Dwayne Glenn McDuffie (February 20, 1962 – February 21, 2011) was an American writer of comic books and television. He was best known for co-founding the pioneering minority-owned-and-operated comic book company Milestone Media, which focused on underrepresented minorities in American comics, creating and co-creating characters such as Icon, Rocket, Static, and Hardware. McDuffie was also known as a writer and producer for animated series such as Static Shock (based on the Static character), Damage Control, Justice League Unlimited and the Ben 10 franchise.
McDuffie earned three Eisner Award nominations for his work in comics.[2]
Early life and education
McDuffie was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Leroy McDuffie[3] and Edna (Hawkins) McDuffie Gardner. He attended and graduated from the Roeper School, a school for gifted children in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 1980.[4] Of African-American characters in comics, he later said:
"You only had two types of characters available for children. You had the stupid angry brute and the he's-smart-but-he's-black characters. And they were all colored either this Hershey-bar shade of brown, a sickly looking gray or purple. I've never seen anyone that's gray or purple before in my life. There was no diversity and almost no accuracy among the characters of color at all."[5]
After McDuffie's death, comedian Keegan-Michael Key discovered that he and McDuffie were biological half-brothers (same father).[7][8]
Career
Marvel and Milestone
Going on staff at Marvel as editor Bob Budiansky's assistant on special projects,[9] McDuffie helped develop the company's first superhero trading cards.[10] He also scripted stories for Marvel. His first major work was Damage Control, a miniseries about the company that shows up between issues and tidies up the mess left by the latest round of superhero/supervillain battles.
After becoming an editor at Marvel, McDuffie submitted a spoof proposal for a comic entitled Teenage Negro Ninja Thrashers in response to Marvel's treatment of its black characters.[11] Becoming a freelancer in 1990, McDuffie wrote for dozens of various comics titles for Marvel, DC Comics, and Archie Comics. In addition, he wrote Monster in My Pocket for Harvey Comics editor Sid Jacobson, whom he cites on his website as having taught him everything he knows.[12] In early 1991, he divorced his first wife, Patricia D. Younger, in Seminole County, Florida.[13]
In the early 1990s, wanting to express a multicultural sensibility that he felt was missing in comic books, McDuffie and three partners founded Milestone Media, which The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio, described in 2000 as "the industry's most successful minority-owned-and operated comic company."[10] McDuffie explained:
If you do a black character or a female character or an Asian character, then they aren't just that character. They represent that race or that sex, and they can't be interesting because everything they do has to represent an entire block of people. You know, Superman isn't all white people and neither is Lex Luthor. We knew we had to present a range of characters within each ethnic group, which means that we couldn't do just one book. We had to do a series of books and we had to present a view of the world that's wider than the world we've seen before.[14]
Milestone, whose characters include the African-American Static, Icon, and Hardware; the Asian-American Xombi, and the multi-ethnic superhero group the Blood Syndicate, which include Black, Asian and Latino men and women, debuted its titles in 1993 through a distribution deal with DC Comics.[10] Serving as editor-in-chief, McDuffie created or co-created many characters, including Static.
Movies, television, and video games
After Milestone had ceased publishing new comics, Static was developed into an animated series Static Shock. McDuffie was hired to write and story-edit on the series, writing 11 episodes.[10]
McDuffie was hired as a staff writer for the animated series Justice League and was promoted to story editor and producer as the series became Justice League Unlimited. During the entire run of the animated series, McDuffie wrote, produced, or story-edited 69 out of the 91 episodes.
McDuffie was hired to help revamp and story-edit Cartoon Network's popular animated Ben 10 franchise with Ben 10: Alien Force, continuing the adventures of the ten-year-old title character into his mid and late teenage years. During the run of the series, McDuffie wrote episodes 1–3, 14, 25–28, 45 and 46 and story-edited all forty-six episodes. McDuffie also produced and story edited for the second sequel series Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, which premiered April 23. 2010. He wrote episodes 1, 10, 11, 16, 30, 39 together with J. M. DeMatteis and 52.
McDuffie's work was also seen on Ben 10: Omniverse, having shared story by credit on the first two episodes, "The More Things Change, Parts 1 and 2."
Return to comics
After his work on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, McDuffie returned to writing comic books. He wrote the Marvel miniseriesBeyond!.
In 2007, McDuffie wrote several issues of Firestorm for DC Comics, starting in January through to its cancellation. Later that year, he became the regular writer on Fantastic Four, scripting issues #542–553 (cover-dated Dec. 2006 March 2008).[17] As well, he wrote Justice League of America vol. 2, writing virtually every issue from #13–34 (Nov. 2007 – Aug. 2009).[18] He was fired from that series following a Lying in the Gutters compilation of his frank answers to fans about the creative process.[19]
McDuffie wrote Milestone Forever for DC Comics, a two-issue, squarebound miniseries chronicling the final adventures of his Milestone characters before a catastrophic event that fuses their continuity with the continuity of the DC Universe.
The 2012 film Justice League: Doom was dedicated to the memory of Dwayne McDuffie, and the Blu-ray and 2-Disc DVD editions of the film included the documentary, A Legion of One: The Dwayne McDuffie Story. That same year, a diner named "McDuffie's" was depicted in the Green Lantern: The Animated Series episode "The New Guy".
In 2012, the Ultimate Spider-Man episode "Damage" was dedicated in memory of Dwayne McDuffie. In the episode, a new character named "Mac" was introduced as the CEO of the Damage Control, the fictional company created by McDuffie.
Also in 2012, the Ben 10: Ultimate Alien final episode "The Ultimate Enemy: Part 2", the crew of the series dedicated the episode in his memory in the credits. The same tribute appeared in the racing video game based on the series, Ben 10: Galactic Racing.
In the 2011 Static Shock comics series, Virgil Hawkins' new high school is named after McDuffie.
In 1996, McDuffie won the Golden Apple Award from his alma mater the Roeper School for the "use of popular art to promote and advance human worth and dignity."[25]
In 2003, McDuffie was awarded the Humanitas Prize in Children's Animation for the "Jimmy" episode of Static Shock, about gun violence.[10]
In both 2003 and 2004, McDuffie was nominated, with other Static Shock creators, for daytime Emmy awards.
