Hidden Gems in Black History: The Black Author Comic Book Universe

The Rose Library also has a sizeable Black comic book collection. “It was a Black-authored universe by Dwayne McDuffie, who was a major comic book creator and someone who is also behind a lot of the Saturday morning superhero TV shows.” Early Life & Education American comic book and television writer Dwayne Glenn McDuffie (February 20, 1962–February 21, 2011)  co-founded Milestone Media. This minority-owned comic book company championed underrepresented minorities and created Icon, Rocket, Static, and Hardware. Static Shock, Damage Control, Justice League Unlimited, and Ben 10 were among McDuffie’s animated works. He garnered three Eisner Award nominations for his comics. The son of Leroy and Edna (Hawkins) McDuffie Gardner, he was raised in Detroit. He graduated from Bloomfield Hills’ Roeper School for gifted kids in 1980. He said of African-American comic protagonists: “Only two characters were kid-friendly. There were dumb, furious brutes and smart-but-black people. All were Hershey-bar black, sickly gray, or purple. I’ve never met gray or purple folks. Colored characters were incorrect and undiversified.” He earned a bachelor’s in English and a master’s in physics from Michigan in 1983. He studied film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. While copy editing at Investment Dealers’ Digest, a...