1. Darwyn Cooke 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.
43 Facts About Darwyn Cooke
1. 2.
Darwyn Cooke's work has been honoured with numerous Eisner, Harvey, and Joe Shuster Awards.
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Darwyn Cooke was born in Toronto on November 16,1962.
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Darwyn Cooke's grandmother saved some of his earliest drawings, at 5 years old, of Batman and Robin in crayon on construction paper, with Darwyn Cooke keeping them after her death.
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Darwyn Cooke discovered comics as a child, but did not become passionate about them until he was a teenager.
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Darwyn Cooke recalled tracing panels of Will Eisner's The Spirit as a teenager.
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Darwyn Cooke 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.
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Darwyn Cooke's father did not think that comics were a good avenue for a career.
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Darwyn Cooke attended George Brown College, but was expelled after a year.
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In 1985, Darwyn Cooke left his family on his own for the first time in order to show his samples at DC Comics' New York City offices.
11.
Economic pressure made Darwyn Cooke leave comics, as he was only paid $35 per page and produced one page a week.
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Animation after replying to an ad for storyboard artists in The Comics Journal placed by animator Bruce Timm, with Darwyn Cooke shocked that there were positions available.
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Originally freelancing from Toronto, Darwyn Cooke met his animation colleagues at San Diego Comic-Con and was approached about moving to Los Angeles full-time.
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Darwyn 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.
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Surprisingly, Darwyn Cooke employed his personal Macintosh computer in his spare bedroom and Adobe After Effects for most of the animation, as opposed to Warner Bros.
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Darwyn Cooke believed the WB Network ultimately disliked the show's level of violence and prematurely ended the show once it could be syndicated.
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Darwyn Cooke then worked as a director for Sony Animation's Men in Black: The Series for a year.
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Darwyn 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.
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An untold story concept Darwyn 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.
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Darwyn Cooke began brainstorming The New Frontier after completing Batman: Ego and being steered by Mark Chiarello to do a Justice League story.
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Darwyn Cooke subsequently worked on Catwoman and Selina's Big Score before returning to work on The New Frontier.
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Darwyn Cooke employed non-linear narrative that increasingly tied together toward the conclusion, likening the approach to films like Memento, Pulp Fiction, and The Limey.
23.
Darwyn 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.
24.
For 2006's collected Absolute Edition of the series, Darwyn Cooke proposed including up to 48 additional pages, later negotiated down to 13 in order to hit a 400-page page count.
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Darwyn 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.
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In 2004, Darwyn Cooke contributed to DC's artist-centric anthology project Solo.
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Darwyn Cooke's issue featured several different stories in different styles with a framing sequence featuring Slam Bradley, and was originally intended by Cooke to be his final mainstream comic before other palatable DC projects pulled him back.
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Darwyn Cooke wrote the first six-issue story arc of the Superman monthly series Superman Confidential, which debuted on November 1,2006, and featured stories set in Superman's early career.
29.
In June 2007, Darwyn Cooke was awarded the Joe Shuster Award for "Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Writer" for Superman Confidential.
30.
In 2008, Darwyn Cooke collaborated with Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray on an issue of Jonah Hex out of a desire to work with the pair, write a Western story, as well as craft a cliche-breaking tale for Hex set within Canada.
31.
Darwyn Cooke playfully made fun of American conventional wisdom that Canadian weather was always a blizzard, but accepted the premise as a central plot element.
32.
Darwyn Cooke did not view Watchmen as "the Holy Grail" of comics, nor did he feel concerned about original Watchmen author Alan Moore's opinion on the Before Watchmen series, but he did initially turn down the project for two years out of concern that his work would not measure up either to the original book or its reputation within the comics industry.
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Vertigo editor Shelly Bond encouraged Darwyn Cooke to produce a collaborative work.
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Darwyn Cooke proposed Gilbert Hernandez as the writer, believing Hernandez would not be interested.
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Darwyn Cooke later had a falling out with Marvel and then-Senior Editor Axel Alonso after Marvel solicited and praised his business plan for the Marvel Adventures children's line, yet subsequently passed it onto other creators without the company's communication or his involvement.
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The second, The Outfit, was released in October 2010, The Score was released in July 2012, and Slayground was published in December 2013, with Darwyn Cooke handling the entire art direction and physical design.
37.
In January 2015, Image Comics announced a three-part fully creator-owned project by Darwyn Cooke entitled Revengeance, originally intended to launch June 2015.
38.
Darwyn Cooke initially pitched the art duties to Tim Sale, but decided to take them up himself after an unsuccessful five-year wait for Sale's availability.
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Darwyn Cooke married Marsha Stagg in Las Vegas, Nevada in November 2012 and lived in western Florida.
40.
Comic creators such as Dan DiDio, Brian Michael Bendis, Gail Simone, Jimmy Palmiotti, Ed Brubaker, and Mark Waid expressed condolences, reminisced on working with Darwyn Cooke, and made recommendations of Darwyn Cooke's works to fans.
41.
Darwyn Cooke acknowledged himself as difficult to work with, a trait that was ultimately recognized as beneficial by his comic book industry peers.
42.
Darwyn Cooke won thirteen Eisner Awards, eight Harvey Awards, and five Joe Shuster Awards for works produced for DC Comics and IDW Publishing, primarily for DC: The New Frontier and Richard Stark's Parker.
43.
However, upon winning his first Eisner Award in 2005 for DC: The New Frontier, Darwyn Cooke did feel gratification for his pursuit of comics as a career and understood that he was genuinely on the right path.