Darwyn Cooke should shut his big gob

Via a long chain links, I ended up at Abahy Khosla’ short post about Darwyn Cooke’s Rolling Stone interview:

I guess the first thing I would say is, I understand how you feel. I have certainly felt that way about things. I would say I understand that kind of an emotional response to something that meaningful. I think it’s all fair game. I’ve read some pretty nasty things said about myself, for example. I can deal with that. There are times when I wish some of these guys – because I think some of them know better – I wish they would take a moment and stop and think. And instead of referring to a man like [veteran artist] Joe Kubert as a scab or a disgrace, you might want to stop for a minute and think with this diverse group of talent involved with the project, maybe there is more to the story than they know. Maybe there are reasons people are willing to work on this. Maybe its not as clear cut as a lot of people think. I’m speaking about this from a distance. I was never in the room, while anything went on, but maybe there’s just more to the story than people think.

To be fair, the difference between working on Before Watchmen, where the originally creators were –legally!– screwed out of their rights and the primary creator has strongly stated his disdain for these prequels and working on your average DC or Marvel company owned titles, where said screwing was done decades ago and most of the original creators are safely dead or bought off, is one of degree not kind. And you certainly cannot fault somebody like Joe Kubert for doing any of those Watchmen prequels. He has worked all his life with the constrains of American commercial comics publishing; this is just another assignment for him.

But that doesn’t mean Darwyn Cooke should get away with his passive aggressive complaining here. He is more than just a hired hand on this project, he has been an active propagandist for DC and its actions, happy to be a cog in its machine (as John Byrne once was at Marvel). He’s somebody who has the kind of talent, opportunities and reputation to do anything he wants to do in comics, but choses to be a company man, working on endless revamps (Catwoman), adaptations (Parker and re-imaginations (New Frontier, doing the same thing as Roy Thomas’ The Last Days of the Justice Society and James Robinson’s Golden Age, but in a slicker art style).

He isn’t the first cartoonist to be happier working on other people’s creations of course, but he does combine this lack of creativity with an aggressive public persona as company spokesman, attacking Alan Moore for being annoyed about the Watchmen prequels, lending himself and his prestige to these attacks, revealing himself to be, well, kind of a douche.

Darwyn Cooke is a slick but limited imitator of better artists, somebody who will at best be a footnote in comics history in fifty years time, while Alan Moore is one of the greatest writers working in comics of the past fifty years and certainly one of the most principled ones. His attacks on Moore are as a fly buzzing a giant: harmless, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to swat the fly anyway.