Darwyn Cooke (1962–2016)

What to say about Darwyn Cooke?

He's dead, and that is awful. That's the first thing, the reason I'm writing this. He was only fifty-four. Cancer. I can't imagine what his family and friends are going through. My heart aches for them.

For the rest of us, well, it's a version of that pain many of us felt recently when Prince died. The grief that can't help but be awkward because it's simultaneously real and attenuated--it's genuine grief felt about a person we knew only through their work. Yet . . . I have no qualms about calling it actual grief. We develop a relationship with the people who make the art we love, the art that gives our world so much of its depth and richness. The "they" whom we love may ultimately bear only a passing resemblance to the person grieved by friends and family, but if the art is genuine, there's nonetheless a reality there: the self bleeds through; the artist, if we take engage with them seriously, takes on a form and role not wholly dissimilar to that of once-close friends who are now distant, encountered mostly in virtual spaces. I have no trouble saying that I love, actually love, Willie Nelson, Aretha Franklin, Rex Stout, Barbara Pym, Henry James, Anthony Powell, and on and on. I wouldn't have wanted to spend a country weekend with Tolstoy, let alone be married to him, but lord, I love that man despite. It's real, and it is a powerful force in shaping the world--so much of it constructed, moment to moment, by my own reflections on it--in which I live and act every day. Darwyn Cooke made my life better, and I'm my grief that he won't be able to keep making beautiful, creative art is genuine.



I never met Darwyn Cooke. We exchanged e-mails a couple of times in the course of his work illustrating and designing the cover of my dreams for The Getaway Car. But mostly I knew him as any fan did: through his wonderful comics art and stories. Let's start with Parker.



In the fifty-plus years since Donald Westlake sat down at the typewriter and discovered Richard Stark's voice, there's been no one who translated Parker into a visual medium as effectively and faithfully as Cooke. His clean-lined midcentury style, redolent of both the silver age and, in its backgrounds, architecture, and use of watercolors, midcentury magazine illustration, put Parker squarely in his era. And Cooke's creativity in storytelling and narrative technique, which saw him combine panel-to-panel comics, fake magazine stories, cartoony comic strips, and more, enabled him to turn Stark's brilliantly clockwork plots into suspenseful pages.



At the same time, he captured an aspect of the Parker novels that is often overlooked: their humor. Richard Stark was Westlake's hardboiled voice, but like a recidivist criminal, he wasn't a man who could ever go wholly straight. I love these two panels from The Score on that front--we've all wanted to say this to Grofield at one point or another.





The Parker adaptations were wonderful. But they're not even Cooke's greatest achievement. I've been reading comics off and on for thirty years. I have a deep and abiding love for superheroes, and a considered awareness of what they can be at their best--and of what we all too often find ourselves accepting as good enough, through some mix of nostalgia and appreciation of comfort food. I'm the twelve-year-old boy who wore out issues of The Amazing Spider-Man with re-reading and can still access reverberations of those feelings, yet knows, to quote (let's imagine) Ben Grimm, that most of it ain't Proust.



The New Frontier, a six-issue miniseries written and drawn by Cooke and published by DC in 2004, is better than that. It's the best comic I've ever read. Hands down. In it, Cooke re-tells the story of DC's Silver Age--of the characters and the moment that people still think of when they hear "comic book" or "superhero," the birth of the Justice League and team-ups between Batman and Robin and Superman, Flash and Wonder Woman and Green Lantern and all.



Cooke does so in a visual style that honors, without wholly aping, the style of the 1950s comics he's drawing on--and setting it within the larger visual and design sensibility of the period. An attentive reader of The New Frontier stares at least as much at furniture and signage as at super-sculpted physiques.



This was a beautiful era visually, among the cherished remnants of which we live today, and Cooke gives us that almost casually throughout the series. But that's only part of his period aim. His larger point was to put these stories themselves, and the characters who powered them, into the actual context of their era.


Written out that way, it sounds like a terrible idea, a recipe for tendentious tales of nuclear fears and the Red Scare. In Cooke's hands, it becomes something different, something that feels honest and organic. Re-reading it now, it calls to mind the later seasons of Mad Men, when the writers had gotten past the first season's tendency to superciliously gawp at history and instead were telling actual stories of a time now lost--which enabled them to generate the only nostalgia that's not toxic: an honest, clear-eyed nostalgia, one that acknowledges that every passing of time entails loss, no matter how it's balanced by gains.



That tug, the pull of the imperfect past, is powerful in The New Frontier. We feel the energy, hope, and technocratic drive of postwar America, even as we acknowledge its darker side.



At the same time, Cooke avoided two major contemporary pitfalls, darkness and irony. His Silver Age is beset by actual problems, the Cold War being the source of most of them. But the tone of the comic is light and hopeful: these are superheroes, people who can do things we can only imagine--and the whole point of imagining them in the first place is to give us people to look up to, to trust in, to thrill to. Cooke lets them be heroes. And he also lets the relative simplicity of the era remain untroubled. Look at this full page, where Robin meets Batman for the first time.



That's powerful earnestness, and Cooke is letting it stand. Throughout the series, he shows us the 1950s inflected by our own time-shifted understanding, but at the same time he lets the era be itself, with nearly all its relative innocence. These are that rare thing: comics that adults and kids can enjoy alike. It's a genuinely thrilling, exhilarating series.



Nearly seventy years after the creation of Superman, sixty-five since Batman, and half a century after the creation of the Justice League, who would have thought there would be anything new to say? There will always be new adventures, of course; that's the beauty of mythological-style characters and serial narrative. But who could have imagined that there would be anything to say, especially looking backwards, that feels as fundamental as what Cooke created in re-telling the story of these heroes? With due deference to the giants, not just from DC but from Marvel and indies, on whose shoulders it was built, The New Frontier is the greatest comics series ever written.

Rest in peace, Darwyn Cooke. You made something truly special, and we'll never forget it.

ITEMS!, or, just barely managing to keep Donald Westlake Week going!

Only time for a couple of quick notes today. Maybe if I dress them up with snazzy ITEM! tags, they'll seem more substantial?

ITEM! Almost Darwyn Cooke's blog, which has been soliciting readers' visual interpretations of Parker to celebrate the release of Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of The Hunter, has gathered all the submissions in a gallery. If you're a Parker fan, you should definitely go check it out; there are a lot of great ones to choose from, but my favorite is this re-imagining of the original pulp paperback of The Hunter.

ITEM! I wrote a post about Westlake for the blog of my employer, the University of Chicago Press, on Friday. There's not much there I haven't covered here in recent days--though I do call Dortmunder a schlimazel--but if you want to see me in straight-up shilling mode, or if you're a Levi Stahl completist {which even rocketlass knows better than to be}, head on over there and check it out.

ITEM! At the risk of derailing Donald Westlake Week, I have to point out Ed Park's essay from this Sunday's New York Times Book Review on the Invisble Library. The strictures imposed by the Times prevented him from mentioning our actual Invisible Library or the recent exhibit by INK Collective in London, but that didn't keep him from writing a great essay. He also talked about the concept on the NYTBR's podcast this week.

Oh, and Westlake is in the collections of the Invisible Library, thanks to Charles Ardai, who included a ghost-written Westlake novel in his Fifty-to-One. So there, we're right back on track!

Darwyn Cooke takes on Parker, as Donald Westlake Week continues!

{Parker, as drawn by Darwyn Cooke.}

I think I have to just give in: this week has unexpectedly become Donald Westlake—and thus Richard Stark—week. {There are worse weeks in which to find oneself.} Right after posting Tuesday’s news about the lost Westlake novel that Hard Case Crime is going to publish next spring, I picked up the new graphic adaptation of the first Parker novel, The Hunter, by comics artist Darwyn Cooke--a book that, as a fan of The New Frontier, Cooke’s beautiful and thoughtful reimagining of the DC Universe’s Silver Age and the origin of the Justice League, I’ve been looking forward to for nearly a year.



With that series, Cooke showed that his style is perfectly suited to depict late 1950s-early 1960s America—the sleek, futuristic design; the skinny ties and tight skirts; the cocktails and hi-fis and wood paneling. But those of us who followed his work on Catwoman know that he also has a feeling for noir, taking pleasure in the accommodating shadows and odd angles that let a touch of Depression-and-wartime darkness leach into the shiny new world of jet-setters and playboys.

His Hunter doesn’t disappoint. Through page after page, Cooke translates Stark’s terse prose into imagery that, while never distracting from the action that is the heart of Stark's book, immerses the reader in a sort of visual tour of the details of 1962 New York City. The opening spread of the Manhattan skyline is marvelous, while the first page of the book, which depicts Parker crossing the George Washington Bridge, is a brilliant piece of visual storytelling--and if you're familiar with the illustration style of the period, that page will give you chills: it doesn't so much feel like Cooke has imitated the old techniques and approaches as that he's imbibed them, or even transported us back to when they were new, stylish, and full of endless promise.

Cooke’s Parker, meanwhile, moves through these panels with all the ruthlessness and danger that he displays in Stark's novels. If anything, his power and relentlessness are even more clear in this adaptation than in the original, visible in the reactions of bystanders, the quivering of his enemies, the efficiency and speed of his movements. If you're a Parker fan, you really don't want to miss this. A second volume--possibly interweaving the second and third novels--is scheduled for next summer, and I'm hoping beyond hope that Cooke sticks with this project at least long enough to get to the wild settings and grim determination of Slayground.

Meanwhile, this month also sees the publication of the next three Parker novels in the reprint series that my employer, the University of Chicago Press, embarked on last year: The Handle, The Seventh, and The Rare Coin Score--which introduces Claire--should be hitting the shelves of your local bookstore any minute now. They've even got a great introduction by I've Been Reading Lately favorite Luc Sante!

I recommend you make sure your hideout is well-stocked with gin and vermouth, take your phone off the hook, and settle in for the weekend.

Catching up on some sewing

Oh, no--it's the return of that cherished friend of sportswriters, church bulletin editors, and fluffy metro columnists--the Notes Column! Only this is a blog, so it's a Notes Post. Ahem. But I'll at least try to follow the advice I give my staff at the office when they're writing copy: make sure there's always a thread leading the reader on. Here's hoping I succeed.

1 Yesterday's post included a George Herbert poem, "Prayer (I)," that is essentially a well-patterned list of different ways of conceiving prayer. I wrote that

even a nonbeliever like me can like me can discern the quiet confidence underlying Herbert's rushing tumble of metaphor in this poem.

Being a nonbeliever, though, I'm also a non-prayer, and even Herbert's poem can't change that.

But today, while reading Tim Page's article about his Asperger's syndrome in the newest issue of the New Yorker, I came across a line that brought Herbert's poem to mind: in noting the tenacity of his friendships, Page says,

I concur with Virgil Thomson, who once said that worry was one form of prayer that he found acceptable.

Though not much of a worrier, I will gladly place myself in Page's camp here, though I'd also like to add the glories of simply thinking about friends in their absence--the joys of, for example, experiencing a work of art simultaneously from my own perspective and from what I imagine would be theirs. That imaginative creation of an absent loved one can easily shade over into the realm of prayer, a sort of devotion or obeisance or even insurance payment to an important missing piece of one's life.

2 Speaking of the New Yorker, the August 6th issue may be the best single issue of any magazine I've ever read--and that's even once you take into account that John McPhee, ordinarily a favorite, is in this issue writing about golf, a sport that, despite the fact that I played it in high school, I see no reason ever to read about. An article on e-mail spam is followed by a piece about a murdered U.S. attorney that is followed by Elizabeth Kolbert on the mysterious disappearance of the bees (which has worried the apocalyptic sci-fi fan in me before) that is followed by, unusually for the New Yorker, a piece of fiction I really liked (long-untranslated writings by Russian Daniil Kharms (who was arrested by the NKVD in 1941 for making "defeatist statements")) that is followed by a brief Louis Menand piece about the craft of biography that is followed by an article about Robert Walser's unforgettable fiction (which includes Walser's immortal response to the question of how his writing was going during his stay in a sanitarium, "I am not here to write, but to be mad.") that is followed by a look at the new New York Times building that is, finally, followed by a look at the art of Sara and Gerald Murphy (friends of Cole Porter and F. Scott Fitzgerald's models for the Divers in This Side of Paradise).

It's an astonishingly good run of articles, a reminder to occasionally stop and marvel at what the New Yorker pulls off, week in and week out. Even once I skip all the pieces about opera, classical music, and business tycoons, there's something to read and admire every week.

3 The newest New Yorker, meanwhile, includes an article by Adam Gopnik on Philip K. Dick, whose recent Library of America volume I've been reading for the past several days. When I came across the Gopnik article, I had just begun Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968); had I not, I might not have agreed with this statement from Gopnik:

Dick tends to get treated as a romantic: his books are supposed to be studies in the extremes of paranoia and technological nightmare, offering searing conundrums of reality and illusion. This comes partly from the habit, hard to break, of extolling the transgressive, the visionary, the startling undercurrent of dread. In fact, Dick in the sixties is a bone-dry intellectual humorist, a satirist—concerned with taking contemporary practices and beliefs to their reductio ad absurdum.

The sense of paranoia is hard to ignore in Dick; in my (relative to the true Dick fans) limited knowledge, it does seem to be the overarching theme, regardless of what Gopnik argues. But the opening pages of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are flat-out funny. As the novel opens, bounty hunter Rick Deckard has just woken up and is immediately in an argument with his wife, Iran. In the midst of the dispute, he considers how he ought to employ his mood organ:

At his console he hesitated between dialing for a thalamic suppressant (which would abolish his mood of rage) or a thalamic stimulant (which would make him irked enough to win the argument).

"If you dial," Iran said, eyes open and watching, "for greater venom, then I'll dial the same. I'll dial the same. I'll dial the maximum and you'll see a fight that makes every argument we've had up to now seem like nothing. Dial and see; just try me."

Gopnik goes on to point out, correctly, that

The gift of Dick's craziness was to see how strong the forces of normalcy are in a society, even when what they are normalizing is objectively nuts.

4 Dick's crazily brilliant The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) features the following exchange between a hallucinating man and his ex-wife (who is almost certainly not actually there):

Eying him, Emily said, "You're blammed."

Blammed. He hadn't heard that term since college; it was long out of style, and naturally Emily still used it. "The word," he said as distinctly as possible, "is now fnugled. Can you remember that? Fnugled."

The dispute over slang terms for drunkenness made for an entertaining coincidence: the same day I read that passage, I received in the mail an out-of-print book I'd ordered, Edmund Wilson's The American Earthquake: A Chronicle of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Dawn of the New Deal (1958), the highlight of which is Wilson's "Lexicon of Prohibition." Wilson explains that the list of terms that follows is of words denoting drunkenness in common use at the time (March 1927) in the United States, organized roughly in increasing order of drunkenness:

lit, squiffy, oiled, lubricated, owled, edged, jingled, piffed, piped, sloppy, woozy, happy, half-screwed, half-cocked, half-shot, half seas over, fried, stewed, boiled, zozzled, sprung, scrooched, jazzed, jagged, canned, corked, corned, potted, hooted, slopped, tanked, stinko, blind, stiff, under the table, tight, full, wet, high , horseback, liquored, pickled, ginned, shicker (Yiddish), spifflicated, primed, organized, featured, pie-eyed, cock-eyed, wall-eyed, glassy-eyed, bleary-eyed, hoary-eyed, over the Bay, four sheets in the wind, crocked, loaded, leaping, screeching, lathered, plastered, soused, bloated, polluted, saturated, full as a tick, loaded for bear, loaded to the muzzle, loaded to the plimsoll mark, wapsed down, paralyzed, ossified, out like a light, passed out cold, embalmed, buried, blotto, lit up like the sky, lit up like the Commonwealth, lit up like a Christmas tree, lit up like a store window, lit up like a church, fried to the hat, slopped to the ears, stewed to the gills, boiled as an owl, to have a bun on, to have a slant on, to have a skate on, to have a snootful, to have a skinful, to draw a blank, to pull a shut-eye, to pull a Daniel Boone, to have a rubber drink, to have a hangover, to have a head, to have the jumps, to have the shakes, to have the zings, to have the heeby-jeebies, to have the sreaming meemies, to have the whoops and jingles, to burn with a low blue flame.

I hate to cast aspersions at Wilson, but I get the sense that somewhere in the making of that list he gave up on his organizational scheme, as it seems unlikely that all the "to have" constructions really denote successive states of drunkenness. But it's churlish to complain about such a valuable gift to posterity. While my friends and I have over the years regularly used soused, lit, tight, and--particularly in college--happy (which could also be turned into a noun: one could bring a bag of happy to a party, for example), the majority of these terms are new to me. At a minimum, I hope to do my part in returning "loaded to the plimsoll mark," "to pull a Daniel Boone," "wapsed down," "lit up like the Commonwealth," and (my favorite) "to burn with a low blue flame" to circulation.

5 Thinking about drink brings me back to Philip K. Dick, with the addition of the subject of a post earlier in the week, Lawrence Block. Part of the fun of reading Block's 1960s novels is entering the world that they incidentally recreate, the early 60s near-suburban world of businessmen who sleep with their secretaries, eat at smoky, dark-paneled steakhouses with deep, red-leather booths, have a couple of martinis at business lunches, and, though always looking out for the main chance, at the same time feel very secure about their place in the world. Dick, despite writing sci-fi, conveys that atmosphere, too--the very normalcy that Gopnik comments on in the New Yorker is a specifically male, post-war boom world, one that despite being propelled into an imagined future shares many assumptions and characteristics with the cozy world that Block's grifters are always attempting to invade and disrupt.

It's not a world that I find at all congenial (despite my love of its patron saint and apostle, Frank Sinatra), but that in no way lessens my appreciation of the way in which it's been almost inadvertently preserved in novels that are ostensibly about other things. A few pages of Block describing hotels and boardwalks and country clubs and I can almost feel the hitch in my lungs and the buzzing in my head on waking up after a late-night poker game with some of the guys from the Elks--that retention of a lost world, however unintentional, is one of the unsurpassed glories of the novel as a form.

6 Finally, writing about the recreation of a lost period reminds me of something that Stacey and I were talking about earlier tonight, Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier. Originally a mini-series and now available as a beautifully produced single hardcover or a pair of trade paperbacks, it's a retelling of the history of the universe of DC Comics in the 1950s, centered around the formation of the first large-scale superhero team, the Justice League.

My memories of Silver Age DC comics are so old, going back as they do to childhood days spent pawing through the footlocker of my father's mildewed Superman comics, that it's hard for me to separate Cooke's story from my at least partially nostalgic memories--so I don't know for sure whether someone who didn't know the rough outlines of the story of the DC heroes would enjoy the book. Regardless, it's rich in character and action, and Cooke's strikingly minimalist, angular art creates a fully believable post-war atmosphere of straight-cut dark suits, narrow ties, and crew cuts, and of an America (and by extension, a superhero population) that was certain its applied might and know-how could completely remake the world for the better. I think it's about as good as superhero comics get.

Plus, Cooke is the only artist I know who has ever drawn Wonder Woman--an Amazon, don't forget--as taller than Superman. That alone is worth a tip of the hat.