Animation. Cooke served as a storyboard artist on both Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series, and later animated the title sequence for Batman Beyond.
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“I always felt a little intimidated by him because he is someone whose work I would have really, really admired even if I didn’t know him personally”, Howlett said in an interview Saturday. He had been moved to palliative care the day before, according to an earlier post.
That became one of the most memorable decisions of my comics-reading life thus far.
“The New Frontier” was based on a DC Comics miniseries of the same name, and one of the first things I noticed was that the film’s producers had chose to use Cooke’s exact art style for the animated movie – a too-infrequent faithfulness in animated comic-book adaptations. The New Frontier was a ground breaking book and earned Cooke Eisner Awards for Best Limited Series, Best Colouring and Best Publication Design.
The family of Cooke, who has lived in Nova Scotia for the past 10 years, told CBC News the artist died at his second home in Florida early Saturday after battling an aggressive form of cancer.
His breakthrough work was 2004’s DC: The New Frontier, a reimagining of DC’s Justice League and related characters set during the 1950s/60s era in which they were created.
Actor Mark Hamill of “Star Wars” remembered Cooke for his exuberance and “effortless stylishness”.
Eventually, Cooke was put together by DC with writer Ed Brubaker, with the two tackling a revamp of the Batman character Catwoman.
A year later, Darwyn Cooke was one of the showcase artists featured in an issue of DC’s Solo, a series that put the spotlight on one artist each issue and gave them nearly complete free reign. His most recent work was illustrating The Twilight Children for DC’s Vertigo imprint. And despite there not being a whole lot of evidence of Darwyn Cooke being a fan of that show (he worked on a cover of one issue of the comic) he got the feel and look stunningly correct. In 2009, Cooke partnered with IDW Publishing to adapt a few of the Parker crime novels by Richard Stark (a.k.a. Donald E. Westlake). Co-Publisher Dan DiDio had this to say about Cooke’s life. Cooke wrote the Silk Spectre series alongside Amanda Conner on art, and wrote and drew the Minutemen mini, which was hailed as the standout of the line.
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In a time when comic artists went for shock value with dark images of bother villains and heroes, Darwyn Cooke had a unique vision of what the DC Universe should be.
