On Dwayne McDuffie

3 Comments | Posted: February 22nd, 2011 | Filed under: Thinking About Comics | Tags: ,

“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.”
               —Dwayne McDuffie

A lot of comics creators (and readers) use the most benign platitudes when it comes to race and gender in superhero books. They say that it doesn’t matter if the latest incarnation of a legacy character is black or white or asian, that it’s not important to the story if Black Manta is a woman this go-round or whatever. Because, you know, people are people, you know?

Dwayne McDuffie was hard-headed and impassioned enough to say “Yes, it does.” He brought the experience he had as a black kid growing up in Detroit in the 70s and 80s to every project he got his hands on by choosing directly not to emulate what he’d seen in the comic books he read, but by creating what he wished he had read.

I’m not going to pretend that I enjoyed all of his work but even when he missed the mark, the lessons he wanted to impart and the world he wanted superhero comics to inhabit were right there in high-gloss digital color on the page and in the numerous animated projects he scripted and produced. Even more than what we saw in the product, McDuffie was fearless, forthright and passionate when it came to his convictions and beliefs, whether he was speaking to fans or the the upper management at Marvel and DC.

He wore his storytelling heart on his sleeve and comics needs more of that. Pop culture needs more of that.

We’ll miss you, Dwayne. Bless.

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3 Comments on “On Dwayne McDuffie”

  1. 1 kate said at 1:08 am on February 23rd, 2011:

    Yes. Exactly.

    Thank you.

  2. 2 Camool said at 12:15 pm on February 23rd, 2011:

    Of course those things matter they are part of who a person is but it doesn’t mean they have to represent a group of people that is just ridiculous. Black people can be as different from each other as white people can. Women can be as different from each other as men can.

  3. 3 S. Frank Kim said at 6:47 pm on February 23rd, 2011:

    Camool: That’s exactly what McDuffie meant. The quote is about why he started Milestone, and entire line of minority superheroes, rather than one title featuring a minority character. He wasn’t saying that minority characters should represent the entire group, but that they inevitably ended up doing exactly that when there were too few prominent minority characters.

    Here’s the rest of his quote:

    “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.”