A Moment of Comics

I've been bad highlighting black creators for Black History Month. Today, I'm featuring the opening page from the biography comic Prince: Alter Ego by the late writer Dwayne McDuffie and pencils by Denys B. Cowan, who is still working today.

A Moment of Comics

In the nineties, the X-Men books during the Image era were regarded negatively with people saying the teams were the equivalent of gangs. This criticism in retrospect seems to carry racist overtones. Milestone Comics' Blood Syndicate seems to lean in to this criticism. One of their house ads blatantly declared, "It's not a team. It's a gang." 

Here's a page from Blood Syndicate #1, written by Dwayne McDuffie and Ivan Velez Jr. with pencils by Trevor von Eeden and inks by Andrew Pepoy.

A Moment of Comics

Happy Black History Month. Here's a splash page from the first issue of Icon, published in 1993 by the then-debuting Milestone Comics (distributed by DC Comics). This first issue was written by the equally iconic Dwayne McDuffie and drawn by M.D. Bright (doing his best imitation of a nineties artist when he was (and is) so much better than that).

I remember watching an MTV segment promoting Milestone Comics where the hero Icon was described as a Clarence Thomas type. Thankfully, that's the only part of the pitch that aged badly, as Icon and much of Milestone's properties (most notably Static Shock) have been integrated as part of DC's mainstream universe.

 

I Had Issues! My Dwayne McDuffie Tribute (1962-2011)

You'll notice that it's my second article reposted from the original comic site I used to work on, and it doesn't really talk about comics, but the film and TV properties based on them. Little did I realize how this was just a shade of things to come with every comics website available.I was definitely part of the problem.

Dwayne McDuffie passed away shortly after the site took off. I knew less of his comics work in later years (I have fond memories of his Damage Control series). His TV work had an effect on me, as I saw most of it in real time, back when I still had a TV and cable. I'm glad I got this out quickly, on February 24, just days after his death. I'm even happier that I can post it here and fix the mistakes I made with the graphics. I was pretty new to WordPress at the time and had no idea how to resize or lay out graphics. Lightly edited for flow.