Darwyn Cooke’s Next Project: Parker

Parker promo art by Darwyn Cooke

IDW will be publishing four graphic novels by Darwyn Cooke based on the early books in the series of Parker novels by Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake). The first GN is due out in mid-2009. The announcement was made at a con press conference, a lovely idea that more companies should arrange. Only not necessarily at San Diego, since everyone is aiming to break news there (and since I don’t go).

My husband KC and I are huge Darwyn Cooke fans, so I was thrilled to get a set of the promo cards (limited to 500) in the mail. (You can see one of the images with this CBR writeup; I’m surprised I haven’t seen the others online yet others are online. And I’m really pleased not to have to chase around for them — one of the benefits of being “press”.)

Parker promo art by Darwyn Cooke

You know, with this genre suddenly being hot in the comics field (Vertigo also announced a spinoff imprint called, unimaginatively, “Vertigo Crime”), I’m thinking that Andy Helfer’s Paradox Graphic Mystery line (1997-1998) was significantly ahead of its time. They only published four titles, but they had the small size (very unusual for graphic novels in that era) that made for handy reading and the emphasis on unusual, character-driven crime fiction.



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