Tomasi and Gleason On Superman's Upcoming Tribute to Darwyn Cooke and The New Frontier

Warning: mild spoilers ahead for Superman #8, due out next week.Next week's Superman #8 from Peter [...]

By Russ Burlingame

Warning: mild spoilers ahead for Superman #8, due out next week.

Next week's Superman #8 from Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason is going to blow the doors off your local comic shop.

The issue plays off of the events of Superman #7 -- a small-scale, quiet, family-driven story in which it's referenced that due to his recent feinting spell, Jonathan "Smith" was given a couple of extra days to work on a science project.

Superman-008
(Photo: DC Entertainment)

When Jon and his father Superman near completion of the project, it takes off under its own power and if last week's issue was small-scale and quiet, Superman #8 is the biggest, most bombastic issue yet as Superman, Superboy, and Krypto are inexplicably transported to Dinosaur Island.

That much you knew from the solicitation text, if you read up on that kind of thing. But what's been held back until now is that the story they're taking part in is a tribute to the late, Eisner-winning cartoonist Darwyn Cooke, whose miniseries DC: The New Frontier is arguably the most famous story to feature Dinosaur Island in recent memory.

Cooke passed away after a short bout with cancer in May, leaving the comics community in shock at the loss of the beloved and talented 53-year-old transplant from the animation industry.

"Pat and I are big, big Darwyn Cooke fans," Tomasi told ComicBook.com during a recent interview. "I loved what he did in New Frontier, and I loved the period piece, and I loved what he did with the old heroes. I especially love The Losers, because as a kid, I actually loved, aside from some of the superhero stuff, I was a big fan of DC's other genres. Especially the War of the Western stuff, and the horror."

"For me, having not have spoken to Darwyn in a long time, it just felt like something Pat and I wanted to do -- just tip our hat to a consummate professional and a consummate storyteller," Tomasi added. "It really got us motivated in a way. Really wanted to do a story that shined a light on his magnum opus."

Of course, DC recently launched Future Quest, a mash-up series featuring the action heroes of Hanna-Barbera, which writer Jeff Parker admitted was patterned after New Frontier, as well, with Cooke even contributing early ideas before he passed away.

"New Frontier was to be a model for how this could all happen," Parker told us in the interview linked above. "Really, even if [DC] hadn't said that to me, it still would've been, just because that book looms in my reading so large. It's still my favorite DC thing of the past forty years."

Since the DC Rebirth soft relaunch in May and June, many of the publisher's characters -- especially Superman -- have had their "grim and gritty" factor dialed way down. Both in and out of story, characters and creators have discussed the idea that Rebirth represents a restoration of hope and legacy -- that there is a war going on between the forces of hope and of cynicism, and Rebirth is about embracing hope.

In that way, Tomasi said, Cooke's New Frontier fits like a glove.

"New Frontier is just full of hope, and especially the way it ends," Tomasi said. "The moving forward, and the era. [The idea that] superheroes are good for us. They want to do good. They want to save people. They want to do all these great things. The darkness hasn't come around the edges, so to speak. That's a thematic aspect. Pat and I took great pains, when we were developing the stories for Superman, and were really keen on making sure it really stayed that way."

"Pat was very adamant about making sure, it stayed an all ages book in a way," Tomasi added, saying that it wasn't an All-Ages book as far as the marketplace is concerned, but that their approach was to make the book as accessible as possible to the widest possible audience. "Pat really wanted to keep it like something that everybody could pick up. Superman is for everybody. Everybody can pick it up. It can be intense, it can be heart-on-its-sleeve, action-packed, emotional, character-based. All that stuff."

"There's people that don't have kids, that read it, too, and I feel like that's kind of the key that Pete and I have really zeroed in on," Gleason said. "Even if you're not a father, a mother, parent, everyone is then someone's kid at some point. Having Jon in the mix really lets us look at Superman through that child's eyes, that we all had at some point, and I think people are discovering again."

Superman #8 is on sale in print and digitally on October 5, 2016. You can request a copy at your local comic shop or pre-order a digital copy on ComiXology.

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