Darwyn Cooke's bold plan with his 2003/04 "New Frontier" miniseries was to provide a uniting storyline for all the major DC characters from the late 1950s, including not only such classic "Silver Age" characters as the Barry Allen...
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Darwyn Cooke's bold plan with his 2003/04 "New Frontier" miniseries was to provide a uniting storyline for all the major DC characters from the late 1950s, including not only such classic "Silver Age" characters as the Barry Allen Flash and the Hal Jordan Green Lantern but also such B-list adventure stars as the Challengers of the Unknown and the Suicide Squad, in their proper Cold War context. Superman and Wonder Woman thus become spearheads for the Eisenhower foreign policy in Indochina; Lois Lane is portrayed -- somewhat jarringly -- as a hawkish redbaiter, while Hal Jordan's employer Ferris Aircraft becomes positioned at the very heart of the 1950s American military/industrial complex. In narrative terms, Cooke has some trouble keeping his pace going. There are too many repeated tense encounters between government agents and the series' central heroes, and in his attempts to bring in every DC-National comic character from the period Cooke allows too many boring langours (especially in the opening sequence involving the Losers and a later episode involving the Viking Prince). And the basic plot structure of the miniseries (collected in paperback in a two-part series), like so many recent comics miniseries of the last twenty years, owes perhaps too much to Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu." But when he really gets going, as in the prize fight in Las Vegas sequence (spotlighting a battle between Flash and Captain Cold) in the first of the two-part collected miniseries, Cooke can really cook with gas. Best of all, he's an absolutely marvelous visual artist, and his compositional sense is superb on almost every page and panel. He does a splendid job evoking the famous "Googie" design of buildings, furniture, and signage from the period, and his cartoonish approach to drawing characters seems simultaneously reminiscent of the animation from the period while also doing a very strong job conveying facial expression and emotion (particularly with the characters of Barry Allen, Ace Morgan, and Carol Ferris). Buying this series either in hardcover or in paperback is an expensive proposition, but it is one of the finest and most visually inventive works DC has produced in years, and thus worth the cost. Comment | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)
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