Parker, a classic anti-hero of pulp fiction, gets updated by artist Darwyn Cooke

[National Post, 8 may 2014]

David Berry

The compromised heroes and outright antiheroes who populate crime fiction are not exactly what you would call nice guys, but even by those standards Parker stands out as a particularly hard case. Created by Donald Westlake under the pen name Richard Stark in the 1960s, the career criminal embodies the darkest shadings of the author’s pseudonymous surname: extreme, severe and brutally blunt, he does not let morals stand in the way of getting what he needs. Actually, he doesn’t seem to be aware that morals are even a thing that impact your choices.

So, naturally, he spoke to graphic artist Darwyn Cooke almost immediately.

“In all honesty, the same thing that’s kind of attracted me to all the characters I feel an affinity for,” Cooke explains over the phone with a gruff kind of thrill in his voice. “This notion of a guy that sees the world for what it is within the context of his own experience and makes his own set of rules up — and then has the wits and fortitude to find a way to live within that.”

As he alludes, Cooke is no stranger to characters who bend the world to their view of it. Though he got his drawing start on Batman: The Animated Series, and made a major splash with DC’s award-winning The New Frontier series, he has since dived into more morally complex heroes like Jonah Hex and in the Before Watchmen: Minutemen series. Though even those pale in comparison to Parker, whose old-school noir stories Cooke has been adapting since 2009, with the hardcover editions debuting at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival May 10.

For instance, in his first appearance, The Hunter, Parker is trying to track down the criminals who double-crossed him and left him for dead (now that’s a crime set-up). One of those happens to be his wife (well, ex, I guess), whose body Parker ends up dumping in a park with the face cut up, so her picture won’t make the papers and make his targets suspicious — he is that kind of ruthless pragmatist.

Though Cooke admits it was a hard scene to depict — he does it with a minimalism that is less graphic but more gutting than the description — he thought it cuts to the quick of the character, and what Weslake, and to a degree all crime fiction, is trying to get at.

“I think Parker was young Don Weslake’s rumination on perhaps a certain side of his personality,” Cooke says. “What he did, which was really, really new at the time, was he didn’t adorn that — he didn’t judge it. He doesn’t make it good, bad or indifferent. He just presents it.

“I think these crime stories give people an opportunity to explore feelings they can’t be honest about within the bounds of polite society,” he adds. “I think that’s the attraction to criminals all the way around.”

He’ll have more of a chance to delve into the appeal of crime on May 10, when TCAF presents The Killing, Stanley Kubrick’s first feature, a clever, tricky film about a racetrack robbery gone wrong. Cooke will share the stage with occasional collaborator Ed Brubaker, whose Captain America comics formed the basis for the recent Winter Soldier film, and who, more germanely to the discussion, writes the incredibly inventive Criminal and Fatale series, which have helped revive crime fiction among graphic artists.

For Cooke, at least, crime stories have never lost their appeal: he easily rattles off a dozen or so of his favourite writers, from Chandler down to Ellroy, and speaks with the casual assuredness of the hardcore fan about what he likes. When I ask him, half-jokingly, if he’s ever actually tried to apply the ruggedly independent mindset of the fictional criminal to his own life, he even seems to have sincerely thought about the question before.

“Well, c’mon, these are fiction novels,” he says with a laugh. “But, on the other hand, there are people that live this way. There must be. Crime exists, and people will never stop being fascinated with that. It’s a whole society that runs parallel to ours, in a grey area.”

Darwyn Cooke appears at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and will take part in a conversation with Ed Brubaker and a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing May 10 at 5 p.m. at Toronto’s Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. For more info, visit torontocomics.com