Monday, March 7, 2011

R.I.P. Dwayne McDuffie

Most people knew Dwayne McDuffie from his work on Ben 10, and Justice League, and Static Shock. His characterizations and plots produced some of the finest moments of television I've seen, animated or otherwise.

Static a creation of Dwayne McDuffie and the Milestone Staff, in his Original Comic Book Design

The more familiar design from the Cartoon Series

I was introduced to him though, not through any of the writing he did for these shows, but a well deserved and hilarious murder. I remember him for murdering Luke Cage, Black Lightening, and Brother Voodoo. Icon one of the criminally underrated titles in the Milestone Universe had a issue called the Death of Buckwild that basically parodied the piss out of these iconic black comic book characters. It Showed the cringe inducing stereotypes and ghetto fabulous portrayals that always accompanied these characters .


As a comic book fan as much as I enjoyed these characters there was always a reserved part of me given these stories the side eye, because of the ridiculously hammy and racist portrayal even by comic book standards of non white characters.

While at Marvel Comic he sent a infamous memo making fun of how Marvel was marketing and portraying two of their popular black characters at the time.


Unfortunately a few weeks ago Dwayne McDuffie passed away due to complications he had from Surgery the day before. With his passing the comic book community not only loses a master of the art who in addition to creating stories that revealed dimension of Archetypes like The Justice League, and others, but a creator who bought the question of race in comic book out of tired cliche and made all his character portrayals, regardless of ethnicity three dimensional.





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