Denys Cowan Refuses to Slow Down

When Denys Cowan got the call that he would be inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame, his first reaction wasn’t pride. It was panic.

“At first, I was like, oh man, I don’t want a Hall of Fame award—that means everything’s over,” he says. “I’m still working.”

A friend set him straight, telling him that the honor isn’t a lifetime achievement award, but rather a way of “just recognizing you for what you’ve done.” The gold statue was sitting unboxed at his home at the time of this interview.

Cowan laughs about it now, but he wants one thing to be clear: “I don’t want to be past tense yet.”

Among Cowan’s greatest achievements over his nearly five decades in comics is cofounding, in 1993, Milestone Media, whose comics imprint represented a major breakthrough for Black superhero stories.

The line’s heroes included Icon (a Superman-like alien with Booker T. Washington–style politics) and Rocket (the modern Black teenager who becomes his partner), as well as Cowan’s own co-creation, Hardware, a genius scientist who builds high-tech armor and weapons to fight urban crime. Milestone’s most famous creation, the superpowered teenager Static, was adapted into the popular 2000s animated series, Static Shock, proving that Black-owned comics characters could find mainstream success.

Though the imprint shuttered in 1997, it was never forgotten by fans, leading DC Comics to relaunch the line with new books in 2021, and even republish the long out-of-print original comics starting in 2022.

Cowan is quick to share the credit for Milestone’s enduring legacy, citing his cofounders Dwayne McDuffie, Derek Dingle, Michael Davis, and Christopher Priest, as well as Reginald Hudlin, who oversaw the line’s recent resurrection.

“I accepted it for me, but also for all those guys,” Cowan says of the Eisner honor.

That same sense of loyalty drew him into his next project, Beast Mode 510. The new graphic novel, published by AWA and hitting shelves October 6, is built around actor and former NFL superstar Marshawn Lynch. Cowan’s yearslong friendship with AWA chief creative officer Axel Alonso was a major factor in his involvement. “If he asks me to do something, nine times out of ten I always say yes,” Cowan says of Alonso.

But the real draw was getting to build a story around Lynch, whose breathtaking athleticism and camera-ready charisma made him an icon on par with Milestone’s heroes. His old NFL nickname, “Beast Mode,” even sounds like a superhero moniker, and fit perfectly as the book’s title.

The story is “totally unlike anything I’ve ever drawn before,” Cowan says; Allen calls that “the ultimate compliment” coming from such a veteran artist

The titular character of Beast Mode, who is based on Lynch, is the fixer that the city of Oakland deserves. He’s a freelance sleuth who keeps cool until someone pushes him into, well, beast mode. The story centers on a missing cat and a secret birthday party for his mother that spiral into a globe-spanning conspiracy. Allen built the book to feel unlike a typical superhero story, something closer to the TV series Atlanta than the usual capes-and-tights formula.

“We had to get Marshawn right—–how he looks, how he moves—and then make him a superhero figure, which wasn’t hard, because he’s already larger than life,” Cowan says. One of the biggest challenges, he notes, was doing justice to the city at the heart of the book. “It’s very Oakland-centric, and it should be,” he says of the story. “That’s where [Lynch is] from, and he’s so proud of it.”

Readers will notice similar DNA in Beast Mode 510 that they’ve seen with Milestone classics like StaticandHardware; bold figures paired whose hometowns carry their own weight in the story. That lineage isn’t lost on Allen, a longtime fan of Cowan, who, in addition to his comics work, drew the album cover for GZA’s 1995 hip-hop masterpiece Liquid Swords.

“I grew up reading Deathlok, the Wu-Tang covers, the Milestone legacy,” Allen says. “To get a chance to work with him, these are the things you dream about as a writer.”

Ask Cowan how he actually builds a page, and you’ll hear about his time-honored rituals as well as self-doubt, even after being in the business for almost 50 years.

“I look at the script, and then I panic,” he says. Rough breakdowns come next, panel by panel, and then he finishes the pages by hand: “I like to feel what I’m doing.”

Cowan’s blunt about what’s shifted for Black creators since he broke in, and what hasn’t. More writers and artists are working now, he says, shouting out such creators as Stephanie Williams, Sanford Greene, and Morgan Hampton. He noted that social media has been helpful for getting more Black creators’ work noticed. What hasn’t changed, he says, is pushback toward Black women, who are still fighting for room in the industry.

“The most creative work is being done by Black women in comics right now,” Cowan says. “That’s such a vital voice.”

His advice for young Black creators today comes from watching how far the door has actually opened. He found Nicholas Draper-Ivy, artist of the recent Milestone revival comic series Static: Season One, on Instagram.

“I just happened to see his work and think this guy could draw,” Cowan says. “The internet is an excellent way to get noticed.”