During the Preview Night at the 2008 edition of Comic-Con International: San Diego, IDW Publishing made the announcement that Darwyn Cooke, the writer-artist and driving force behind DC: The New Frontier, would adapt author Donald Westlake’s Parker novels into four graphic novels beginning with the first one, The Hunter.

Fans of Cooke and crime comics alike took note and waited enthusiastically, while Parker enthusiasts waited patiently and perhaps more skeptically. Westlake, who wrote the novels under the pen name Richard Stark, had previously sold the film rights to his creation several times (the films Point Blank and Payback), but he had never before used that character’s name. For Cooke, though, he had agreed to it just before he passed away.

Published in 1962, The Hunter does indeed have some very serious fans, and after this we suspect it’s going to have plenty more now that this new adaptation has arrived.

While there’s no doubt that artist behind New Frontier is the same one working here, Cooke’s work on this leans more toward his run on Catwoman than toward his Silver Age-infused hit mini-series. With lemming mentality that is often passed off as creativity, the terms “darker” and “grittier” have been used so frequently that they have become the king clichés of the comic book medium. Here, though, they are not only appropriate, they are well executed in the service of the story.

The depth the intrigue in The Hunter sneaks up on the reader, the way Body Heat did on moviegoers in 1981. Initially it just sort of languidly rolls along, certainly engaging but also deceptively simple. Then…BLAM! You’re hooked. You can’t get away. You can’t put it down, and if by some quirk of fate you do, you can’t stop thinking about it. The story becomes relentless. It surges onward just like its protagonist.

We’ll leave it to others to judge how effectively Cooke has captured the spirit of Westlake’s work, but there is no question that he has captured our imagination. The Hunter is the real deal, and it seems almost criminal that we’ll have wait until 2010 for the next graphic novel in the series.