New Frontier auteur Darwyn Cooke appears to have taken up the mantle of unabashed pseudoicon-worshipping nostalgia of the sort occasionally visible in the work of Alex Ross and Mark Waid with a zeal unrivalled this side of John Byrne. The latest target of Cooke’s ire is Mark Millar, who has violated Cooke’s delicate sensiblities by making the Hulk into, essentially, a giant cannibalistic prison rapist. (Link courtesy of Franklin Harris, who’s got a bunch of cool links up there.)
Your mileage may vary when it comes to Millar’s brand of vulgar deconstructionism–like Jim Henley, I can’t quite decide if Millar’s making some sort of point about how we glibly condone bastardry when it’s done by “our bastards,” or if he simply likes blowing shit up; at any rate I like his Captain America–but it’s clear at this point that Cooke has bought into the big corporate superhero companies’ attempts to transform their cheaply churned-out pulp heroes into worship-worthy Olympians. I detected this back when Cooke was going after Frank Miller for mistreating fictional characters in The Dark Knight Strikes Again, and with this new revelation I’m increasingly glad I jumped off the New Frontier-buying bandwagon. I don’t need to spend all that money on some long hagiography of Green Arrow and the Blue Beetle.
(Which is not to say I’ll never jump back on–I like his art and his storytelling style so much on their own merits that I’ll be sorely tempted by the eventual collection. Moreover, Cooke comes across as far less fundamentalist about these issues in his exchange with Millar than he did during his assault on Miller. But if the future of superhero writing is to be with either Cooke on one side or Miller and Millar on the other, I’m pretty comfortable with the side I’m on.)