Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Dwayne McDuffie, American comic book writer, editor and animator (Milestone Media), died from complications following heart surgery he was , 49.

Dwayne Glenn McDuffie was an African-American writer of comic books and television, known for creating the animated television series Static Shock, writing and producing the animated series Justice League Unlimited, and co-founding the pioneering minority-owned-and-operated comic-book company Milestone Media died from complications following heart surgery he was , 49..

 

(February 20, 1962 – February 21, 2011)

Biography

Early life and career

Dwayne McDuffie was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Edna McDuffie Gardner.[1] He attended The Roeper School and went on to the University of Michigan,[2] graduating with a bachelor's degree in English, then earning a master's degree in physics.[1] He then moved to New York to attend film school at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.[1]
He co-hosted a radio comedy program,[citation needed] and also wrote under a pseudonym for stand-up comedians and late-night television comedy programs.[citation needed] While McDuffie was working as a copy editor at the business magazine Investment Dealers' Digest,[1] a friend got him an interview for an assistant editor position at Marvel Comics.

Marvel and Milestone

Going on staff at Marvel as editor Bob Budiansky's assistant on special projects,[3] McDuffie helped develop the company's first superhero trading cards.[1] 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.[4] 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.[citation needed] In early 1991, he divorced his first wife, Patricia D. Younger, in Seminole County, Florida.[5]
In the early 1990s,[1] wanting to express a multicultural sensibility that he felt was missing in comic books, McDuffie and three partners[1] 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."[6] 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.[7]
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.[1] Serving as editor-in-chief, McDuffie created or co-created many characters, including Static.

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.
His other television writing credits included Teen Titans and What's New, Scooby-Doo?.
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 also wrote the story for the video game Justice League Heroes.
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/or 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 and 21.
McDuffie wrote a number of direct-to-DVD animated films featuring DC Comics characters.[8] His final animated project was scripting the direct-to-DVD adaptation of All-Star Superman,[9] which was released one day after his death.[8]

Return to comics

After his popular work in Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, McDuffie returned to writing comic books. He wrote the Marvel miniseries Beyond!.
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).[10] As well, he wrote Justice League of America vol. 2, writing virtually every issue from #13-34 (Nov. 2007 - Aug. 2009).[11] He was fired from that series following a Lying in the Gutters compilation of his frank answers to fans about the creative process.[12]
He married comic book and animated-TV writer Charlotte Fullerton in 2009.[1]
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.

Death

On February 21, 2011, one day after his 49th birthday, McDuffie died at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, California, of complications from emergency heart surgery.[13] He lived at the time in nearby Sherman Oaks, California.[1] He was survived by his wife and his mother.[13][8]

Awards


Filmography

Bibliography

Regular writer

Fill-in writer

Editor

  • Freddy Kreuger's A Nightmare on Elm Street #1-2 (Marvel Comics, Oct.-Nov. 1989)
  • Blood Syndicate #1-30 (DC Comics [Milestone], April 1993 - Sept. 1995)
  • Hardware #1-10 (DC Comics [Milestone], April 1993 - Dec. 1993)
  • Icon #1-8 (DC Comics [Milestone], May-Dec. 1993)
  • Static #1-28 (DC Comics [Milestone], June 1993 - Oct. 1995)
  • Static #30 (DC Comics [Milestone], Dec. 1995)
  • Shadow Cabinet #0 (DC Comics [Milestone], Jan. 1994)
  • Xombi #0 (DC Comics [Milestone], Jan. 1994)
  • Frank #1-2 (Harvey Comics, March-May 1994) - (limited series)
  • "The Call." Superman: The Man of Steel #34 (DC Comics, June 1994) - (Kobalt preview)
  • Kobalt #1-10 (DC Comics [Milestone], June 1994 - March 1995)
  • Shadow Cabinet #1-17 (DC Comics [Milestone], June 1994 - Oct. 1995)
  • Xombi #1-16 (DC Comics [Milestone], June 1994 - Sept. 1995)
  • Worlds Collide #1 (DC Comics [Milestone], July 1994) - (one-shot)
  • Deathwish #1-4 (DC Comics [Milestone], Dec. 1994 - March 1995) - (miniseries)
  • My Name is Holocaust #1 (DC Comics [Milestone], May 1995) - (miniseries)
  • Kobalt #14 (DC Comics [Milestone], Aug. 1995)
  • Static Shock! Rebirth of the Cool #1-4 (DC Comics [Milestone], Jan.-Sept. 2001)

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