When I'm drawing the characters, I begin to understand them better and know how I perceive them, I think I've got something with Barry here that I'm happy with. Part of what I'm doing with this story is showing some growth on his part as a person which maybe helps us understand how he came to be the man we know him as.'īut isn't Barry the same guy that Cooke was having a difficulty isolating as a character last time? He is and Cooke says it's gotten easier, adding, 'Yeah, as a matter of fact and I think this is why, but I don't know about other people's processes, but when I have a plot, that's when I draw my story. He's still very much a police scientist who discovered he's got this fantastic power and I don't think he's had the time to even consider what it means to be the Flash. When we meet Barry Allen, he's been at it for three weeks and so he's not iconic atĪll. Basically we have two types of characters that we're dealing with here- players like Superman and Wonder Woman are established at the time the story opens, so they have a very iconic nature to them in the story, but the Flash is brand new. I know as I'm constructing the book, I'm looking at it as several separate stories that are feeding into one big story.'Īnother creative challenge that Cooke faces is whether to portray these iconic DC characters as, for lack of a better term, icons or as the fallible characters that are so popular today. Levels, and as the story progresses we see how things that don't seem related at all come together at the end. January 2004 is the scheduled date and it's apparently a firm date.' It in terms of my storytelling and I'm finishing it up.

I just started inking the first book and I'm about a dozen pages into that. 'I have 200 pages of it in what I call rough story stage, which means it's all been laid out, and of that, 145 pages of that are finished pencilled pages. With a project of this size, it takes some time to finish all the work when you're writing, pencilling and inking all three hundred and eighty pages, but Cooke says he's progressing quite well. The goal is to try to successfully reflect the essence of what it means to be a hero.

'At 380 pages, there's more than one goal, but I think at this point, it can be summed up succinctly.

''New Frontier' is a six issue limited series from DC that takes a look at the core characters of the DC Universe, back in the time they were created, so that's the original Justice League and the characters around them at the time,' explains Cooke.

Darwyn cooke new frontier