Dave Cooper

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David Charles Cooper (b. 1967), is a cartoonist, commercial illustrator and a graphic designer who lives in Ottawa, Canada. In addition to comics, Cooper has worked extensively as a designer, producer, and creator in the field of animation. Several of his designs were used on Futurama, notably various areas of the Planet Express office.

Cooper became a published cartoonist in his teens, creating sci-fi comics stories for Barry Blair's Aircel Comics. Blair has caused controversy with some comics that have featured young boys being tortured or eroticized, and while Cooper has never said that he was molested by Blair, he told The Comics Journal that their relationship was awkward and "inappropriate" and it served as the inspiration for Cooper's book Dan and Larry in: Don't Do That! The book features a childlike, duck-ish creature named Dan who is mentored by a pushy, older creature named Larry, and at one point Larry holds Dan down and rubs against him, saying, "THIS is how we should play sometimes." (In the same Journal interview, Cooper took pains to point out that although some readers believe Larry is actually raping Dan, Larry's pants are on through the whole encounter.) Despite Larry's disturbing relationship with their son, Dan's parents are cheerfully oblivious.

After gradually giving up working for Aircel, Cooper spent a few years in a band before eventually returning to comics. In his 20s he created books like Puke and Explode and Cynthia Petal's Alien Sex Frenzy, lavishly illustrated stories that featured dark subject matter with incongruous cutesy touches such as letter i's dotted with little circles. (Puke and Explode has a cameo in the 1995 film Crumb, when R. Crumb briefly examines the cover in a comics store and then rather disdainfully passes it by).

With Suckle, his graphic novel published in 1997, Cooper broke through to a new level of critical acclaim with the story of an innocent, childlike fellow, Basil, who is confronted by strange, sexualized horrors in a futuristic world. It was nominated for the Harvey Award. He followed this up with the even darker book Crumple (first serialized in the pages of Zero Zero, about a square-headed little man in a world ultimately overrun by militant feminists, and the multi-issue series Weasel, which featured the ongoing story Ripple, about a frustrated illustrator who enters an obsessive relationship with one of his models. With each book, Cooper's work grew darker in subject matter while more accomplished visually. During this time Cooper also contributed to Nickelodeon's children's magazine along with other anthologies. He also created a line of deluxe toys with the firm, Critterbox Toys.

In recent years, Cooper has, to the dismay of fans of his comics, moved away from making comics, and is now focusing on fine art, often painting sexy but disturbing portraits of chubbyish women with overbites (or, as he has put it, "mostly pillowy girls").