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Comic-Con talked to Darwyn Cooke for our last issue of Update, about his work on DC's new series, Will Eisner's The Spirit. Portions of this interview were featured on this website as part of an extended talk with Darwyn.

» Click here to read that interview

CCI: You worked in animation for a number of years including at Warner Bros. Animation. What's it like going full circle and coming back to work on New Frontier?

Darwyn: It was pretty weird, in a good way. It's been probably seven years since I worked with the guys at Warners' and I still have a lot of friends there. My time there was great and I got to know so many of the guys who ended up working on The New Frontier, so it was like old home week. It was a lot of fun.

CCI: New Frontier is an epic work. How much of it will we see translated to the movie version and how difficult was it to let some of the story go?

Darwyn: It's like a lot of things: it feels a lot worse than it is at first. We were all pretty daunted by trying to compress this material down to a 70-minute video. But Stan Berkowitz did a great job of objectively going through the story and finding out what needed to stay and what could go. The screenplay he pulled together did a very good job of that, so it was just a matter of us playing with it a bit more. It was really kind of difficult and hard to let go, but in the end we were all pretty amazed at how much of the story actually made it into the video and how much does feel like the book.

CCI: New Frontier is very much of a particular era, the late 1940s through the 50s. Is that maintained in the movie?

Darwyn: We certainly did our best and there were some hilarious moments when the prop designers were designing things like pink telephones from 1959. So yeah, we had notes for them (laughs) but all in all the entire crew really embraced the challenge of trying to put that together. And our partners overseas will let us know if we've succeeded or not, but what we tried to do with it is not to use any techniques that will make it clear that this was made after 1955. We want it to feel like it was made with the resources and technology available at the time. Granted we are using digital to support what we're doing everywhere we can, but we want it to look traditional.

So in everything from the color palette on down, I think we've done pretty good in scoring it. I did design most of the characters so I was able to control the wardrobe and things like that. I think we got it. I mean, until you see the footage you just don't know.

CCI: New Frontier included a lot of history and social issues. Will we see that transferred to the movie?

Darwyn: Again, we were in a tough spot because we had to cut so much material. But its incredible how much we've managed to maintain. It's in short bursts, but we're using devices like Batman looking through an old style microfilm catalogue, so we get these slides that roll by with Rosa Parks, or the Russians, and all this kind of material that we've used as much as we can for backstory. And I really think it all comes through pretty clearly.

CCI: The new DVD films are not beholden to the continuity that's on, say, the Justice League TV series.

Darwyn: If they had been adapting this in the "Adventures" style that would have been great. But the fact that this was going to get to stand alone is what made it really exciting, and that they wanted it to look like the book is like, "Wow, what a great opportunity."