Darwyn Cooke

Comic book creator Darwyn Cooke died last week at the too-young age of 53. Cancer. Friends of his in and out of the industry are mourning his death, talking about what a good person he was: enthusiastic about his work, generous with his time, friendly to fans, making comics for the right reasons.

I can't talk about that because I never met him. I just loved his work. So I'll talk about that.

There are a hundred stories in the city, and Cooke tells all of 'em in one drawing.

Understand that everything below this sentence is my opinion based on a lifetime reading, studying and creating comics. This is what I see when I look at Cooke's work. If you see something else, that's good too.

Cooke came to comics from animation, and it shows. Animation is all about economy: draw nothing but the lines you absolutely must, because you'll be drawing them another 10,000 times. Character designs are often based on simple geometric shapes that are easy to turn in space as the character moves. Clean lines, solid blacks. Not a lot of fussing around.

A tradition of animation excellence echoed in Cooke's art: Superman by the Fleischer brothers, Space Ghost model sheet by Alex Toth, Jonny Quest model sheet by Doug Wildey. The Fleischer Superman cartoon shorts are particularly beautiful examples that influenced generations of creators including Cooke and me, as in my "Last Mechanical Monster" webcomic.

Cooke built on his animation roots and transcended them. His style is often called "retro," and I'm sure some of that was due to Cooke looking back at the Old Masters of the 1940s and '50s, liking what he saw, and incorporating some of their look and feel. But I'll bet a lot of it involved Cooke facing the same storytelling problems they did and arriving at similar solutions on his own. Because while Cooke does evoke the past, nobody in any decade drew like he did.

Illustrators vs. Essentialists
There are two approaches to cartooning I'll call the Illustrators and the Essentialists. Scott McCloud probably has other names for them but that's how I think of them. Those aren't the only two approaches--there are others that could be called Abstract, Impressionism, Photorealism, etc., roughly corresponding to the same schools in fine art--but they're the two that I think illuminate Cooke's unique talent.

Illustrators have a long pedigree, coming out of the tradition of book illustration that predated comic strips and comic books. It's tempting to call it a "realistic" style, but there's nothing really realistic about it. It's romantic, heroic, detailed, dynamic. Classical. This is the kind of art most people think of when they think "comic books." It's also the type of art that anyone can look at and think, "Wow, that's good drawing!"

Some comics artists in the Illustrator tradition: (upper left) Alex Raymond, "Flash Gordon"; (upper right) Hal Foster, "Prince Valiant"; (lower left) John Buscema, "The Avengers"; (lower right) Neal Adams, "Batman."

The artists I'm calling Essentialists take a different approach. The idea is that comics shouldn't necessarily try to mimic reality but instead embrace their built-in comic-ness. The ideal comic is one that distills reality to its essence, omitting anything that doesn't matter. Simplify, polish, pare. This approach is common among some types of comics--Charlie Brown's face is a masterpiece of minimalism--but unusual in superhero comics.

Two dots, a half circle and a squiggly line are all Charles Schulz needed to create a character who could break your heart.

Cooke stood out because he was an Essentialist in an industry filled with Illustrators. Here's an example. On the left, Batman by Neal Adams; on the right, Batman by Darwyn Cooke. Adams drew hundreds of lines defining the contours and expression of Batman's face. Cooke drew two, plus two white triangles for eyes. You couldn't draw much less than that, yet it's still instantly recognizable as Batman.

Compare how the artists handled the shading on Batman's forehead. Adams's is all elaborate cross-hatching and feathering, while Cooke's is a simple swath of black.

I'm not criticizing Adams! He's one of the all-time greats. They were different artists pulling from different traditions to different ends. But the graphic clarity and immediate punch of Cooke's style is very strong and appealing.

One reason Cooke's work struck me as powerfully as it did is because I'm an Essentialist, too. Whenever I redraw something, it's always to take out lines, never to add them. My perfect comic would be a single line that conveys exactly the information or emotion I intend.

It takes a lot of hard work to make it look easy.

Which isn't to say that Cooke's drawings were simple. Not at all. They were often filled with action and detail, but they were always clear and uncluttered. Cooke's gracefully balanced compositions guided the reader's eye where he wanted it to go. Not a line was wasted.

The first thing you see is Robin, throwing the grenade whose smoke trail leads back to him via the flow of his cape. Then you follow the line of Robin's outstretched arm directly to Batman, and continue to Batman's hands clenching the steering wheel. Maybe later you notice the chaos of cars speeding and tumbling through the background. 

That highway sign at upper right breaks this drawing's symmetry and makes it a lot more interesting. It also provides exposition: even if the reader doesn't recognize the George Washington Bridge on sight, an elaborate suspension bridge combined with the name "Hudson" (as in "River") hints at where the character's going: New York City.

(EDITED TO ADD: This is irrelevant but kind of cool: out of curiosity, I looked
up this location in Google Street View and found the sign. How about that!)

Inkiness
The panel immediately above, from Cooke's adaptation of Richard Stark's Parker novels, shows one way in which Cooke outgrew his animation foundation: brushwork. I don't know enough about Cooke's methods to know if he used actual brushes to put ink on paper, or electronic styluses to put pixels on monitors, but it hardly matters. The controlled looseness of his ink line (or virtual ink line?) wouldn't work for animation but fits right into one of comics' oldest and finest traditions.

Masterful brushwork by Milton Caniff (top), Will Eisner (center) and Mort Meskin (bottom).

I have no idea what did or didn't influence Cooke, but he would have been very aware of all those precedents when he sat down to do more Impressionistic work like this:

The casual confidence required to command line, form, light and shadow with such apparent ease astonishes me. Bringing a line to life is one of the hardest artistic feats there is. I feel like I pull it off maybe one out of every thirty or forty tries. Cooke managed to do it every time.

Proportions
Cooke also did a subtle thing that humanized his characters and separated him from the pack: he (mostly) drew them in realistic proportions.

Since the ancient Greeks, artists have known that if you want to make someone look really heroic, give them a disproportionately small head (or, if you prefer, a disproportionately large body). Most real-life adults are about 7½ heads tall; most superheroes are at least 8 heads tall. Sometimes 9 or 10 or more.

Christopher Reeve stood about 7½ heads tall, while the drawing of his counterpart on the right is more than 8 heads tall. Compare and contrast not just their muscles, but their other proportions (shoulders-to-waist, leg length-to-torso, etc.) as well. Tricks of the trade. 

This ancient Greek statue of the god Apollo has about the same proportions as the Superman drawing above.

This Hulk is so incredibly powerful that his fists are twice as large as his puny head! And those feet! Yikes!

Heroic proportions can get pretty ridiculous once you start noticing them. For the most part, Cooke reined his in. This created an interesting paradox: despite how abstract and stylized he drew his characters, they often looked more real than characters drawn in a more detailed illustrative style.

Wonder Woman and Batman, in atypically realistic proportions. 

Cooke's men have barrel chests but aren't muscle-bound. His women have broad shoulders and credible waists. His characters are thick and powerful. They have weight. To me they suggest circus performers in costumes--which were Siegel and Shuster's inspiration when they created Superman.

Color
Again, I don't know enough about Cooke's working method to say how his art was colored. I don't want to give him too much or too little credit. Coloring isn't usually done by the artist, but there's enough unity in all his work--especially Parker--that I'm confident he at least had a very strong hand in directing it.

I think Cooke's use of color is his secret weapon. It gives form to figures and features that could otherwise appear two-dimensional and dull. Look at that Wonder Woman drawing immediately above left. She's lit by blue light from the left and pink light from the right ("chiaroscuro") that makes her pop off the page. Cooke's characters are dressed in bold primary and secondary colors, as they should be, but there's always a haze or shadow to mute them. Backgrounds are subdued. His artwork feels light and bright but never garish.

A painting by Cooke for New Frontier.

Cooke's colors reminds me (and perhaps only me) of the work of the mid-century master Mary Blair, most famous for her work as a concept artist for Disney. They shared a thoughtful use of lighting to give life and form to fairly flat, almost geometrical, shapes. In any case, color is a key reason Cooke's work is instantly recognizable as his and no one else's.

Mary Blair studies for Disney's "Peter Pan" and "Cinderella."

Fun
Virtually every summary of Cooke's work uses that word, exemplified by both his art and his writing. Not that the stories he told were always light and funny. Parker was a hard-boiled noir detective, and Cooke's New Frontier version of the Justice League took some dark and serious turns.

Yet everything he did had a stylistic lightness and liveliness that never let his tales tip into grim, gory, or depressing. When appropriate for the story, nobody ever had more fun being a superhero than Cooke's characters.

Just as I posted this, I noticed the orange mass of Batgirl's hair. Surrounded by the high contrast of her black cape, it pulls the reader's eye right to her face. And it still reads as "hair" even though there's not a single line drawn on it. Terrific.

 

Again, look at the use of color.

No need to take my word for Cooke's attitude toward storytelling when we have his. At a WonderCon panel in 2015, Cooke spoke on the state of today's superhero comic book business:

I can’t really read superhero comics anymore because they’re not about superheroes. They’ve become so dark and violent and sexualized. I think it’s a real wrong turn. I don’t know how a company like Warner Bros. or Disney is able to rationalize characters raping and murdering and taking drugs and swearing and carrying on the way they do, and those same characters are on sheet sets for 5-year-olds, and pajamas and cartoons . . .

I think the bravest and smartest thing one of these companies could do would be to scrap everything they’re doing and bring in creative people who would have the talent and were willing to put in the effort it takes to write an all-ages universe that an adult or a child could enjoy. If either one of these companies were smart enough to do that, I think they could take huge strides for the industry.

Cooke was a great talent, maybe even a necessary one. I'm sorry we lost him but I'm glad we had him at all.

Willie & Joe & Me

Regular readers know I love the USS Hornet, the aircraft carrier that recovered Apollos 11 and 12, and is now a National Historic Landmark and museum in Alameda, Calif. where my daughter Laura works and my other daughter Robin volunteers from time to time.

Laura helped put together an exhibition on "Cartoons at War" inspired by the recent find of some letters in the archives between a sailor on the Hornet and famous cartoonist Milt Caniff in 1944. Caniff created the comic strips "Terry and the Pirates," and later "Steve Canyon," which both featured a lot of military action. Caniff wanted to get the details right so he regularly corresponded with soldiers and sailors. Full disclosure: I edited the exhibition's text panels for Laura, so I'm invested.

The museum staff asked me to give a talk about Cartoons at War, and I asked Corry Kanzenberg, curator of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, if she wanted to do it with me. I was astonished and delighted she agreed. Schulz was a machine gunner in Europe; he drew a lot of sketches while there, and his experience informed his later work in "Peanuts," particularly re: Snoopy and the Red Baron.

So we went and did that Saturday.

Laura, wearing a "Peanuts" hoodie to fit the day's theme, gave us a tour of her "Cartoons at War" exhibition. It's in a space designed for temporary rotating shows, and in fact closes today. Sorry if you missed it!

Wartime art from the Hornet's sister ship Bunker Hill (the Hornet was CV-12).

Disney designed more than 1200 military insignias and patches during the War, including one for the Hornet.

Corry and I are way up on the stage under the giant flag, projecting our slides on the screen at the right. The audience included a good-sized squad (or platoon or whatever) of recruits who spent the weekend training on the Hornet. Karen counted about 60 people in the audience, which I thought was a good turnout.

I presented first, while Corry sat beside me wondering if she'd make a terrible mistake. I gave a real quick history of comics up to World War 2, then, taking my cue from the exhibition, hit superhero comics, Bill Mauldin's "Willie & Joe," Dr. Seuss's political cartoons, Milt Caniff, Roy Crane's "Buz Sawyer," and more, all lavishly illustrated. 

Corry introducing the Schulz Museum. We were speaking on the Main Stage in the Hangar Deck, which extends far to the left and right. At the right side of the photo is a flight simulator ride for entertaining the kiddies. 

Corry's turn to talk. Her presentation was great. Then we talked to each other for five minutes, took a few questions (one boy just had to tell us how much he loved Snoopy), and were done after about 50 minutes.

Immediately afterward I went to a small classroom below decks to do a Girl Scout Comic Artists Badge Workshop for a troop of six scouts. One of their mothers works with Laura on the Hornet (Hi, Chris!) and has wanted to do the workshop for a while, so we figured we'd kill as many birds with as few stones as we could. Attendance at the earlier talk was part of their requirement for earning the badge. It was a great group of girls, lively and attentive in all the right parts. By the end of the workshop everyone knew how comics are made and had drawn a four-panel (at least--some girls did much more) comic strip.

Me up front guiding the troop through some cartooning skills, with Laura looking on from the gangway. Robin came too, but we didn't get photos of her. I really like this shot Karen took because it give a good sense of what it's like to be aboard this giant chutes-and-ladders maze of a ship.

The ship's store stocked my book. We sold and signed a few.

In the Hornet's Apollo Exhibit, inspecting the plastic case I underwrote to properly display these two Space Age artifacts that are, in my opinion, the jewels of the Hornet's collection. I explained the significance of those little wooden signs the first time I actually got to touch them. 

Any day I get to spend aboard the Hornet is a good day for me. Thanks to Heidi and the Hornet staff for inviting me, and huge thanks to Corry for driving all the way down from Santa Rosa to help me out. She was terrific!

Happy Birthday, Dumplins!

Twenty-eight years ago today, at around 3:40 and 3:42 a.m., I learned the true terror of the Ides of March.

Best day of my life.

Happy Birthday, punks. See you tonight!

I Got No Strings On Me

Last Mechanical Monster reader Richard B. sent me these photos of a terrific Robot marionette he built for his grandson (strings not yet attached), and gave me permission to share them. Great design, I'd love to see it in action. Thanks, Richard!

Book Review: Move to Fire

Mike Harkins is a friend whom I met years ago when we were both freelance writers for a regional magazine. I like and respect him, and though I carried that bias into my reading of his book Move to Fire, if I didn't think it was genuinely good I simply never would have mentioned it. It's good.

Move to Fire (322 pages) is an impressive work of investigative journalism that Harkins spent years pulling together. It's the story of Brandon Maxfield, a 7-year-old boy shot through the spine and paralyzed for life when a semiautomatic handgun accidentally discharged as a family friend tried to unload it. Brandon and his family sued the gunmaker for manufacturing a defective product, and, years later, tried to buy the company at a bankruptcy auction so they could melt down its inventory of 20,000 cheap junk guns.

The case made national news. I remember it, and I remember thinking the same thing many people did: How could you argue that a gun was defective because it fired a bullet when the trigger was pulled, even if accidentally? Isn't that what a gun is supposed to do? In fact, wouldn't a gun be defective if it didn't fire when you pulled the trigger?

Harkins patiently, methodically explains why I was wrong.

As originally designed, the Bryco Model 38 was intended to be unloaded with the safety in the "safe" position, so that someone couldn't possibly fire it while unloading it. However, when that procedure was followed, the gun jammed. Rather than make an inexpensive fix to prevent jamming, gunmaker Bruce Jennings rewrote the instruction manual so that someone unloading the gun would first have to move the safety to "fire." At the very moment a user was trying to disarm the weapon, it was most vulnerable to an accidental slip of a finger to the trigger.

It would be like Ford building a new car with the brake and gas pedals reversed, then saying it wasn't their fault that people were careless enough to drive over cliffs.

The hero of the book is attorney Richard Ruggieri, who began his career working for defendants in insurance cases, representing companies against plaintiffs stricken with asbestos-related cancer. After several successful years he switched sides, partly driven by his conscience after badgering too many witnesses on their deathbeds, and his intimate knowledge of the Dark Side made him an invaluable Jedi Knight to Brandon's family. He knew all the tricks Jennings and his lawyers would use to hide their assets and evade responsibility, and dogged them relentlessly.

Favorable laws make it tough enough to win cases against gunmakers. Ruggieri's job was made magnitudes harder when the handgun that shot Brandon couldn't be found, having been lost by an earlier attorney in the case. Now he had to prove not just that one particular weapon was defective, but that the entire model line was.

The book is structured like a legal thriller, so that by the time it reaches its climactic three-part trial we know the heroes and villains and understand the stakes. Harkins draws the later chapters directly from the trial transcript, selecting passages that build on and pay off the groundwork he laid earlier.

The suspense is compelling. Harkins plays fair. Ruggieri's case has holes--not least the missing weapon--and some of his opponents' arguments are convincing. Move to Fire isn't an anti-gun screed. I found it an engrossing, well-built narrative that pulled me through, page by page. It's naturally structured like a three-act drama and ought to be a movie (in fact I believe Harkins is developing a screenplay).

Published via an Indiegogo campaign I was happy to support, Move to Fire has some flaws characteristic of self-published works, including a few typos and inconsistent usage and style. I wish a good copy editor had given it a final scrubbing before it went to press. I know first-hand how a second set of eyes can catch mistakes that the people immersed in making a book have overlooked for months.

[EDITED TO ADD: Mike tells me my copy is a first edition, and that many errors were subsequently found and fixed. Since I haven't seen newer editions I'll let my point stand as a reflection of my reading experience, with the understanding that it may be moot.]

Harkins knows these deep woods so well, and is so eager to guide readers through them, that I sometimes felt he didn't look back as often as he should have to be sure everyone was still following. Which is to say, a couple of times I got lost.

The book has a lot of technical detail about handguns: firing pins, slides, triggers, dual magazines, safeties that move up and down instead of side to side. Those details are important; the gun is practically a character itself. I would have appreciated one clear photo or diagram of it to help me understand how it worked, as well as how it failed to work.

These are nits and quibbles that don't detract from my admiration of the book. Whatever polishing it might benefit from wouldn't change its fundamental quality and accomplishments. Move to Fire is a passion project by a writer who knows how to mine facts, build characters, and use them to tell a terrific story. The fact that this writer had to mount an Indiegogo campaign to publish the sort of long-form journalism that magazines used to be proud to print is an indictment of how the field has fallen. Still, without modern crowd-financing the story might never have been told at all. I'm grateful it was.

The recent recipient of a prestigious starred review from Publisher's Weekly, Move to Fire is available on Amazon.

World's Fair Greetings!

Friends and long-time readers know of my love for both the 1939 New York World's Fair, which I featured in my book Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow, and old-fashioned red-blue 3-D images (called "anaglyphs"). Here, now, in this very post, those worlds collide.

I like visiting antiques shops in other parts of the country. Our local shops are fine, but different places have their own regional flavors. I also think the vintage pickings aren't as good here in California as they are elsewhere because we're a state of emigrants who left all their old stuff behind when they moved out here.

So while in Ann Arbor, Michigan a couple of days ago (see my previous post!) I browsed a shop and discovered a treasure: a pack of 3-D "Stereovue" souvenir cards from the Fair. Each card is the size of a small postcard, in a cardboard pack meant to be mailed home. Here's the front cover:

And here are several of the cards. I'm posting them large so you can look at them with your own red-blue glasses (everybody should have a pair!). Clicking on the images should make them much larger.

In all my research on the 1939 World's Fair, I hadn't seen these 3-D cards before. In fact, I was surprised to see the red-blue anaglyph technology at all--I thought it hadn't been invented until the 1950s. A good 2011 book by Craig Yoe and Joe Kubert, Amazing 3-D Comics, described Kubert developing it for comic books beginning in 1952. Kubert wrote that he'd seen publications using red-blue 3-D pictures serving in Germany in 1950-51. Obviously it had been around at least a decade before then. I wonder if the Fair was one of its earliest uses?

These are beautiful little gems in near-mint condition from 77 years ago. The cards don't look like they were ever touched, and I can't believe the plastic lenses of the enclosed viewer survived without cracking, What a tremendous find! If anybody wants to see more, let me know and I'll fire up the scanner.

Go (Quick Web Search) Wolverines!

Not a Wolverine.

Honestly, I was about 96% sure that University of Michigan students are Wolverines, but since I haven't cared about college sports since I was in college, I thought I'd better double-check.

I got home late last night from an exhilarating and exhausting trip to the University of Michigan, where I gave three different talks in two days. I think everything went very well. Unless my hosts were lying, so did they. I've never been to Ann Arbor and found that it lived up to its reputation as the quintessential Midwestern college town. I had some time to do my favorite thing in new places: wander aimlessly. Even better, I got to do it through light snow flurries, which is an exotic treat for me (not so much for others who don't live in coastal California, I know).

I did not make it to Zingerman's Deli, which a couple of people told me I must. Now I have a reason to go back.

Several months ago, professor Alex Stern asked if I'd be interested in talking about Mom's Cancer with her class on Health, Biology and Society. Indeed I was, and since I was flying two-thirds of the way across the country I encouraged her to find as much work for me to do while there as she could. I was subsequently booked to speak at the Ann Arbor District Library the evening after the class, and talk with honors students at a luncheon the next day.

Three different audiences with three different talks, and not really one I could pull off the shelf (I do have a couple of standard stump speeches but they didn't fit the bill). I'm not afraid of public speaking but I was a little nervous taking three untested talks for their first spins around the track the day of the big race.

I think it worked out.

My hosts and instructors of the Health, Biology and Society course, Laura Olsen and Alex Stern. The class is a fascinating interdisciplinary thing pulling together material and students from science and humanities to focus on the socio-economics of cancer. By the time I got there, all the students had read Mom's Cancer and were frighteningly well prepared.

About 80 students take the class. Big group! Before I shot this photo I said, "Anybody who doesn't want to be on Facebook look away," so students whose faces you can't see obviously have something to hide. After the class I signed a lot of books and had some great one-on-one conversations. The future is in good hands.

Alex said the students are used to collaborating on worksheets and projects in their table groups (which they've all wittily named), so I suggested we could do jam comics, in which everyone draws the first panel of a comic and then passes it on for someone to draw the next, and so on. It's a great improvisational storytelling exercise whose success depends on the participants' willingness to play along and have fun. These guys were terrific.

Weather was crisp but not unbearably cold, with an inch of dry icy show on the ground and occasional flakes drifting through the sky. The campus is home to roving gangs of squirrels that are fluffier, fatter and browner than those I'm used to, and nearly tame thanks to food handouts from big-hearted students. The squirrel at the top of this post was literally begging at my feet.

They put me up at the Michigan League, which looks like a typical student activity center (cafe, study areas, meeting rooms) except it has a hotel hidden on its fourth floor. Weird but nice. I remarked to someone that one of my favorite things to see while traveling is bricks. We don't have brick buildings in northern California. Ours all fell down in 1906. 

Wandering Ann Arbor. Look at all the bricks!

If your college town doesn't have an old movie theater converted to showing obscure arthouse films and Oscar shorts, you're going to the wrong college.

Some of the people who dropped by the Ann Arbor District Library that evening. The girl at center in the salmon-colored shirt next to Alex Stern is her daughter Sofia, who is a budding graphic novelist, likes plain cheese pizza, and is my new best friend, not least because knowing me puts her only one degree of separation away from her hero Raina Telgemeier. 

Jim Ottaviani is the writer of science-themed nonfiction comics. His subjects have included physicists Niels Bohr and Richard Feynman, Quantum Theory, the Moon Race, Jane Goodall, and Alan Turing. Jim and I are Facebook friends but had never met, and I didn't even know he lived in Ann Arbor until he told me he'd try to make my talk. And he did!

In addition to Jim, two other creators whose work I know and appreciate showed up completely out of the blue. Jerzy Drozd teaches comics, makes webcomics and podcasts, and with Ernie Colon illustrated a graphic adaptation of the Warren Commission Report (published by Abrams ComicArts!). His wife Anne Drozd, in addition to being his collaborator on several projects, is also on the library staff and introduced my talk.

I expected Jim to show and was excited enough about that, but to get Anne and Jerzy at the same time was like Christmas morning.

With Jerzy and Anne.

Enjoying adult beverages after the library talk with Jim, Jim's wife Kat, Anne and Jerzy. It turns out we've all worked with my pal and editor Charlie Kochman at Abrams, and so traded much intelligence and strategy.
Heh heh heh.

Wednesday morning I had some wander time before lunch with about 15 or 20 honors students. This was a less formal setting and I aimed to say more than I usually would about the history of comics as an artistic and literary medium (the Art of the People!) still working to gain respect. Hope I made a good case. I had an especially nice pre-lunch conversation with philosopher and honors program advisor Henry Dyson.

The luncheon set-up. I sat in a comfy chair up front while students grabbed a plate of food (good stuff!) and ate while we talked.

After lunch I went downstairs to a car waiting at the door to whisk me to the airport, where after about seven hours on two planes (separated by a rice bowl dinner at LAX) and another hour and a half dodging fender-benders on a rainy drive home, I oozed into bed dreaming of snow-blown bricks and hungry squirrels.

This trip was a nice career highlight for me. Thanks to Alex and Laura for making it happen (and for teaching my book!); Jim, Kat, Jerzy and Anne for talking shop; Sofia for drawing me a picture; and the students for being good people and good sports. Great school and town! Someday I'll be back for Zingerman's.