Cartoonist Darwyn Cooke (1962-2016) got his start in the Toronto magazine world back in 1984 when he was hired as the art director for Music Express. He did all the design, graphics and even some photography for that magazine, and its sister mag Metallion, until he left to work for one of Canada’s biggest fashion magazines, Flare, in 1988. Looking at these issues of Music Express, you can see how Cooke was applying a retro mid-century design sense to its pages in a style that nevertheless still retains a very hip 1980s feel. The pages from this 1985 issue are crammed with Cooke’s spot illustrations and there is even a house ad done in the form of a comic strip. This is some of Cooke’s earliest published comics.
3 comments:
i ran across a stack of these mags and gave them to Darwyn. He said he used to have a bunch but they were lost in the trunk of a car he sold years ago. Some great spot illustrations and caricature work. One had a terrific full page illustration of Paul Hogan during the Crocodile Dundee craze.
Cool. I've looked through a few more but haven't found any sequential work yet!
My mom have the old magazines with his work within it. She use to be the Metal Nanny with Darwyn and he drew her as a comic character that was publish within the magazine
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