They say you should never meet your heroes, but I think I can speak for both Dave and myself when I say that we consider ourselves very lucky to have been able to spend the time we did in Darwyn Cooke's company.

The news of Darwyn's death this week was absolutely devastating, not only to those who knew him, but those who love his work. And there are a lot of people who love his work.

I was certainly not close with him, but he was always very warm and friendly and generous to me and I loved every opportunity I got to talk to him. I am very sad that I won't have that opportunity again. He was an unparalleled talent in the comic book world, and he was a tremendous presence here in the local comic book scene in Halifax. He was a lot of fun, and he will be dearly missed.

In this episode, Dave and I share our own memories of him, and we look back at his incredible body of work. The news of his death is still very fresh, and we are very sad, but we laugh a lot throughout the episode because the stories about Darwyn tend to be pretty funny. And we prefer to laugh than cry.

We talk about Darwyn for the first part of the episode, but we decided to still include some of our usual content in the second half. Mostly because I needed to talk about something else for a little while. So we end with some fun comic news stuff (and talk about Civil War a little more).

Here are some of the sketches Darwyn did for Dave that were mentioned:

We mention that Darwyn was handing out rough pencil pages from New Frontier at his Absolute Edition signing at Strange Adventures. Because he is crazy generous. Here is the one that Dave got:

And this is the one I got:

I've always wanted to get that framed together with the finished page, but I can never bring myself to cut up a copy of the comic.

Here is a sketch of Batman Darwyn did for me:

And this is what was written in the copy of his DC art book that he gave me on the last day I saw him:

And here is the clip of Darwyn talking about Nathan Boone's short film, Arty, while on a panel. Because he was supportive and nice.

I'm sad, guys. This is really, really horrible, and I am truly sorry for his close friends and loved ones, especially Marsha.

I'll leave it there. I'm not going to link to the other dumb things we talk about. Please buy Darwyn's books if you don't own them all already. And if you do own them, re-read them. And consider making a donation to Hero Initiative or the Canadian Cancer Society in his memory.

Oh, and I was not kidding about Mitchell being terrible at drawing Venom: