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Darwyn Cooke Artwork from the Batman Black and White Collection, Volume #3
Text by Paul Grist. On display are Cooke's combination of animation and art deco chops, along with innate design and drawing skills. Notice the texture of the paper stock in the shading.
There is distortion, particularly when Cooke makes the elements fit the overall page (or panel) design whether it violates his anatomy system or perspective or not. Reminds me of Alex Toth, who came to a way of implying textures and objects without bothering to really draw them in (Cooke certainly does this less that Toth and in not the same way: Toth liked the basic 6-panel grid and background objects in a frame to create specific settings and depths, versus an anime effect to fill the panel and push the reader on to the next frame).
Detail marshaled in the manner of a Jim Lee or Neal Adams is superfluous when applied to this kind of immediate effect approach. Cooke wants the reader to assimilate the information as quickly as possible in order to make the story points stick. It seems like a contradiction: we end up gazing lovingly at the artwork regardless, but not in the same way as when Jim Lee details the tread on the bottom of Batman's boot and would have us dwell on it.
