Darwyn Cooke, an award-winning comic-book writer, artist and animator whose work was known for its bold retro style and singular character, page and cover designs, died on Saturday at his home in western Florida. He was 53.

The cause was lung cancer, said David Hyde, a spokesman for the family.

Among Mr. Cooke’s most celebrated works was DC: The New Frontier, a six-issue series published in 2004 that chronicled the experiences of superheroes including Flash, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman, in the 1950s. His adaptations, beginning in 2009, of four hard-boiled novels by Richard Stark, a pseudonym used by Donald E. Westlake, featuring the coldblooded con man Parker, also won praise.

Describing those adaptations in The New York Times Book Review in 2010, Douglas Wolk, an author who writes frequently about comics, said that Mr. Cooke “distills Westlake’s lean prose to concentrated bursts of scruffy chiaroscuro, looming negative space, pacing-tiger tension and ice-cold violence.”