character is still around for people to enjoy. And that’s just what the Ultimate Universe does. I also disagree that changing a character is necessarily denigrating it.
