Darwyn Cooke.  Where to begin.  Cooke was the heroic fantasy comics art synthesizer of his generation, par excellence.  He knew comics. He knew how they worked.  He could take them apart and put them back together again, and, more importantly, he amply demonstrated, that he could disassemble the machinery of the styles of the greats of comics past, pick out the best, strongest parts, the ones that still held up, and then put them all together to build an awesome new comics story-telling machine, one that coould deliver page after page of action-packed adventure.  And there’s more.  His work successfully conveys, and, when the moment is ripe, reveals the emotional needs that undergird heroic fantasy; the bruised egos, the tethered ids, the lack of grace.  Cooke was practically alone among his peers working at the “big two” in his conscious understanding of the wounded life led by the reader of heroic fantasy; plus, he was a die-hard romantic.  He will be missed.  

November 16, 1962 – May 14, 2016

Posted by on 17 May 14:05 (almost 8 years ago)