On October 16th, I headed down to the Gladstone Hotel to support what I thought was just a show for a phenomenal talent I feel privileged to have spent time with personally, Darwyn Cooke. Little did I know that most of the work was actually for sale! If you like something you see below, and act quickly, you might still be able to buy it: the gallery show ends Sunday the 25th. Email info@artoriginals.ca

Darwyn is in an enviable position in his career. After a relatively brief time he has a phenomenal body of work under his belt… wait, why did that sound dirty? Anyway, Darwyn started his career in superheroes as an animator on Batman: The Animated Series, and went on to produce the masterpieces The New Frontier and, along with inker J. Bone, The Spirit revival. J. is another gent positively oozing in awesomesauce, and… aw man that sounded really dirty! Check out his Super Friends covers and don’t mind me.

Where was I? Right, Darwyn Cooke’s work to date is stupendous. So he’s able to tell the mainstream comics world to piss off and live comfortably working on projects that make him happy. And Darwyn really does seem happy these days, which is saying something for a guy known as one of the most lovable grumps in comics. Darwyn’s wife, Marsha, was a firecracker as usual. I have to avoid consuming beverages in Marsha’s presence, because she is the patron saint of spit takes.

The reason for the happy happy joy joys is yet another landmark adaptation for Mr. Cooke. Not content with bringing Wil Eisner’s brilliance to a modern audience – hey, someone had to, because the movie was epic fail -- now he’s set his sights on Donald Westlake, the prolific crime novelist responsible for the anti-hero known only as Parker, back before anti-heroes were an overused repository for senseless emo. Forget Sin City, kiddies, this is true Crime Noir.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked Sin City, but it’s not true Noir. Noir is a barren medium, an experiment in storytelling without overt emotion. Characters don’t spew exposition in Noir. They fight, they drink, they run, and they fuck, and the way they do these things conveys their inner natures, not babbling caption bubbles that clog up pages. The Sin City stories are powerful, but they suffer from a format hangover: unnecessary descriptions left over from prose fiction that should have been circumcised when the leap was made to a graphic medium.

Parker: The Hunter does not make such diversions from its stylistic genre. Many consecutive pages run with absolutely no words. When captions appear they’re sparse and hand-lettered. In the original artwork on display at the Gladstone, you can still see the pencil guidelines holding up the text. The inks feather at the edges. The marker strokes tear and slash at the pages, a vibrant teal in the originals that is muted down to a steely blue-green in the published version. The Spartan presentation of the original Hunter pages is accompanied by some New Frontiers art – including the cover to issue #6 and a nifty page breakdown thinger -- some Jonah Hex, Catwoman (Darwyn is responsible for her slick current costume), Power Girl, and, much to my glee, one page with the lovable floating Marvel Comics blob, Doop.

Oh how I love Doop. Let me count the ways in an alien glyph language.

The power of Darwyn’s work can be summed up in a Ditko-esque image that sucked me in so thoroughly that I got a great shot of it, but failed to make a note of what the heck it actually is. I was staring at it so intently I forgot!

Kudos to Walter Dickinson for hanging such a beautiful show. Insert “Walt is well hung” joke here. That’s three, folks! I’m on a roll! I’m curious to see what he and his partner in the Art Originals endeavor, Sean Menard, host next. Maybe next time they’ll know what the weird brown crackers were that were served with the hummus. They smelled like ginger and tasted like rye. I’m perplexed.

While I ponder these and other mysteries of life, pick up The Hunter. The print run was fairly limited, and there are more Parker adaptations on the way.

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