Dc The New Frontier

Coming up with a way to stitch together the birth of DC’s Silver Age is daunting enough. Stitching it together with elements of our own, real continuity (so to speak), such as the Korean War, the start of the Viet Name conflict, and the civil rights movement, that’s insane, particularly since Silver Age heroes were the completely cheery and sanitized compared to the social upheaval readers were looking to escape from.

But to then stitch in the heroes before the heroes, to make references to DC’s war comics and those-who-came-before, such as the JSA, that’s genius. And you’d be hard-pressed to find someone to say Darwin Cooke’s New Frontier isn’t genius. After leaving behind a comic industry that didn’t think he had what it took, Cooke found himself doing commercial illustration and working in animation (the fantastic Batman Beyond opener is all him),only to return to comics and make what instantly became enpar with Batman: Dark Knight or Kingdom Come. He made a classic.

The book is a wealth of homage and nods, while remaining a spectacular primer for readers new to the DC Universe. For those that come in as new readers, you might want to check out the Absolute hardcover edition, as the back features a page by page guide by Cooke, wherein he takes you by the hand and walks you through his lovefor the comics he (and many of us) grew up with. You may just find some old comics you’d like to track down (I’d recommend DC’s phonebook compilation of their Silver Age series