You do not want to miss this.
Parker comic creator Darwyn Cooke is interviewed by The Comics Reporter‘s Tom Spurgeon. He is joined by his editor, Scott Dunbier, and former collaborator Ed Brubaker, who currently does Criminal (which has been recommended to me a million times but which I have not yet purchased–get better, economy!).
The interview is an in-depth look at the creation process of Cooke’s adaptation of The Hunter, and many other subjects–how the project got started, how Cooke sees Parker, how he made his artistic decisions in terms of both art and prose, which other books are going to be adapted, his interactions with Donald Westlake, and much more. If a comic book could have a commentary track like a DVD, this would be it for Darwyn Cooke’s The Hunter.
A sample:
The movies [Point Blank and the Payback director’s cut]… they made brilliant visual choices, but they all run counter to the nature of the stories. Like in Point Blank, we have Big Al Stegman’s car lot, and it’s this awesome looking place with Corvettes and great graphics. It’s wonderful in the film. In the book, it’s a shitty little shack in between two houses with a couple of dirty cabs parked in front of it. I had to resist all the story training I got at Warner’s, which is to amp it up, to stage it bigger, to make more of everything. In this case, to keep it down where it was.
Another:
The first chapter of that book [The Hunter] is so well written it makes me want to puke, but it was like there’s nothing visual left if you put the prose down. It’s all there. It’s an external description, people’s reaction to the guy. So it’s like, “You know what? Let’s take a good chunk of space here and see if we can achieve the feeling of that chapter purely through the visuals that he’s directing. Right down to the holes in his shoe.
Set aside some time, bookmark it if you have to, but make sure you read the whole thing. There are very few articles that I save to my hard drive to make sure that they are preserved for posterity if the hosting website ever vanishes. This one I did.
Read it here.
(I have also linked this at the Extras page)
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If you’re interested, MySpace Comics posted previews of two full issues of Criminal, and it looks like they’re still around. I help maintain a fan blog for Criminal, and I linked to both previews here:
http://criminalcomic.blogspot.com/2008/02/bullets-myspace-wizard-newsarama-blast.html
Each preview is the first chapter of a self-contained story arc, and each arc has been collected in trade paperbacks. There are now four trade collections out, and as good as the first story is, I believe they’ve only gotten better.
Criminal’s currently on a brief, half-year hiatus as Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips work on a comic mini-series called “Incognito,” about a supervillian in witness protection and which Brubaker describes as “an apocalyptic pulp noir.” The next issue should be published around August.
First time I’m commenting here: you have a very cool site. I’m just now discovering Parker, by way of Westlake’s stuff in Hard Case Crime, which was featured in one of the few ads in the monthly Criminal comic. (Since the comic is creator-owned, the monthly issues are very heavy on actual content, and the issues feature additional material not found in the trade paperbacks, including an interview with HCC’s Charles Ardai.)
I’m really looking forward to Darwyn Cooke’s Parker comics, and I’ve taken the liberty of linking to one of your early blog posts on the topic.
If you like Criminal, you might also like Sleeper and Incognito, which have more superhero tropes, but I can say this with a good deal of confidence: those guys recommending Criminal are probably right. If you like Hard Case Crime and like what’s been shown so far of Cooke’s Parker, you should get a real helluva kick out of Criminal.
and i also brubaker wrote i comic called point plank, that is the prequel to sleeper
Yeah, Brubaker wrote Point Blank and Sleeper — the latter also featuring art by Sean Phillips — which told the story of a spy deep undercover in a powerful criminal organization. When his one contact falls into a coma, he’s “out in the cold,” where everyone on both sides thinks he’s a villain. It’s set in the superhero universe of DC’s WildStorm imprint, but the story is very self-contained, so that you wouldn’t need any prior knowledge of the world in which the story resides.
I believe a new edition of Point Blank just came out…
http://dccomics.com/wildstorm/graphic_novels/?gn=3741
…and it appears that new, less expensive collections of the two “seasons” of Sleeper are on their way:
http://dccomics.com/wildstorm/graphic_novels/?gn=11754
But fans of hard-boiled noir should really check out CRIMINAL first, since it doesn’t have any of the trappings of aliens, superpowers, and secret identities.