Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter

by Darwyn Cooke (Adapted by), Richard Stark

Overview

Darwyn Cooke, Eisner-Award-winning writer/artist, sets his artistic sights on bringing to life one of the true classics of crime fiction: Richard Stark's Parker. Stark was a pseudonym used by the revered and multi-award-winning author, Donald Westlake. The Hunter, the first book in the Parker series, is the story of a man who hits New York head-on like a shotgun blast to the chest. Betrayed by the woman he loved and double-crossed by his partner in crime, Parker makes his way cross-country with only one thought burning in his mind - to coldly exact his revenge and reclaim what was taken from him!

Product Details

BN ID:	2940000962022
Publisher:	Idea & Design Works, LLC
Publication date:	11/07/2011
Series:	Parker
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	283,287
File size:	48 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Richard Stark is the most famous pseudonym of world-renowned author Donald Westlake (1933-2008). In 1962 he created the master thief Parker and began a series of novels that have been recognized as seminal works of crime fiction. Several of Westlake’s books have been adapted by Hollywood and Westlake’s adaptation of The Grifters earned him an Academy Award nomination for best motion picture screenplay. Westlake has won numerous awards for his fiction and in 1993 the Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master, the highest honor bestowed by that prestigious society.

Darwyn Cooke (1962-2015) was a graphic designer and animator who turned his attention toward cartooning in the late nineties. Known primarily for his work on the DC line of superheroes, Cooke always had an affinity for crime fiction and has often cited the Parker books as a great source of creative inspiration. Cooke has won multiple Eisner, Harvey, and Shuster awards, as well as the National Cartoonist Society’s Best Series award. In 2008 Cooke was Emmy-nominated for the animated adaptation of his magnum opus, DC: The New Frontier.

Editorial Reviews

…a wonderfully engrossing graphic-novel adaptation…While the situations may be Mr. Stark's, the stylized imagery is Mr. Cooke's. (At this point in his career, I would happily buy his graphic adaptation of a phone book)…Mr. Cooke depicts his characters with such emotion and conveys so much with gesture and composition that, except for the specifics of the hijacking, you could almost follow the story by the images alone. And when the words and graphics are in harmony, the effect is deliciously brutal.
—The New York Times

George Gene Gustines

…a near-perfect match of artist and character. Cooke's a powerful enough cartoonist that his images do most of the heavy lifting here…At times, he seems to be demonstrating how few brushstrokes it can take to communicate a precise degree of amoral machismo. Parker's a very bad man, but it's hard to take your eyes off him.
—The Washington Post

Douglas Wolk

Cooke has transformed the first volume of the late Donald Westlake's long-running Parker series (written under the pseudonym Richard Stark), about an indomitable outlaw, into a smashing graphic novel, making its ferocious mood and retro aesthetics the stars of the show. Parker belongs to the bottom of the urban jungle's economic strata, but the top of its food chain—anyone who stands between him and his revenge is doomed, whether they're trying to resist him or just happen to be in the way. As the book begins, he's returning to New York City in the Kennedy era with murder in his eyes: double-crossed by his wife and partners, he's come back to kill whoever needs killing to get his money. Cooke has a real affinity for the tough-as-hammers tone of Westlake's story. His Parker doesn't seem to enjoy or dislike slaughter (or anything else); he's just doing what it takes to reach his goal, with a certain dispassionate savoir faire. And Cooke's delicious two-color artwork nails the look of the early '60s, from hairstyles and tiki bars to the illustrative technique that defined the era everywhere except for comics: angular caricatures that capture his characters' motion and expressions with a bare minimum of elegantly rugged lines. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Graphic-novel version of dark 1950s crime fiction. Donald E. Westlake, who died last year, was known mainly for his humorous caper tales, but he also wrote-under the pseudonym Richard Stark-a famous hard-boiled series featuring a stoic and brutal professional thief named Parker. The Hunter (1952) was the first of these; it had Parker exacting revenge on fellow thieves who betrayed him and was made into two films, Point Blank (1967) and Payback (1999). Canadian comic-book writer and artist Cooke (The Spirit, Vol. 2, 2008, etc.) has stylishly adapted it here as the first in a projected series of Parker graphic novels. Cooke has kept the story in its '50s setting, and his retro-flavored illustration style brilliantly fits this material. But his obvious reverence for the source at times works against him; one flashback section is so text-heavy as to nearly crowd out the illustrations. However, when Cooke frees himself from words-as in the opening pages, which have little text or dialogue-his work truly shines. Fans of the noirest noir, such as Frank Miller's Sin City series, will find a lot to like in this well-executed adaptation.

Kirkus Reviews

"Parker's a very bad man, but it's hard to take your eyes off him." –Washington Post

"A tremendous feat of compression and interpretation. When Westlake wrote as Richard Stark, he wrote starkly, using minimal description and the tersest dialogue. Cooke, perhaps best known for his work on DC: The New Frontier and another remarkable adaptation, his reinvention of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, somehow pares down the story of The Hunter even more radically than the Stark novel." –Entertainment Weekly

From the Publisher