Bruce Timm gets a lot of credit for the look of the DC Animated Universe. That’s not wrong; a lot of its style does come from him. However, at least as much of it comes from the work of Darwyn Cooke, who among other things animated the opening sequence of Batman Beyond, one of the few times an opening sequence for a cartoon show was animated to fit the music as opposed to having the music written to fit the animation. Cooke hadn’t even wanted to live in Los Angeles, but he moved there because he knew that being part of the show was exactly what he wanted from life, that the opportunity would not come around again.

At five years old, young Darwyn Cooke watched the Adam West Batman. He drew the characters in crayon on construction paper—drawings his grandmother apparently saved. At thirteen, he read a reprint of Spectacular Spider-Man #2 and immediately rushed out to buy art supplies. He copied John Romita’s style. He traced panels of The Spirit—a comic he’d later work on—and copied Eisner’s style. In time, he worked on developing his own style, and in 1985, he sold his first work to DC.

Unfortunately, DC was paying $35 a page. Since Cooke could produce one page a week, this simply wasn’t a viable career path. (With inflation, that’s still under a hundred bucks.) He worked in magazines in Canada and eventually established his own design studio, but rather than shaping the face of the comics industry, he was, you know, making a living. Which the industry doesn’t really let people do, even today.

He also considered his work on Batman Beyond to be compromised by the studio. They didn’t like what his vision of the show looked like. They didn’t like the violence. It wasn’t how they saw “Batman in the future.” Cooke believed that the studio rushed through the series to get it to syndication length so they could drop it after that. He is, on the other hand, responsible for making sure that Wonder Woman and Lois Lane weren’t dropped from the adaptation of his DC: The New Frontier.

Eventually, Cooke was allowed to do work in the comics industry that shaped how things went. Batman: Ego was inspired by My Dinner With Andre and was Batman and Bruce Wayne talking about their shared mind. DC: The New Frontier combined aspects of The Right Stuff and the work of James Ellroy. He would work with Marvel, IDW, and Image. His loss, too young, from an aggressive lung cancer, is a loss to art.

I don’t even get $35 an article; consider supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!