Andrew Farago talks to Darwyn Cooke about the New Frontier movie and comic book for Animation World Magazine:
AF: Can you talk about the origins of The New Frontier, both as a comic book and as an animated feature?
DC: When New Frontier was first conceived for DC Comics, they had asked if I was interested in doing a book about Justice League, and this was sort of what I’d come up with. I realized that I didn’t want to deal with the established continuity, and I didn’t want to do anything transient. I wanted to go all the way back to the beginning and do a book that distilled everything that was wonderful about DC’s universe of characters, and bring it all together into one book, and encapsulate the spirit of the Silver Age, and what these characters meant.
I think that the continuity over the years has given these characters a chance to go off in every possible direction, and the idea of The New Frontier was to get right back to the beginning, looking at what made these characters great at the start of it, and on a deeper level than had ever been done before.
As far as it becoming a movie, I really have to put the credit for the project going forward into Greg Noveck’s hands. He’s DC’s VP, down in Hollywood. When Warners’ DTV initiative was announced, and they decided to adapt existing comic book stories, Greg was adamant that New Frontier be one of the first things they put on the schedule.
So, in terms of getting it off the ground as a movie, all I had to do was pick up the phone. Greg called and said, “We’re making it.”
