Hussein, Cooke revised Ellen Dolan and Ebony White, in particular discarding White's exaggerated blackface-inspired appearance and dialect. In June 2007, Cooke and J. Bone won a Joe Shuster Award for "Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Artists" for their work on Batman/The Spirit, and Cooke won "Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Cartoonist" for his work on The Spirit. Despite intending a second year of the series, Cooke announced at the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con that his run on The Spirit would conclude after one year, after artist J. Bone had to step down, and an editorial reshuffle at DC moved editors Scott Dunbier and Kristy Quinn from the book, believing that resulting quality would not be up to his standards. Darwyn Cooke also wrote the first six-issue story arc of the Superman monthly series Superman Confidential, which debuted on November 1, 2006, and featured stories set in Superman's early career. As Cooke developed the plot with artist Tim Sale, he realized he had no creative hook for a Superman story until discovering that, surprisingly, none had been told regarding the character's early fear and uncertainty at the limits of his invulnerability. In June 2007, Cooke was awarded the Joe Shuster Award for "Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Writer" for Superman Confidential. Feeling more comfortable with human characters like Catwoman and Batman, Cooke nonetheless had pitched one other unrealized Superman graphic novel around 2002 in collaboration with artist and future Justice League: The New Frontier director David Bullock. In 2008, Cooke collaborated with Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray on an issue of Jonah Hex out of a desire to work with the pair, write a Western story, as well as craft a cliché-breaking tale for Hex set within Canada. Cooke playfully made fun of American conventional wisdom that Canadian weather was always a blizzard, but accepted the premise as a central plot element. Cooke was the writer/artist of Before Watchmen: Minutemen and the writer of Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre in 2012–2013. After originally being pitched to author the entire Before Watchmen series, Cooke was able to reduce his commitment to only two books, eventually accepting the project after successfully conceptualizing the Minutemen series. Cooke did not view Watchmen as "the Holy Grail" of comics, nor did he feel concerned about original Watchmen author Alan Moore's opinion on the Before Watchmen series, but he did initially turn down the project for two years out of concern