I started writing a lengthy blog post about Darwyn Cooke’s masterful New Frontier back in March after reading it for the second time, long before I learned that he had fallen victim to “aggressive cancer”.
This is not that post.
In that post I go on at length about the brilliance of the work, how it manages the herculean and seemingly impossible task of combining nostalgia and revisionism into a single, robust narrative, surpassing both and becoming far, far greater than the sum of its parts. I’m still writing it and maybe you’ll see it some day. Maybe not. It’s a tough nut to crack and probably beyond my meager skills as a writer and a thinker, at least at present. If 2016 has taught us anything it is that the clock is ticking for all of us, winding down as it approaches the last hour.
There is a bit of that post in this one but the tone is wholly different. This is far less critical and far more personal.
