Superman Through the Ages! Forum

The Superman Family! => Other Superfriends => Topic started by: Super Monkey on July 30, 2007, 07:35:47 PM



Title: Spotlight on Darwyn Cooke
Post by: Super Monkey on July 30, 2007, 07:35:47 PM
http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=11420

highlights:

“I think the word ‘adult' is often used in the most ironic fashion in this business. The material termed ‘adult' is among the most juvenile. It's adult because the boobies are big or because the guy says ‘spit' ten times. The themes are as juvenile as imaginable. However, you can do almost any subject matter you want if you present it in the right way. In ‘The Spirit,' we've beaten the tar out of him, we've melted a poor guy's head, we've got a guy in love with an animal, and this is all perfectly acceptable because of the way it is presented.”

Cooke said that the idea for “DC: The New Frontier,” a six-issue limited series published in 2003 and 2004 and set in the late 1950s, came out of DC's request that he do a Justice League story. “I'm really not a superhero guy at heart,” Cooke said. “I've always gravitated more towards characters like Batman, or Catwoman, or Slam Bradley - real people. So to take on the Justice League wasn't something that I felt naturally comfortable with. I had to find a hook for myself, to make it personal for me. I realized that when I looked at everything that DC had done, there was one thing that I was confused and disturbed by; it was the fact that it was all unrecognizable to me.

“So, I started tracing what had happened with these characters since I had stopped reading them and I can remember getting particularly disturbed by Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern's life, as DC had plotted it out through the ‘90s. That's when it occurred to me that maybe all this grim and gritty stuff is really doing more damage than good.

“I thought, is there a way to look at these characters and recast them in the light in which they were created? The more I looked, the more it became apparent that the only way to do the project was to put the characters in the time in which they were originally meant to appear.