“In terms of the visuals a lot of the inspiration is anonymous in that it’s the army of illustrators and painters that made up the advertising art of the era,” Cooke says. Confidential, American Tabloid ), and Ellroy’s knack for “taking fictional characters and inserting them into real history.” Though he has done some work for Marvel, including a short run on Spider-Man, he has primarily worked on titles for DC, including Superman Confidential, Catwoman, and The Spirit.Ĭooke says New Frontier was pitched as “ The Right Stuff with superheroes,” and that much of his inspiration for the comic came from The Right Stuff (both Tom Wolfe’s book and its film adaptation), as well as the novels of James Ellroy ( L.A. He spent much of the 1990s working as an animator and storyboard artist on Warner Bros.’ Batman: The Animated Series. His first professional piece was published in the mid-’80s, though he only began to publish frequently within the last decade. I looked at the America of that era and all of a sudden all of these elements came together in my head really well.”Ĭooke was born in Toronto in 1962 and says he began writing comics as a childhood hobby.
I began to look at the history of the company and the time the characters were created in. “I didn’t particularly have a great affinity for superheroes and the more I looked at the characters I realized that I was very interested in who they were before they were superheroes. “ New Frontier came about based on the fact that after my first book DC thought maybe a Justice League project would be appropriate,” Cooke says. Working from this historical cocktail, Cooke reimagined the birth of comics’ greatest team. New Frontier finds the Justice League mired in the post-war America of McCarthyism, Communist paranoia, and the Space Race, a time where superheroes are under suspicion and distrusted by much of the world. The movie is based on Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier, a six-issue limited series originally published in 2004 and winner of the Eisner Award, one of comic books’ most prestigious honors. Since its formation the Justice League has undergone a number of transformations, but perhaps none so phenomenal as the rebirth given them by writer/artist Darwyn Cooke, the brains behind the animated film Justice League: The New Frontier, which recently premiered on DVD. When DC Comics debuted the Justice League in 1960 it brought together some of its biggest and best names-Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and Martian Manhunter-under one banner.
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