Darwyn Cooke, a Canadian comic-book artist who gave his signature retro flair to DC Comics heroes as well as one of crime literature's more notable protagonists, died early Saturday morning at the age of 54.
His wife Marsha Cooke confirmed the news in a statement one day after posting on the artist's blog that he was receiving palliative care following a bout with aggressive lung cancer.
Darwyn Cooke, who died at his home in Florida, was a Toronto native who worked as an art director and graphic designer until the 1990s when he was hired by Warner Bros. Animation to be a storyboard artist on Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series.
In 2001, Cooke and writer Ed Brubaker retooled the look and persona of Catwoman for a run on Detective Comics, and three years later Cooke wrote and drew the iconic six-issue miniseries DC: The New Frontier, a period story that imagined Superman, Wonder Woman and others in the 1950s stopping a Cold War-era alien invasion. (An Emmy-winning direct-to-video animated version of New Frontier was released in 2008.)
"Darwyn Cooke lived life like a character from a Mickey Spillane novel, a throwback to a bygone era that was, more than occasionally, reflected in his work," said DC co-publisher Dan DiDio in a statement. "He was both compassionate and combative, approaching everything he did with a tenaciousness and temerity that is now unheard of in a world afraid to offend.
"This is an industry-wide loss that I feel personally, but the sadness is mitigated in the knowing that the beauty and grace of his art will forever stand the test of time and be a monument to all that is great about comics."
Cooke took on the adventures of legendary cartoonist Will Eisner's The Spirit in 2006, and he also adapted four of Donald Westlake's Parker novels for IDW. The first, Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter in 2009, brought new pop-culture life to the title criminal.
Cooke teamed again with DC four years ago for prequel books to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic Watchmen featuring the Minutemen and Silk Spectre, though he initially turned the projects down.
"The reason I didn't want to get involved was I didn't see anything story-wise that could match up to or live up to or complement what Watchmen was. It took a while for that to come together in my head," Cooke told USA TODAY in 2012.
More recently, Cooke did an animated Batman Beyond short for Batman's 75th anniversary in 2014, and teamed with writer Gilbert Hernandez on the Vertigo Comics series The Twilight Children (out Tuesday in a collected trade paperback).
In her statement Marsha Cooke included a line from John F. Kennedy's speech in New Frontier: “Then we shall not be weary. Then we shall prevail.”
