Skip to content

Tag: obituary

Darwyn Cooke 1962 — 2016

parker darwyn cooke
parker darwyn cooke 2

I was sadden to hear that Canadian cartoonist Darwyn Cooke had died earlier this month from lung cancer, age 53. I never had the opportunity to meet Cooke in person, but I liked his adaptations of Donald Westlake’s Parker novels very much, and thought that The New Frontier, his elegant tribute to Silver Age comics, could reinvigorate a superhero genre mired in cynicism. His work — reminiscent of Will Eisner, whose The Spirit he also drew — was full of charm and joy. Cooke’s friend Nathalie Atkinson wrote his obituary for the Globe & Mail:

Although he was a proud Canadian, it was John F. Kennedy’s Camelot – with its Cold War tensions, social upheaval and cool aesthetics – that held an enduring fascination for him. His masterwork ‘DC: The New Frontier’ (2004) sets the origins of the Justice League and the characters of the DC Silver Age into a powerful narrative set in the America of that era. The six-issue comic book series, named for the JFK’s 1960 Democratic nomination acceptance speech, would win Mr. Cooke the first of his 13 Eisner Awards, the industry’s most prestigious accolade, and he won many of its others – Reubens, Harveys and several Shusters, the Canadian comics awards named for the Canadian co-creator of Superman… His dynamic illustration, panel design and thoughtful approach to writing transcended mere nostalgia, whether he was telling hard-boiled stories of anti-heroes or exploring heroism through superheroes. Although whenever it was suggested to Mr. Cooke that he was an auteur he’d reply, “I’m more like John McTiernan,” the director of Die Hard, one of his favourite movies. “That’s the kind of creator he thought he was,” his friend Michael Cho says. “An entertainer.”

new frontier darwyn cooke

Comments closed

Adrian Frutiger: His Type Designs Show You the Way

The New York Times obituary for type designer Adrian Fruitger who died at the age of 87 on September 10  in his native Switzerland:

The son of a weaver, Adrian Johann Frutiger was born on May 24, 1928, in Unterseen, near Interlaken, Switzerland. As a youth he hoped to be a sculptor, but his father discouraged him from plying so insecure a trade. Apprenticed to a typesetter as a teenager, he found his life’s work.

In 1952, after graduating from the School of Applied Arts in Zurich, Mr. Frutiger moved to Paris, where he was a designer with the type foundry Deberny & Peignot, eventually becoming its artistic director. There he created some of his earliest fonts, among them Président, Méridien and Ondine; in the early 1960s he founded his own studio in Paris.

Commissioned to create signage for airports and subway systems, Mr. Frutiger soon realized that fonts that looked good in books did not work well on signs: The characters lacked enough air to be readable at a distance. The result, over time, was Frutiger, a sans serif font designed to be legible at many paces, and from many angles.

One of Frutiger’s hallmarks is the square dot over the lowercase “i.” The dot’s crisp, angled corners keep it from resolving into a nebulous flyspeck that appears to merge with its stem, making “i” look little different from “l” or “I.” (For designers of sans serif fonts, the gold standard is to make a far-off “Illinois” instantly readable.)

For more on Frutiger and his work, there is an interesting interview with the designer in the spring 1999 issue of Eye Magazine.

Comments closed