art direction and most of the character design. Cooke praised both Berkowitz and Timm for their ability to preserve many important character moments within the necessary shortening of the story to accommodate the film's runtime, shifting the movie's focus specifically to the Justice League characters. During the scripting process, Cooke intervened to preserve both Wonder Woman and Lois Lane's places in the film, which had originally been eliminated due to time constraints. Without them, Cooke joked that "We might as well just rename this 'White Guys in the '50s,' because everything else is gone," describing the women as "the heart of the story." Cooke also admitted fearing for the film's outcome until he learned that his former Warner colleague David Bullock would be directing it, praising Bullock as "probably the only person in the world I would have picked ahead of myself to direct it." He also credited his strong previous relationships at Warner Bros. with his comfort on the project. DC Comics In the late 1990s, DC Comics art director Mark Chiarello discovered Cooke's years-old proposal for a Batman story while throwing out old pitches, and hired Cooke for what became the 2000 graphic novel Batman: Ego, marking Cooke's permanent move from animation to comics at 37 years old. Described by Cooke as "What if Batman and Bruce Wayne were able to sit down and talk about what it is they do?", the internal dialogue of Batman: Ego between Bruce Wayne and Batman was inspired by the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre. Catwoman In 2001, Cooke and writer Ed Brubaker revamped the Catwoman character. They started with a four-issue serial "Trail of the Catwoman" in Detective Comics #759–762 in which private detective Slam Bradley attempts to investigate the death of Selina Kyle (a.k.a. Catwoman). According to Cooke, he and Brubaker bonded over the re-introduction of Bradley, who first appeared in 1937's Detective Comics #1 and pre-dated the super-hero era of comics. The story led into a new Catwoman title in late 2001 by Brubaker and Cooke, in which the character's costume, supporting cast, and modus operandi were all redesigned and redeveloped. Cooke would stay on the series until issue #4. In 2002, he would write and draw the Selina's Big Score prequel which detailed what had happened to the character directly before her new series. Cooke regarded Selina's Big Score as the "single thing I did that I