Dwayne McDuffie

1993 might have been the worst year ever for comic books.

DC followed up the awful "Death of Superman" storyline with an even worse one where they brought him back. Marvel was publishing a gazillion comics a month, making it economically impossible to keep up with everything. Image was putting out crap. Nicely drawn crap. But crap. And the entire industry seemed geared towards speculators and ADD fanboys. It was so bad that not long afterwards, I quit reading comics for a few years.

Arguably, the one bright spot that entire miserable year was the launch of Milestone Comics.

Considering the sheer glut of bad superhero comics being produced, the last thing the industry probably needed at that point was another line of superhero books. But rather than just put out comics that the masses would devour, Milestone took the much riskier approach of focusing on minority superheroes. Black superheroes were nothing new in 1993, but the idea of not giving them a name with "Black" in front of it (i.e., Black Lighting, Black Panther,etc.) was surprisingly revolutionary. Still, all this could have easily been dismissed as a gimmick; an exercise in political correctness, except the comics were actually really good. Hardware was my favorite, but I also enjoyed Static and Blood Syndicate.

The writer behind these books was Dwayne McDuffie, who died today. Aside from the Milestone books, he also worked on the Justice League series on Cartoon Network and some recent stuff for DC and Marvel. Unlike with most comic book creator deaths, McDuffie was still relatively young and probably had his best work ahead of him.

He was also a major online presence on various message boards and websites, going all the way back to Compuserve. I never personally interacted with him, but from what I saw, he was never anything less than a class act.

Sometime soon, I'm going to back and pick up all those Milestone comics I missed when I stopped reading comics.