Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and ninety-eighth installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

Click here for Part 1 of this week's legends.

NOTE: If the CSBG Twitter page hits 11,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow the CSBG Twitter page!

COMIC LEGEND:

Darwyn Cooke's Batman: Ego pitch had been rejected for years until someone at DC found it and decided to publish it

STATUS:

True

I'm doing a countdown (based on YOUR votes) of the greatest one-shots and original graphic novels of all-time. In the latest batch of graphic novels, one of the books on the list is Darwyn Cooke's classic 2000 graphic novel, Batman: Ego, which sees a troubled Bruce Wayne fight against his own id, in the form of Batman, with Bruce Wayne being the representative of his own superego.

"Batman" argues that Bruce hasn't been going far enough in their pursuit of vengeance for the murders of Thomas and Martha Wayne...

Brilliant stuff, right?

Well, the problem is that Cooke came up with the idea at perhaps the worst possible time to come up with it (well, I guess before the Comics Code was relaxed in the early 1970s would be the WORST possible time, but you know what I mean), in 1994, during the middle of a comic book book that spotlighted artists that were very much different than Cooke's style.

In a Comics Journal interview with Mariksan Naso in 2016, Cooke explained what it was like to try to sell his Batman: Ego pitch in the middle of an era where a very specific style of art was dominant...

COOKE: So I thought, “You know what? This is probably my last chance to take a shot at this. I was worn out from the work I’d been doing and the way I’d been carrying on, so I took a break and that’s when I put the pitch for [Batman] Ego together. So this would be like ’94. I go to a Chicago convention. Again, like I said, in my life when I’ve wanted to do something I’ll just do it and then take it wherever I gotta take it to show people, and figure it out from there. So I get down to the show, and of course, this was the year of the big Image boom. So I’m the last thing in the world anybody wants to actually buy, a guy who draws like Alex Toth! I couldn’t have picked a worse time.

NASO: Yes … Liefeld you are not [laughter].

COOKE: Oh hey, I can remember at that show, I was in line with a girl who was a colorist, I was just chatting her up and hanging in the line, the line was for Will Portacio and he was doing portfolio reviews. He looked at my work and he [laughter] was trying to explain to me how to do the kind of work they do. It was a bad year for me to be out there with that stuff.

NASO: How did you react to that? Was he just trying to give you advice?

COOKE: Yeah, he was being earnest. He didn’t realize I’d made an aesthetic choice away from what he was doing. He thought what I needed was to have my eyes opened to the way they did it, whereas I had decided to avoid that approach. What does he know about that? I think all commentary or response to the work is good. These days it’s hard for me to get honest commentary because it’s coming from people who know me. You rarely get to hear what people really think of the work, unless it’s the odd reviewer.

I met Archie Goodwin, and I did show him the work. He said, yeah, you do a nice Year One Batman. But it didn’t go anywhere. The next time I was in New York I went by and dropped it with the DC editors, Denny O’Neil and the head of the group and the time. There again, they were sort of complimentary, but they couldn’t see any place for it or anything to do with it, so it basically died. I said, “OK, well, that failed. That was my life’s dream and I failed. Fantastic.” I went back to being an animator for commercials and trying to figure out what my next step would be, and that’s when the Journal ad came along.

The Journal ad is the one where he got a gig working for Warner Bros. in their animation department, so he got to work on DC's cartoons. He even came up with the title sequence for Batman Beyond!

However, near the turn of the century, Cooke got an interesting phone call...

“Hi. Is this Darwyn Cooke? Yeah, my name’s Mark Chiarello at DC Comics. I’ve got this thing, Batman: Ego. I found this here in the office, I was wondering, would you still be interested in doing this?”

They had hired him as the art director at DC and when they gave him the office, he was clearing out all the old pitches. Throwing them out. And he found the old pitch. And he liked it. So people ask me, “How do you get started?” And I just laugh and I go, “I don’t know! Hang-glide off of the Chrysler building. Try voodoo. I don’t know.” For me it was a really strange way around. So at that point I was working on the shows, and I said, “I’d love to do the book, but I’m really busy working on Batman for Warner Brothers right now!” And when I decided that I had had my fun with animation, that’s when Mark and I got together and I started Ego.

Man, Mark Chiarello is just a brilliant editor. He has such a wonderful eye for talent. He's basically the Archie Goodwin of the 21st Century.

Anyhow, Batman: Ego was awesome, of course, and that got Cooke set on his way at DC, although of course since he was working on a bunch of big projects that took a long time to come out, it would be a while for people to see Cooke's stuff and then it seemed like they were all out at once. It sort of reminds me of Jessica Chastain's career. Her first big break was Tree of Life, which took years to film and then she got some other work that also took some time, so it seemed like she went from nobody to SOMEbody all at once, when it had been literally years in the making (she would joke that she wasn't sure her mother's friends believed that her daughter was a movie actress because there was no evidence of her film career for YEARS).

Thanks to Mariksan Naso and the late, great Darwyn Cooke for this great story! And thanks to Mark Chiarello for finding that project.


Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed - Did George Lucas quit the Directors Guild of America because of a dispute over The Empire Strikes Back not having traditional opening credits?


Also check back soon for the final part of this week's Comic Book Legends Revealed!