Comic book writer and artist

Born: November 16, 1962;

Died: May 14, 2016

DARWYN Cooke, the award-winning comic book writer, artist and animator who has died at the age of 53 in Florida, will be remembered for his hugely popular retro-style storytelling which invested familiar comic book characters with a renewed dignity.

Cooke’s award-winning 2004 series New Frontier, set in the 1950s, was a refreshing reinvigoration of characters such as Wonder Woman and Green Lantern and a rejection of the comics industry’s then prevailing taste for nihilism.

“This type of book, this genre of comic has become so inbred and so nasty it’s kind of forgotten the point of its own existence,” Cooke said in an interview in The Comic Journal in 2007. “So a lot of bringing this stuff back and making it seem good is not screwing with it, just adding a little emotional depth to it.”

Cooke, who was born in Toronto, fell in love with comics as a teenager. He sold his first story to DC Comics in 1985 but did not think the business paid enough to make a career out of comics. Instead, he became the art director for a music magazine and then a fashion magazine, a job he loved. “I thought the music thing was fun, and then came the models. It was absolutely the best job I could have possibly had at the age of 25.”

However, he soon joined the animation team at Warner Brothers were he worked on Batman and Superman cartoons. His drawing style was a sleek throwback drawing on the influences of older artists such as Alex Toth. It was not what the publishing companies were looking for at the turn of the century, however, and it took him years to get established. His idea for a Batman story was found in a drawer by a new art director four and a half years after he had pitched it.

After that story, Batman Ego, was finally published he began work on a new take on the character Catwoman, with the express purpose of reinventing her after years of leering, sexist representations. New Frontier followed soon after, cementing Cooke’s reputation as a creator who loved the larger-than-life heroism of the characters and presented them in a style influenced by old-school Hollywood and old-school magazine illustrations. His work was both modern and vintage at the same time and had a Cadillac gleam to it.

Even when he dealt in darker themes, as in his adaptations of Richard Stark’s hardboiled crime novels about a con man named Parker, his pencils had a movie sheen to them. But for all the smooth creaminess of his artwork, Cooke could be an outspoken, argumentative figure not afraid of biting the hand that fed him. “The mainstream comic industry is the most poorly run business I’ve ever encountered.,” he once said.

That did not stop him working for it. His final completed work, The Twilight Children, for which he provided art for a script by Gilbert Hernandez, was published earlier this year by Vertigo, a DC imprint.

Cooke, who is survived by his wife Marsha, died at his home after suffering from lung cancer.

TEDDY JAMIESON