Robert Kirkman's Secret History of Comics (2017) s01e05 Episode Script
The Color of Comics
[music.]
I read a lot of comic books when I was a kid.
There were no black superheroes.
None of 'em looked like me.
As a young black kid, we would look at the representations that we had and sort of be ashamed.
The comic books today, they reflect the people who create them, people who are in charge, who are mostly white males.
At the time, I said, "If I want a world where there's black superheroes, we're going to have to create some black superheroes.
Every black kid who's ever wanted to do comics has had that idea.
I told him, "The only way we're going to see it is if we do it.
" Milestone Comics was heroes for everybody.
They were very, very innovative and ahead of their time.
It was definitely revolutionary.
The political act was forming the company, and having four black guys in charge.
We broke a lot of barriers, but there's a price to be paid for doing things differently.
So you want the real story of Milestone? Okay, here we go.
[title music.]
[music.]
[Denys Cowan.]
I was raised in Springfield Gardens, Queens, by my grandparents.
They took all of us kids in after my mom died.
She died when I was eight.
After my mom died, I met this kid, Derek, Derek Dingle.
He and I sat next to each other from second through fifth grade.
We were we were pretty much inseparable.
I went to Denys's home one day with a stack of comic books from my brother's collection.
[Cowan.]
I did not know what a comic book was until Derek showed me, and I was just done.
From that moment, you know, I just looked at them, and I was just I was just gone.
After that, I probably went to school to look at comic books.
[laughing.]
Well, I liked to get the new comic books from Derek.
I had big bottle glasses, I had a pocket protector, I looked like Sam Jackson in Unbreakable.
You know, with that hairstyle that went like that? I was that kid.
I was that kid I was picked on.
Well, the comics were, like, helping me cope with all that, or maybe sometimes you get picked on because you're reading comic books.
Comics were sort of that little underground thing that we all did back then.
Growing up, I read a lot of comic books.
Most of the kids in my neighborhood read comic books.
It doesn't grab everybody.
You just know it's for you.
I mean, you have to be born a comic book fan, I think, 'cause once you see one, it's like [sighing.]
And you open one, and the smell, and the pages, and everything, it You have to be born [claps.]
a comic book fan, I think.
[Reginald Hudlin.]
Black kids read comics in huge numbers.
The presumption that black people don't read comics comes from people who don't know black people.
To be a kid growing up in that era, you know, and reading The Fantastic Four, and reading The Hulk, and Spider-Man, and Batman, Superman, whatever it was you were reading, and to not see yourself, you know, like, we were completely invisible.
There were representations of African-Americans in mainstream comics, but they tended towards kind of the stereotypical or the racist.
[music.]
Probably the most infamous would be Ebony White with Will Eisner's "The Spirit.
" [Keith Pollard.]
Big lips, big eyes he was meant to be comic relief.
"White Wash," in 1941, this big red-lipped, pimp hat-wearing guy who's all, "Oh Lord, help me!" you know, this kind of thing.
He was always in trouble, and it was just a superfluous, unnecessary character.
[Jones.]
As a young black kid, you know, we would look at these other characters and sort of be ashamed, because that's all we would see of ourselves.
That was the representations that we had.
There was nothing to aspire to.
[Dingle.]
After a while, you're saying, "Why isn't the hero African-American?" [Cowan.]
I remember the day when Derek bought me a copy of "Fantastic Four #52," and I remember us reading it under the desk when we were supposed to be, you know, doing our lessons, and that was the first time I had seen the Black Panther.
[music.]
That was something that was a special moment.
When the Black Panther showed up, dressed all in black still one of the coolest outfits in the history of comic books.
He's not a sidekick, he's not a mugger His introduction was him taking on the Fantastic Four to see if he could beat them, and he did, and as a kid, that blew my mind.
They'd beaten Dr.
Doom.
They'd beaten Galactus, who eats planets, but the Black Panther defeats them all.
So you go, "This cat is badass.
" The Black Panther is a really important character.
Now, of course, all of his earliest adventures were written by, you know, white writers and drawn by white artists.
Well, I never thought that it was my place to talk about politics, but I also felt there were some things that perhaps ought to be mentioned, and one of the things I've always been against is bigotry.
I like the pilot very much, yeah.
She's a black girl, that's good.
[Michael Davis.]
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby named their black superhero "the Black Panther" in the middle of the civil rights movement.
Think about that.
Stan Lee and Ja Two white Two Jewish people! [Stan Lee.]
And I thought, "I will make him the king of a black nation in Africa.
" [Davis.]
He had his own country, and his country was the most technologically advanced country on the planet.
[Walker.]
The mythology is that he sort of understood that Americans were a little too racist to accept, like, a black superhero from America.
[Gayles.]
The Black Panther can be powerful over there in Wakanda, and so he is not as inherently threatening as someone that you might see around the corner.
[music.]
[Cowan.]
The first African-American hero I saw was Luke Cage.
[bell jingles.]
I would go to my local comic book store.
They had their comic books on a spinner rack, and I remember this one standing out.
It was just a single figure of a black man bursting out of chains, and I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
I brought it to school, and I showed it to Derek.
He was blown away.
It was one of the few times I got to show him something, you know, as opposed to him him always showing me.
[Jones.]
In the beginning, I embraced it, and I bought all of the issues, but I was finding it hard to read it.
Some of the characters struck me as being stereotypical and sort of making fun.
I mean, I loved Luke Cage, and my cousins and I would sit down, and we would read Luke Cage, and we would laugh, and we would go, "Nobody talks like this.
" [Jones.]
You know, I don't think that Luke Cage should be saying "Sweet Christmas" all the time.
"Sweet Christmas!" Really? I knew there was a white guy sitting back, writing and penning this, going "What does a dude from Harlem sound like?" Black people have never been in control of their own story in this country.
People should tell their own stories.
[music.]
[Dingle.]
The one thing that comic books always communicated to me is two things, heroes and possibilities, and if you don't see yourself as part of that, then, you know, who are the heroes, and what are my possibilities? [Cowan.]
When Derek and I first started hanging out, it was all about reading comic books.
Eventually, it became about us making our own comic books.
I don't even think we thought to copy them or mimeograph them or anything.
We just sold the original art, like, stapled together, like, you know, you can get your own comic.
The first characters we created was a character called Black Vig, and Jive was his partner, and I remember thinking, "These are the coolest characters ever, and one day they're gonna be famous.
" I think at one point Denys did say, you know, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could do this when we were older?" [Cowan.]
That was the dream, to somehow, someday, make our own comic books.
[music.]
[Dingle.]
We graduated.
Graduation day from P.
S.
37, my family, the day after, moved to Norfolk.
[Cowan.]
Because he was my best friend, it was unreal for me.
It was unreal.
I didn't think I would see him again.
[Dingle.]
Getting on that Greyhound bus and knowing that it's a possibility I never would be connected with my best friend again.
[music.]
[Cowan.]
When I got into comics, there were very few artists who looked like me, so I didn't have a whole lot of examples to look up to.
The comic book industry in the early 1970s wasn't diverse at all.
It was a bunch of Jewish and Italian guys.
I'd say that DC was probably, at that point, entirely white, entirely white and male, except for, you know, two women, and then I upped the demographics by being the third.
At the time, there were only a few black artists and no writers.
I remember one black guy, I can't remember his name, who was in the production area, and beyond that there was me.
Arvell was, like, the living example of a black person who made his living drawing comics.
[Jones.]
One day, this 14-year-old kid came over to our apartment, knocked on the door.
I opened it, and it was, "Hey, you're Arvell Jones! Hey, it's really great to meet you!" and he just kind of barges his way in, threw down some of his artwork and told me, "Hey, man, I'll do whatever I could do.
" Well, that kid was Denys Cowan.
[Pollard.]
He was an eager kid, and I thought, that took a lot of guts to stick his neck out to get what he wanted, so he was always at the apartment helping Arvell.
[Cowan.]
I wasn't drawing anything.
I was making coffee, running errands, sweeping the floor.
I was a terrible assistant.
I think the only thing I really wanted to do was draw.
[music.]
Three years later, I was, like, 17.
I had a chance to bring my portfolio into the art director at DC at the time.
He looks at my portfolio.
My heart's beating, I remember that now.
He says, "Good.
" He handed it back, looked at me, and he said, "These are good, but we already have a colored artist working for us.
" [record scratch.]
At the time, I said, and strangely, it was like, "Oh, okay, so you're not hiring any more black artists.
" That's the only thing I thought.
I didn't realize how [bleep.]
up it was until later.
[music.]
After that, Jim Shooter at Marvel hired me to draw Luke Cage - So Cage is trapped by the Halwan army - Right.
[Cowan.]
And he hired me to do it because he thought that I might be familiar with the subject matter.
"You're black, so we're going to give you this black [bleep.]
to do," so I got a chance to do Luke Cage, which I had read when I was a little kid.
After that, I had another opportunity to draw the Black Panther.
Now, that was a big deal for me.
[music.]
This is at the start of my political awareness a bit.
That story was about the Black Panther fighting apartheid, and his South African neighbors were being oppressed, and what was he doing about it, being the king of Wakanda? Around that time, I started to get recognized throughout the industry.
It was a bit surreal.
I even ended up in an ad for Dewar's Scotch.
While I was at Marvel, I met another black artist, Michael Davis.
I heard about Michael from a mutual friend of ours.
Her name was Darlene.
[Davis.]
Darlene said to me, "Michael, you've got to meet Denys Cowan," because you're, like, only one of three or four black people working in the industry.
[Cowan.]
I don't understand how it happened, but we ended up being very good friends.
[Davis.]
From that point, he became my boy, and, quite literally, introduced me to the industry.
[music.]
[Dingle.]
It was 1983.
I came back to New York.
I got a job at Black Enterprise as an associate editor.
One day in 1989, I was on my way to work.
I see this 50th anniversary Batman comic book, and then I go to the artists.
It's Denys Cowan.
The very next day, I called DC Comics.
"I have to find Denys Cowan.
" I said, "You know what? I'm going to go to Denys's house," and I rang the doorbell [Cowan.]
And I went to answer the door, and there's Derek in a suit.
[Dingle.]
I guess I probably looked like, you know, an IRS agent.
That's one of those movie moments, too.
You open the door and your best friend, who you haven't seen in 10 years or whatever, is just standing there, going, "Hey, what's up?" [music.]
New York City was insane.
The things that were going on were crazy.
Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights We will not continue to pay for people that abuse, and murder, and maim us I mean, the '80s shaped what we did.
[Method Man.]
It's funny that my start would be with a group of guys, you know, and we're sort of like a hip-hop X-Men, I guess.
For a lot of people, the escape was music, whatever.
My escape was comic books.
[Gayles.]
Hip hop was emerging in a very political way.
Public Enemy, Tribe Called Quest [Hudlin.]
Def Jam was rising.
Spike was creating, you know, his production company.
[Cowan.]
"She's Gotta Have It," "Do the Right Thing," Malcolm X Spike Lee, for us, was a major influence, because Spike Lee did it himself.
In the comic book medium, there was a absence of this voice.
[Dwayne McDuffie.]
99.
9% of comic book companies up to that point had been owned and run by white males.
My own inclination was to create comics that were more contemporary, that, even though it was a fantasy world, we wanted it to look like the world we lived in.
[Christopher Priest.]
He was a brilliant person.
Not just a brilliant writer, but a brilliant person.
[Cowan.]
Dwayne McDuffie was probably the only black writer that I had met.
I met him because they had asked me to do Deathlok at Marvel, and he happened to be the writer.
I responded to his writing immediately.
[McDuffie.]
My biggest issue, generally, in writing mainstream comics is if you write a black character, he represents blackness, and that's ridiculous.
That's way too much, way too complex, way too much weight for any character, any single character, to hold.
[Cowan.]
And we had both gotten to the point where we were frustrated at the lack of characters to express the things that we wanted to express, but that all changed in 1992.
I literally woke up one morning.
I thought, "This is it.
If I want a world where there's black superheroes, we're going to have to create some black superheroes.
" I got up and I called Michael Davis.
The idea was to create a universe of characters - that looked like us.
- "What do you think? Am I crazy?" and he said, "You're crazy.
" [chuckles.]
Every black kid who's ever wanted to do comics has had that idea.
I told him, "The only way we're going to see it is if we do it.
" It was that time.
[music.]
[Cowan.]
So the next person we called was Dwayne McDuffie, and Dwayne looked at both of us and said, "You guys are crazy.
" I'm like, "Nah, Dwayne, we can do it because" whatever reasons I came up with, I don't even remember, and Dwayne said, "You're crazy, but imma do it wit' you because you crazy, but we'll do it, but you crazy.
" Denys was committed from day one to get Derek involved.
You know why? Because him and Derek made up comic books when they were kids.
How cool is that [bleep.]
? Dwayne and Michael and I knew nothing about business, but we knew Derek wore a tie.
I always wore a suit, even on Saturdays.
"Here's the idea," and I pitched him the same thing.
He said, "You're crazy.
" My response, of course, was, "Denys, I have a job.
" [chuckles.]
And he said, "Derek we have to do this.
You know, people have marched and died so that we can create these images.
" From that point on, the reservations, you know, faded away.
[Cowan.]
We met constantly, I drew a lot of pictures.
I probably designed the whole universe.
[Priest.]
I got a phone call from Denys Cowan, and I always wanted to do something like this.
Christopher Priest wrote some bible stuff.
Michael wrote some bible stuff.
[Priest.]
I created most of the background stuff, and then I ran it all past Dwayne McDuffie, who made it better.
[Cowan.]
Dwayne McDuffie distilled all of it, rewrote it, and made it fit into this 28-page document.
On a Friday evening, I brought that document over to DC Comics right before Paul Levitz had to go home, and gave it to him in his hands.
Denys Cowan walked into my office, we were friendly, - and he had a nice thick bible - He couldn't put it down.
Every time he put it down, he'd pick it back up.
[Cowan.]
So Monday morning, he calls me up, calls me on my phone and says, "Denys, this is great.
We want to do it.
Come down and meet with us.
" Boom.
[Dingle.]
It was euphoric.
It was exciting.
You know, we did pop the cork on the Champagne, but what was cooler than that was when we went into our offices.
That made it real.
"Oh, my god, what does this really all mean?" That means that we had to deliver.
[music.]
We all initially met at my studio in Manhattan at the time.
We said, "Okay, if we're going to create a comic book universe, what do we need to do?" and then we said, "Well, we need archetypes, like the Superman archetype.
" [music.]
[Davis.]
Icon is an African-American No, he's not.
He actually is not.
Icon is an alien.
[Cowan.]
He crash-landed here on Earth.
The pod being discovered, but he wasn't discovered by Ma and Pa Kent.
He was discovered by a slave.
It was important to us to represent there was no one monolithic black point of view.
[Hudlin.]
He's a Republican because Lincoln freed the slaves, and he's sticking with what's working for him.
Icon had a sidekick, Rocket, and Rocket was the antithesis of Icon.
Rocket was a spitfire, and young and energetic.
[Cowan.]
The book was told through her point of view, which was another Dwayne innovation.
You only saw the world through her eyes.
If she didn't see it, you didn't see it.
Genius just genius.
[Gayles.]
To see them having the conversations that they were having, to see Rocket challenge his assumptions about class, and work ethic, and the way in which you can pick yourself up by your own bootstraps Reading that comic book became a much more rich experience for me.
[Cowan.]
The next book we released was "Hardware.
" [Hudlin.]
I loved Hardware because he was just cool.
You know, he had that Tony Stark kind of swagger to him.
Hardware is a technological genius who works for a corrupt company, Alva Industries, and because he recognizes the corruption in the company, he decides to create the Hardware armor and fight the corruption.
The first couple of pages of the first issue, there's this metaphor of a caged bird [glass shattering.]
Certainly, Dwayne was writing about himself and that frustration of working for the man that doesn't appreciate you.
[Cowan.]
The next book we did was a little different.
"What if we had a teenage kid, and he's a black kid, and he has nuclear powers? No, what if he has speed powers? Like, he's really No.
What if he has electric powers?" He can control electricity, and we'll call him "Static.
" Static was interesting because Static, it was one of my favorite comics.
It was the most old-fashioned.
[Hudlin.]
He spoke to who the core demo was, which was smart, nerdy, black kids, - or I guess the new phrase is "blerd.
" - We made him a geek.
We made him a big science fiction fan, like the four of us actually were when we were that age.
The last thing we needed was a superhero team, because all great comic book universes have a superhero team.
[music.]
There's no other superhero team like the Blood Syndicate.
[Cowan.]
All superhero teams are basically like a gang anyway, so why not just do a real gang? [chuckles.]
[Brandon Easton.]
I loved the diversity of "Blood Syndicate.
" You had gay, straight, lesbian, African-American, Latino, Native characters in a comic, which you had never seen before.
[Gayles.]
There were a lot of metaphors for police brutality, drugs, and the ra you know, how drugs ravaged communities.
The Blood Syndicate dealt with all of that.
[Brady.]
Each of these characters in that universe, in the Milestone universe, to a degree, because they were black, had to eat crow.
They didn't turn their backs on the greater good.
They still said, "Damn it, this dude thinks I'm trash, but let me go and save this airplane.
" [McDuffie.]
There's never been a good distribution chain that was black-owned or black-controlled, or even particularly black-friendly.
They really wanted to be free to do things very independently.
There's limits to how much independence was possible when they required both distribution, economic support - It was challenging.
- We had complete editorial control.
- They could say no.
- If something offended DC's not principles, but sort of DC's brand in some way, I think we had the ability to say, "Please don't publish that.
" They had final approval of what they were going to publish.
It was their money, their comic book company, and everything else.
[announcer.]
Meet the men of Milestone, the newest division of DC Comics.
Dwayne McDuffie is the editor in chief We want to give people that shock of recognition I got the first time I saw a black superhero, and I went, "Wow," you know? "I could do this.
I could be Superman.
" [music.]
[Cowan.]
20 years ago, there were two titles being published by a major publisher that had black lead characters, until this week, where everything changed.
History changed this week.
[music.]
[Hudlin.]
The books were as good or better than anything else on the stands, and I read them not out of some sense of obligation, but because I wanted to read the books.
[music.]
These Milestone comic books are really dope, man.
I got, I got this, um, Blood Syndicate, man.
They've got all kind of people in here.
What you got? Icon, man Oh, he looks hell.
What you got, Dre? - I got Hardware, man, all three issues, man.
- Yeah? It's hard to say what numbers we expected from the Milestone comics, but they were really good.
[music.]
[Davis.]
We've got these jackets with "M" on the back, right? It's like, you walk through a convention back then with that "M" on your back, man, it's like you're a Beatle, because we did something that no one else could even imagine getting done.
[Dingle.]
Sometimes you didn't know who would be coming into the office.
You know, one day it'll be John Singleton, another day it'd be Quincy Jones.
[Cowan.]
Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court judge, - wrote Derek a fan letter.
- You know, because of Icon [chuckles.]
In fact, invited me to his chambers.
[Cowan.]
It was amusing to us, and a little strange, that Clarence Thomas would say this was his favorite book.
Now I think about it, I'm like, Well, yeah, he liked Icon, who was just a conservative dude.
[music.]
[Stacey Robinson.]
I moved to New York City to work for Milestone specifically.
I knew that they were making history.
[Matt Wayne.]
They knew me as the white guy at Milestone.
I ended up doing some of the most exciting work of my life.
[Cowan.]
Dwayne had a very strong point of view that he wanted to get across editorially.
Dwayne had this unshakable moral code.
It created some some challenges, because in some situations, in terms of business, there needs to be, you know, compromise.
When things are going well, you know, you kind of rolling along, and it's all good.
It's only when things are not going so well that you start taking stock that maybe this wasn't what we thought it was.
[Cowan.]
There was a political heart to Milestone.
[Robinson.]
Dwayne McDuffie has always been political.
His books have always been political.
His stories have always been political.
He was an activist.
[Wayne.]
Two questions Dwayne always asked in a story.
One is, "What's the worst thing that can happen?" and the other is, "What if this was really happening? How would it play out?" Well, in Icon and Rocket, we had Rachel get pregnant, at 14, so it was a teenage pregnancy, so we were dealing with, like, kind of heady stuff for 1992.
It was to address a certain reality that has never been reflected in comics before.
We got into some kind of controversy about that.
We published a lot of stuff that made them very uncomfortable, which always sort of amused me because they weren't as uncomfortable when they dealt with those topics.
Well, it was largely Dwayne's job that we would butt heads with.
He thought that they can't tell us what to do.
"They hired us for a specific point of view, and if they're not going to let us do this, then why are we there? We have to do this, and we have to do it, we're making a point.
" I felt it was unnecessary.
[Wayne.]
Denys, I think, was starting to butt heads with Dwayne more.
They're they're two different people.
It wasn't that he was more of an idealist.
It was just that I was a little bit more practical.
[Hudlin.]
I knew there was a lot of internal tension, and the friendship and the partnership started to unravel.
Probably the biggest the biggest actual fight that we had was an issue of Static.
[music.]
[Cowan.]
The incident that happened was that we wanted to show safe sex on a Static Shock cover.
It sounds like something we'd have an argument about.
The way we were going to do that was to show condoms in a wrapper on the cover.
[McDuffie.]
On the cover, he's making out with his girlfriend.
There's no flesh exposed, but they're going at it pretty good.
[Gayles.]
The idea of a black teenage superhero having sex with his girlfriend and using cond That was a lot for DC.
You can imagine.
There was a lot of Pepto-Bismol being had at DC that day.
I remember there was one one issue of one of the books where we had a fairly energetic disagreement about the cover art, and we asked them to make changes.
They were very frustrated by that.
That was a huge, huge fight, and I think a lot of it, it wasn't about sexuality.
It was about black sexuality.
He didn't like it at all.
You know, when they decided to censor that particular issue of Static Shock, he fought back.
He fought back pretty hard.
Even though they said that we couldn't do it, somehow in between the stage of where they approved it and when we sent it to the printer after getting it back, somewhere between Dwayne McDuffie and whoever else was working with him, through some kind of bait and switch, the condom was back on the cover, but that's not what the issue was ever, really.
The issue was the editorial that accompanied the cover, and the editorial page started talking about the injustices that were done to us, and how was it racist to not show condoms on the cover, and this and that and the other, and I think that people at DC, Paul and other people, got very upset at that, reading about themselves in an editorial page of Milestone and how unfair they were, because they had been paying for this whole thing.
I felt it was their money.
I really did.
I felt it was unnecessary.
I felt we could have gotten what we wanted without going through the "Let's put it on the cover based on principle," because what happened after that was not good.
[Wayne.]
Mysteriously, payments that were due to Milestone kind of dried up, and we kind of had a little bit of trouble.
Paul's response was dispassionate and direct.
"If this is the way you feel about how we treat you, then we're going to no longer treat you like we were treating you before.
We will treat you in this new way," and that's when things became very hard for Milestone.
Soon after that cover incident is when I left, and didn't discuss it with anybody, and it was just it was just a very bad situation for me, handled not very well by me.
Derek, I don't know what Derek said.
I think he was disappointed, because I just made the move.
There was no hard, long discussion with Derek, because at that time, I wasn't having any conversations with Dwayne and Derek about anything.
My friendship with Michael continued, but not with Dwayne and Derek, not at all.
[Jones.]
I would talk to Dwayne on the phone every once in a while.
"Hey, man, how's it going?" and everything, and he would say, "Oh, man, it's always a fight.
" [laughs.]
[Cowan.]
At the time, the whole comics industry was not collapsing, but it was definitely changing and imploding and shrinking.
I mean, Derek was doing the best he could to keep everything together.
Milestone was dealing with the challenges of the industry.
They ended up moving to DC Comics and working out of DC Comics' offices, but once you're doing that, it's over.
The Milestone line, along with a number of other lines, were cut.
I don't know whether we broke the news to them or they broke the news to us.
We just weren't able to make it work in the marketplace.
[music.]
[Cowan.]
I think that they just ran into losing sales, and "These guys are difficult to work with anyway.
" At the time when when they were considering what to do with Milestone, that was part of it.
It pissed me off because sometimes they don't know what what was missing until you jump up and scream loud enough, and that's what was the bummer about Milestone stopping, was was there was a voice that was silenced.
It's sad, because Milestone is the greatest thing to ever happen Milestone's the greatest thing to ever happen to comics since the Black Panther.
[Duffy.]
I think when you see comics fans talk about Milestone now, they often talk about Milestone as some sort of failed experiment.
It's always been my argument that Milestone comics didn't fail, but that comics failed Milestone.
Milestone is not a failure by any stretch of the imagination.
There's a lot of folks who not only got their career started, but got a crash course in storytelling and business from Milestone.
[Gayles.]
How many people did Milestone Media hire? How many artists got their start at Milestone Media? How many writers? How many illustrators? That's passed on through all of these artists, probably hundreds of artists.
[Cowan.]
Milestone was not a failure to me because the things that we created, and the characters that we created are forever.
[Static Shock animated series theme song plays.]
[music.]
[Cowan.]
About three years after Milestone stopped publishing it, a producer pal of mine pitched the idea of doing Static to Kids' WB.
Basically, I got a phone call, and said, "Would you mind if we did Static as a TV show?" [chuckles.]
and, you know, I thought about it and said yes.
[music.]
Static Shock the animated series was an extraordinary success.
[McDuffie.]
The first day that Static was on television, more people saw it than read all of 45 issues combined.
[Dingle.]
The creative process was mostly Denys and Dwayne.
At that point, they patched things up a little bit.
I remember talking to Dwayne, and he said, "You know what? There are some things I can never forgive Denys for, but I can sure as hell work with him.
" [Cowan.]
We worked together on Static Shock, and once again we got along famously professionally, but personally, it was a lil it was a little trickier.
Because I was friends with everybody, even when people weren't getting along, I was talking to everybody.
After the success of Static Shock, Dwayne and Denys, I hear, were talking about a reboot of the whole Milestone line.
I felt it was important because these characters needed to be seen again by an entirely new generation, by the generation that missed them and by their kids.
That's when the germ of the idea about bringing it back started.
[Hudlin.]
I was excited to say, "Okay, let's get together," again, we're scheming on how to revive Milestone, the whole thing, and then it was over.
[music.]
[Dingle.]
I get a call from his wife saying that Dwayne was in the hospital.
Dwayne had had a heart attack.
He had surgery.
He had come out of surgery [Cowan.]
So we all thought he was going to be fine and that he was fine.
[Davis.]
He sent me an email from the hospital, and it was picture of Static Shock, the action figure [breaking voice.]
that was going be produced "Look what we created.
Look what we did," and then the next day, he was dead.
[Dingle.]
It was like somebody just hit me and took all the air out of me.
[Walker.]
I turned on the computer, and it said Dwayne McDuffie was dead.
[Dingle.]
You know, I always thought that Dwayne didn't realize how much of an impact his work had on people.
I mean, I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt, Dwayne McDuffie, I owe a massive debt to.
What he has given to comics, what he has given to animation, can't be overstated.
[Dingle.]
So many people coming to us and saying, "This needs to come back.
There's still a void.
" [Hudlin.]
And it was that pivotal moment where you just go, "Well, we just can't let it end.
" [music.]
[Dingle.]
We had a memorial service shortly after Dwayne's death.
[Cowan.]
I was fine until I saw Dwayne's mom.
When I saw his mom, and we started talking about her son, that's when I broke down, and she knew what kind of rocky relationship we had but none of that mattered, you know? None of that mattered.
What mattered was what we had done, and what we had shared, and the devastating loss.
[Dingle.]
People were starting to disperse, and I called Denys and Reggie, and I remember saying, "We can't let this die.
This is too important.
" [Cowan.]
That's when the germ of the idea for bringing it back started.
[Dingle.]
It was time.
Reggie Hudlin said, "We should talk.
" [Hudlin.]
"We can't just let it end like this.
We can't let it end at a memorial service.
" [Dingle, chuckling.]
Denys shook his head as he's always shook his head, "I'm in.
" [Cowan.]
I called Derek two days after.
We kind of patched things up and we talked about it, and I apologized for any of my miscalculations on how how I should have behaved, and he accepted my apology, and I really meant it, because Dwayne's gone and it won't be the same, but to me it's just as imperative now to to to build this again, and he agreed.
[Victor Lucas.]
Got some huge news at the Con.
Milestone Comics is coming back, and Reginald Hudlin is part of all of this, and After Dwayne McDuffie passed away, I met with Reggie Hudlin, who had been invited into the Milestone Media Group, so we took a number of meetings with him and Denys, and really just talked about the future of Milestone and these characters, and we saw that there was an incredible missed opportunity not having these characters out there.
Everyone at DC was excited about the idea of bringing it back to life.
This is going to be a new Milestone Media.
It's not a matter of doing what we did before.
It's about defining what Milestone Media means now.
[Cowan.]
Hardware is making another appearance, Blood Syndicate, we're relaunching Static Shock.
We're relaunching Icon and Rocket.
But the most exciting part is that we have a whole bunch of new characters that people are not ready for and they have not expected.
[Jim Lee.]
Who would have imagined that there would be so many changes in fandom, where you have people really demanding diversity and inclusivity, so the industry has changed quite a bit, and, frankly, it was the right time for DC to do this right now.
[music.]
[Brady.]
There's definitely been an evolution and progress since I was a child.
Not only have we come such a long way that Black Panther, the movie is even being made.
It's going to be a tent-pole movie.
[music.]
I'm so glad we're making the Black Panther movie now, and it's going to be just the way I had envisioned it, and I can't wait to see it.
[tires squealing.]
[music.]
[Luke Cage.]
I'm still not sure what I am.
To have Luke Cage on Netflix is, that's some powerful [bleep.]
.
When I heard they were making the Luke Cage, you know, I was a little apprehensive at first.
It's you.
Yeah, it's you.
Sweet Christmas.
[chuckling fondly.]
[music.]
I've watched little black kids dressed up as Thor and Captain America and Batman and Superman for years.
Last year, I saw little white kids dressed up as the Black Panther.
That, to me, is way more progress than anything I I can I can quantify.
I don't see any way you can look this renaissance not paying homage to Milestone Media.
They made it okay to be black and dream.
United we fight! This is a world that needs Milestone Comics in it.
It needs that example.
[Dingle.]
Milestone was a badge of honor.
It represented a change in the industry.
I must say, it's the most exciting thing that I've ever done in my life, other than growing up next to Denys with a stack of comic books from my brother's collection.
It's, um it's been quite a journey.
It's been quite a journey.
Being able to work with Derek again means more to me than, you know, anyone could possibly understand.
It's It's as it should be, because we started this together, so, you know, we're going to continue this together.
[music.]
[title music.]
I read a lot of comic books when I was a kid.
There were no black superheroes.
None of 'em looked like me.
As a young black kid, we would look at the representations that we had and sort of be ashamed.
The comic books today, they reflect the people who create them, people who are in charge, who are mostly white males.
At the time, I said, "If I want a world where there's black superheroes, we're going to have to create some black superheroes.
Every black kid who's ever wanted to do comics has had that idea.
I told him, "The only way we're going to see it is if we do it.
" Milestone Comics was heroes for everybody.
They were very, very innovative and ahead of their time.
It was definitely revolutionary.
The political act was forming the company, and having four black guys in charge.
We broke a lot of barriers, but there's a price to be paid for doing things differently.
So you want the real story of Milestone? Okay, here we go.
[title music.]
[music.]
[Denys Cowan.]
I was raised in Springfield Gardens, Queens, by my grandparents.
They took all of us kids in after my mom died.
She died when I was eight.
After my mom died, I met this kid, Derek, Derek Dingle.
He and I sat next to each other from second through fifth grade.
We were we were pretty much inseparable.
I went to Denys's home one day with a stack of comic books from my brother's collection.
[Cowan.]
I did not know what a comic book was until Derek showed me, and I was just done.
From that moment, you know, I just looked at them, and I was just I was just gone.
After that, I probably went to school to look at comic books.
[laughing.]
Well, I liked to get the new comic books from Derek.
I had big bottle glasses, I had a pocket protector, I looked like Sam Jackson in Unbreakable.
You know, with that hairstyle that went like that? I was that kid.
I was that kid I was picked on.
Well, the comics were, like, helping me cope with all that, or maybe sometimes you get picked on because you're reading comic books.
Comics were sort of that little underground thing that we all did back then.
Growing up, I read a lot of comic books.
Most of the kids in my neighborhood read comic books.
It doesn't grab everybody.
You just know it's for you.
I mean, you have to be born a comic book fan, I think, 'cause once you see one, it's like [sighing.]
And you open one, and the smell, and the pages, and everything, it You have to be born [claps.]
a comic book fan, I think.
[Reginald Hudlin.]
Black kids read comics in huge numbers.
The presumption that black people don't read comics comes from people who don't know black people.
To be a kid growing up in that era, you know, and reading The Fantastic Four, and reading The Hulk, and Spider-Man, and Batman, Superman, whatever it was you were reading, and to not see yourself, you know, like, we were completely invisible.
There were representations of African-Americans in mainstream comics, but they tended towards kind of the stereotypical or the racist.
[music.]
Probably the most infamous would be Ebony White with Will Eisner's "The Spirit.
" [Keith Pollard.]
Big lips, big eyes he was meant to be comic relief.
"White Wash," in 1941, this big red-lipped, pimp hat-wearing guy who's all, "Oh Lord, help me!" you know, this kind of thing.
He was always in trouble, and it was just a superfluous, unnecessary character.
[Jones.]
As a young black kid, you know, we would look at these other characters and sort of be ashamed, because that's all we would see of ourselves.
That was the representations that we had.
There was nothing to aspire to.
[Dingle.]
After a while, you're saying, "Why isn't the hero African-American?" [Cowan.]
I remember the day when Derek bought me a copy of "Fantastic Four #52," and I remember us reading it under the desk when we were supposed to be, you know, doing our lessons, and that was the first time I had seen the Black Panther.
[music.]
That was something that was a special moment.
When the Black Panther showed up, dressed all in black still one of the coolest outfits in the history of comic books.
He's not a sidekick, he's not a mugger His introduction was him taking on the Fantastic Four to see if he could beat them, and he did, and as a kid, that blew my mind.
They'd beaten Dr.
Doom.
They'd beaten Galactus, who eats planets, but the Black Panther defeats them all.
So you go, "This cat is badass.
" The Black Panther is a really important character.
Now, of course, all of his earliest adventures were written by, you know, white writers and drawn by white artists.
Well, I never thought that it was my place to talk about politics, but I also felt there were some things that perhaps ought to be mentioned, and one of the things I've always been against is bigotry.
I like the pilot very much, yeah.
She's a black girl, that's good.
[Michael Davis.]
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby named their black superhero "the Black Panther" in the middle of the civil rights movement.
Think about that.
Stan Lee and Ja Two white Two Jewish people! [Stan Lee.]
And I thought, "I will make him the king of a black nation in Africa.
" [Davis.]
He had his own country, and his country was the most technologically advanced country on the planet.
[Walker.]
The mythology is that he sort of understood that Americans were a little too racist to accept, like, a black superhero from America.
[Gayles.]
The Black Panther can be powerful over there in Wakanda, and so he is not as inherently threatening as someone that you might see around the corner.
[music.]
[Cowan.]
The first African-American hero I saw was Luke Cage.
[bell jingles.]
I would go to my local comic book store.
They had their comic books on a spinner rack, and I remember this one standing out.
It was just a single figure of a black man bursting out of chains, and I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
I brought it to school, and I showed it to Derek.
He was blown away.
It was one of the few times I got to show him something, you know, as opposed to him him always showing me.
[Jones.]
In the beginning, I embraced it, and I bought all of the issues, but I was finding it hard to read it.
Some of the characters struck me as being stereotypical and sort of making fun.
I mean, I loved Luke Cage, and my cousins and I would sit down, and we would read Luke Cage, and we would laugh, and we would go, "Nobody talks like this.
" [Jones.]
You know, I don't think that Luke Cage should be saying "Sweet Christmas" all the time.
"Sweet Christmas!" Really? I knew there was a white guy sitting back, writing and penning this, going "What does a dude from Harlem sound like?" Black people have never been in control of their own story in this country.
People should tell their own stories.
[music.]
[Dingle.]
The one thing that comic books always communicated to me is two things, heroes and possibilities, and if you don't see yourself as part of that, then, you know, who are the heroes, and what are my possibilities? [Cowan.]
When Derek and I first started hanging out, it was all about reading comic books.
Eventually, it became about us making our own comic books.
I don't even think we thought to copy them or mimeograph them or anything.
We just sold the original art, like, stapled together, like, you know, you can get your own comic.
The first characters we created was a character called Black Vig, and Jive was his partner, and I remember thinking, "These are the coolest characters ever, and one day they're gonna be famous.
" I think at one point Denys did say, you know, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could do this when we were older?" [Cowan.]
That was the dream, to somehow, someday, make our own comic books.
[music.]
[Dingle.]
We graduated.
Graduation day from P.
S.
37, my family, the day after, moved to Norfolk.
[Cowan.]
Because he was my best friend, it was unreal for me.
It was unreal.
I didn't think I would see him again.
[Dingle.]
Getting on that Greyhound bus and knowing that it's a possibility I never would be connected with my best friend again.
[music.]
[Cowan.]
When I got into comics, there were very few artists who looked like me, so I didn't have a whole lot of examples to look up to.
The comic book industry in the early 1970s wasn't diverse at all.
It was a bunch of Jewish and Italian guys.
I'd say that DC was probably, at that point, entirely white, entirely white and male, except for, you know, two women, and then I upped the demographics by being the third.
At the time, there were only a few black artists and no writers.
I remember one black guy, I can't remember his name, who was in the production area, and beyond that there was me.
Arvell was, like, the living example of a black person who made his living drawing comics.
[Jones.]
One day, this 14-year-old kid came over to our apartment, knocked on the door.
I opened it, and it was, "Hey, you're Arvell Jones! Hey, it's really great to meet you!" and he just kind of barges his way in, threw down some of his artwork and told me, "Hey, man, I'll do whatever I could do.
" Well, that kid was Denys Cowan.
[Pollard.]
He was an eager kid, and I thought, that took a lot of guts to stick his neck out to get what he wanted, so he was always at the apartment helping Arvell.
[Cowan.]
I wasn't drawing anything.
I was making coffee, running errands, sweeping the floor.
I was a terrible assistant.
I think the only thing I really wanted to do was draw.
[music.]
Three years later, I was, like, 17.
I had a chance to bring my portfolio into the art director at DC at the time.
He looks at my portfolio.
My heart's beating, I remember that now.
He says, "Good.
" He handed it back, looked at me, and he said, "These are good, but we already have a colored artist working for us.
" [record scratch.]
At the time, I said, and strangely, it was like, "Oh, okay, so you're not hiring any more black artists.
" That's the only thing I thought.
I didn't realize how [bleep.]
up it was until later.
[music.]
After that, Jim Shooter at Marvel hired me to draw Luke Cage - So Cage is trapped by the Halwan army - Right.
[Cowan.]
And he hired me to do it because he thought that I might be familiar with the subject matter.
"You're black, so we're going to give you this black [bleep.]
to do," so I got a chance to do Luke Cage, which I had read when I was a little kid.
After that, I had another opportunity to draw the Black Panther.
Now, that was a big deal for me.
[music.]
This is at the start of my political awareness a bit.
That story was about the Black Panther fighting apartheid, and his South African neighbors were being oppressed, and what was he doing about it, being the king of Wakanda? Around that time, I started to get recognized throughout the industry.
It was a bit surreal.
I even ended up in an ad for Dewar's Scotch.
While I was at Marvel, I met another black artist, Michael Davis.
I heard about Michael from a mutual friend of ours.
Her name was Darlene.
[Davis.]
Darlene said to me, "Michael, you've got to meet Denys Cowan," because you're, like, only one of three or four black people working in the industry.
[Cowan.]
I don't understand how it happened, but we ended up being very good friends.
[Davis.]
From that point, he became my boy, and, quite literally, introduced me to the industry.
[music.]
[Dingle.]
It was 1983.
I came back to New York.
I got a job at Black Enterprise as an associate editor.
One day in 1989, I was on my way to work.
I see this 50th anniversary Batman comic book, and then I go to the artists.
It's Denys Cowan.
The very next day, I called DC Comics.
"I have to find Denys Cowan.
" I said, "You know what? I'm going to go to Denys's house," and I rang the doorbell [Cowan.]
And I went to answer the door, and there's Derek in a suit.
[Dingle.]
I guess I probably looked like, you know, an IRS agent.
That's one of those movie moments, too.
You open the door and your best friend, who you haven't seen in 10 years or whatever, is just standing there, going, "Hey, what's up?" [music.]
New York City was insane.
The things that were going on were crazy.
Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights We will not continue to pay for people that abuse, and murder, and maim us I mean, the '80s shaped what we did.
[Method Man.]
It's funny that my start would be with a group of guys, you know, and we're sort of like a hip-hop X-Men, I guess.
For a lot of people, the escape was music, whatever.
My escape was comic books.
[Gayles.]
Hip hop was emerging in a very political way.
Public Enemy, Tribe Called Quest [Hudlin.]
Def Jam was rising.
Spike was creating, you know, his production company.
[Cowan.]
"She's Gotta Have It," "Do the Right Thing," Malcolm X Spike Lee, for us, was a major influence, because Spike Lee did it himself.
In the comic book medium, there was a absence of this voice.
[Dwayne McDuffie.]
99.
9% of comic book companies up to that point had been owned and run by white males.
My own inclination was to create comics that were more contemporary, that, even though it was a fantasy world, we wanted it to look like the world we lived in.
[Christopher Priest.]
He was a brilliant person.
Not just a brilliant writer, but a brilliant person.
[Cowan.]
Dwayne McDuffie was probably the only black writer that I had met.
I met him because they had asked me to do Deathlok at Marvel, and he happened to be the writer.
I responded to his writing immediately.
[McDuffie.]
My biggest issue, generally, in writing mainstream comics is if you write a black character, he represents blackness, and that's ridiculous.
That's way too much, way too complex, way too much weight for any character, any single character, to hold.
[Cowan.]
And we had both gotten to the point where we were frustrated at the lack of characters to express the things that we wanted to express, but that all changed in 1992.
I literally woke up one morning.
I thought, "This is it.
If I want a world where there's black superheroes, we're going to have to create some black superheroes.
" I got up and I called Michael Davis.
The idea was to create a universe of characters - that looked like us.
- "What do you think? Am I crazy?" and he said, "You're crazy.
" [chuckles.]
Every black kid who's ever wanted to do comics has had that idea.
I told him, "The only way we're going to see it is if we do it.
" It was that time.
[music.]
[Cowan.]
So the next person we called was Dwayne McDuffie, and Dwayne looked at both of us and said, "You guys are crazy.
" I'm like, "Nah, Dwayne, we can do it because" whatever reasons I came up with, I don't even remember, and Dwayne said, "You're crazy, but imma do it wit' you because you crazy, but we'll do it, but you crazy.
" Denys was committed from day one to get Derek involved.
You know why? Because him and Derek made up comic books when they were kids.
How cool is that [bleep.]
? Dwayne and Michael and I knew nothing about business, but we knew Derek wore a tie.
I always wore a suit, even on Saturdays.
"Here's the idea," and I pitched him the same thing.
He said, "You're crazy.
" My response, of course, was, "Denys, I have a job.
" [chuckles.]
And he said, "Derek we have to do this.
You know, people have marched and died so that we can create these images.
" From that point on, the reservations, you know, faded away.
[Cowan.]
We met constantly, I drew a lot of pictures.
I probably designed the whole universe.
[Priest.]
I got a phone call from Denys Cowan, and I always wanted to do something like this.
Christopher Priest wrote some bible stuff.
Michael wrote some bible stuff.
[Priest.]
I created most of the background stuff, and then I ran it all past Dwayne McDuffie, who made it better.
[Cowan.]
Dwayne McDuffie distilled all of it, rewrote it, and made it fit into this 28-page document.
On a Friday evening, I brought that document over to DC Comics right before Paul Levitz had to go home, and gave it to him in his hands.
Denys Cowan walked into my office, we were friendly, - and he had a nice thick bible - He couldn't put it down.
Every time he put it down, he'd pick it back up.
[Cowan.]
So Monday morning, he calls me up, calls me on my phone and says, "Denys, this is great.
We want to do it.
Come down and meet with us.
" Boom.
[Dingle.]
It was euphoric.
It was exciting.
You know, we did pop the cork on the Champagne, but what was cooler than that was when we went into our offices.
That made it real.
"Oh, my god, what does this really all mean?" That means that we had to deliver.
[music.]
We all initially met at my studio in Manhattan at the time.
We said, "Okay, if we're going to create a comic book universe, what do we need to do?" and then we said, "Well, we need archetypes, like the Superman archetype.
" [music.]
[Davis.]
Icon is an African-American No, he's not.
He actually is not.
Icon is an alien.
[Cowan.]
He crash-landed here on Earth.
The pod being discovered, but he wasn't discovered by Ma and Pa Kent.
He was discovered by a slave.
It was important to us to represent there was no one monolithic black point of view.
[Hudlin.]
He's a Republican because Lincoln freed the slaves, and he's sticking with what's working for him.
Icon had a sidekick, Rocket, and Rocket was the antithesis of Icon.
Rocket was a spitfire, and young and energetic.
[Cowan.]
The book was told through her point of view, which was another Dwayne innovation.
You only saw the world through her eyes.
If she didn't see it, you didn't see it.
Genius just genius.
[Gayles.]
To see them having the conversations that they were having, to see Rocket challenge his assumptions about class, and work ethic, and the way in which you can pick yourself up by your own bootstraps Reading that comic book became a much more rich experience for me.
[Cowan.]
The next book we released was "Hardware.
" [Hudlin.]
I loved Hardware because he was just cool.
You know, he had that Tony Stark kind of swagger to him.
Hardware is a technological genius who works for a corrupt company, Alva Industries, and because he recognizes the corruption in the company, he decides to create the Hardware armor and fight the corruption.
The first couple of pages of the first issue, there's this metaphor of a caged bird [glass shattering.]
Certainly, Dwayne was writing about himself and that frustration of working for the man that doesn't appreciate you.
[Cowan.]
The next book we did was a little different.
"What if we had a teenage kid, and he's a black kid, and he has nuclear powers? No, what if he has speed powers? Like, he's really No.
What if he has electric powers?" He can control electricity, and we'll call him "Static.
" Static was interesting because Static, it was one of my favorite comics.
It was the most old-fashioned.
[Hudlin.]
He spoke to who the core demo was, which was smart, nerdy, black kids, - or I guess the new phrase is "blerd.
" - We made him a geek.
We made him a big science fiction fan, like the four of us actually were when we were that age.
The last thing we needed was a superhero team, because all great comic book universes have a superhero team.
[music.]
There's no other superhero team like the Blood Syndicate.
[Cowan.]
All superhero teams are basically like a gang anyway, so why not just do a real gang? [chuckles.]
[Brandon Easton.]
I loved the diversity of "Blood Syndicate.
" You had gay, straight, lesbian, African-American, Latino, Native characters in a comic, which you had never seen before.
[Gayles.]
There were a lot of metaphors for police brutality, drugs, and the ra you know, how drugs ravaged communities.
The Blood Syndicate dealt with all of that.
[Brady.]
Each of these characters in that universe, in the Milestone universe, to a degree, because they were black, had to eat crow.
They didn't turn their backs on the greater good.
They still said, "Damn it, this dude thinks I'm trash, but let me go and save this airplane.
" [McDuffie.]
There's never been a good distribution chain that was black-owned or black-controlled, or even particularly black-friendly.
They really wanted to be free to do things very independently.
There's limits to how much independence was possible when they required both distribution, economic support - It was challenging.
- We had complete editorial control.
- They could say no.
- If something offended DC's not principles, but sort of DC's brand in some way, I think we had the ability to say, "Please don't publish that.
" They had final approval of what they were going to publish.
It was their money, their comic book company, and everything else.
[announcer.]
Meet the men of Milestone, the newest division of DC Comics.
Dwayne McDuffie is the editor in chief We want to give people that shock of recognition I got the first time I saw a black superhero, and I went, "Wow," you know? "I could do this.
I could be Superman.
" [music.]
[Cowan.]
20 years ago, there were two titles being published by a major publisher that had black lead characters, until this week, where everything changed.
History changed this week.
[music.]
[Hudlin.]
The books were as good or better than anything else on the stands, and I read them not out of some sense of obligation, but because I wanted to read the books.
[music.]
These Milestone comic books are really dope, man.
I got, I got this, um, Blood Syndicate, man.
They've got all kind of people in here.
What you got? Icon, man Oh, he looks hell.
What you got, Dre? - I got Hardware, man, all three issues, man.
- Yeah? It's hard to say what numbers we expected from the Milestone comics, but they were really good.
[music.]
[Davis.]
We've got these jackets with "M" on the back, right? It's like, you walk through a convention back then with that "M" on your back, man, it's like you're a Beatle, because we did something that no one else could even imagine getting done.
[Dingle.]
Sometimes you didn't know who would be coming into the office.
You know, one day it'll be John Singleton, another day it'd be Quincy Jones.
[Cowan.]
Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court judge, - wrote Derek a fan letter.
- You know, because of Icon [chuckles.]
In fact, invited me to his chambers.
[Cowan.]
It was amusing to us, and a little strange, that Clarence Thomas would say this was his favorite book.
Now I think about it, I'm like, Well, yeah, he liked Icon, who was just a conservative dude.
[music.]
[Stacey Robinson.]
I moved to New York City to work for Milestone specifically.
I knew that they were making history.
[Matt Wayne.]
They knew me as the white guy at Milestone.
I ended up doing some of the most exciting work of my life.
[Cowan.]
Dwayne had a very strong point of view that he wanted to get across editorially.
Dwayne had this unshakable moral code.
It created some some challenges, because in some situations, in terms of business, there needs to be, you know, compromise.
When things are going well, you know, you kind of rolling along, and it's all good.
It's only when things are not going so well that you start taking stock that maybe this wasn't what we thought it was.
[Cowan.]
There was a political heart to Milestone.
[Robinson.]
Dwayne McDuffie has always been political.
His books have always been political.
His stories have always been political.
He was an activist.
[Wayne.]
Two questions Dwayne always asked in a story.
One is, "What's the worst thing that can happen?" and the other is, "What if this was really happening? How would it play out?" Well, in Icon and Rocket, we had Rachel get pregnant, at 14, so it was a teenage pregnancy, so we were dealing with, like, kind of heady stuff for 1992.
It was to address a certain reality that has never been reflected in comics before.
We got into some kind of controversy about that.
We published a lot of stuff that made them very uncomfortable, which always sort of amused me because they weren't as uncomfortable when they dealt with those topics.
Well, it was largely Dwayne's job that we would butt heads with.
He thought that they can't tell us what to do.
"They hired us for a specific point of view, and if they're not going to let us do this, then why are we there? We have to do this, and we have to do it, we're making a point.
" I felt it was unnecessary.
[Wayne.]
Denys, I think, was starting to butt heads with Dwayne more.
They're they're two different people.
It wasn't that he was more of an idealist.
It was just that I was a little bit more practical.
[Hudlin.]
I knew there was a lot of internal tension, and the friendship and the partnership started to unravel.
Probably the biggest the biggest actual fight that we had was an issue of Static.
[music.]
[Cowan.]
The incident that happened was that we wanted to show safe sex on a Static Shock cover.
It sounds like something we'd have an argument about.
The way we were going to do that was to show condoms in a wrapper on the cover.
[McDuffie.]
On the cover, he's making out with his girlfriend.
There's no flesh exposed, but they're going at it pretty good.
[Gayles.]
The idea of a black teenage superhero having sex with his girlfriend and using cond That was a lot for DC.
You can imagine.
There was a lot of Pepto-Bismol being had at DC that day.
I remember there was one one issue of one of the books where we had a fairly energetic disagreement about the cover art, and we asked them to make changes.
They were very frustrated by that.
That was a huge, huge fight, and I think a lot of it, it wasn't about sexuality.
It was about black sexuality.
He didn't like it at all.
You know, when they decided to censor that particular issue of Static Shock, he fought back.
He fought back pretty hard.
Even though they said that we couldn't do it, somehow in between the stage of where they approved it and when we sent it to the printer after getting it back, somewhere between Dwayne McDuffie and whoever else was working with him, through some kind of bait and switch, the condom was back on the cover, but that's not what the issue was ever, really.
The issue was the editorial that accompanied the cover, and the editorial page started talking about the injustices that were done to us, and how was it racist to not show condoms on the cover, and this and that and the other, and I think that people at DC, Paul and other people, got very upset at that, reading about themselves in an editorial page of Milestone and how unfair they were, because they had been paying for this whole thing.
I felt it was their money.
I really did.
I felt it was unnecessary.
I felt we could have gotten what we wanted without going through the "Let's put it on the cover based on principle," because what happened after that was not good.
[Wayne.]
Mysteriously, payments that were due to Milestone kind of dried up, and we kind of had a little bit of trouble.
Paul's response was dispassionate and direct.
"If this is the way you feel about how we treat you, then we're going to no longer treat you like we were treating you before.
We will treat you in this new way," and that's when things became very hard for Milestone.
Soon after that cover incident is when I left, and didn't discuss it with anybody, and it was just it was just a very bad situation for me, handled not very well by me.
Derek, I don't know what Derek said.
I think he was disappointed, because I just made the move.
There was no hard, long discussion with Derek, because at that time, I wasn't having any conversations with Dwayne and Derek about anything.
My friendship with Michael continued, but not with Dwayne and Derek, not at all.
[Jones.]
I would talk to Dwayne on the phone every once in a while.
"Hey, man, how's it going?" and everything, and he would say, "Oh, man, it's always a fight.
" [laughs.]
[Cowan.]
At the time, the whole comics industry was not collapsing, but it was definitely changing and imploding and shrinking.
I mean, Derek was doing the best he could to keep everything together.
Milestone was dealing with the challenges of the industry.
They ended up moving to DC Comics and working out of DC Comics' offices, but once you're doing that, it's over.
The Milestone line, along with a number of other lines, were cut.
I don't know whether we broke the news to them or they broke the news to us.
We just weren't able to make it work in the marketplace.
[music.]
[Cowan.]
I think that they just ran into losing sales, and "These guys are difficult to work with anyway.
" At the time when when they were considering what to do with Milestone, that was part of it.
It pissed me off because sometimes they don't know what what was missing until you jump up and scream loud enough, and that's what was the bummer about Milestone stopping, was was there was a voice that was silenced.
It's sad, because Milestone is the greatest thing to ever happen Milestone's the greatest thing to ever happen to comics since the Black Panther.
[Duffy.]
I think when you see comics fans talk about Milestone now, they often talk about Milestone as some sort of failed experiment.
It's always been my argument that Milestone comics didn't fail, but that comics failed Milestone.
Milestone is not a failure by any stretch of the imagination.
There's a lot of folks who not only got their career started, but got a crash course in storytelling and business from Milestone.
[Gayles.]
How many people did Milestone Media hire? How many artists got their start at Milestone Media? How many writers? How many illustrators? That's passed on through all of these artists, probably hundreds of artists.
[Cowan.]
Milestone was not a failure to me because the things that we created, and the characters that we created are forever.
[Static Shock animated series theme song plays.]
[music.]
[Cowan.]
About three years after Milestone stopped publishing it, a producer pal of mine pitched the idea of doing Static to Kids' WB.
Basically, I got a phone call, and said, "Would you mind if we did Static as a TV show?" [chuckles.]
and, you know, I thought about it and said yes.
[music.]
Static Shock the animated series was an extraordinary success.
[McDuffie.]
The first day that Static was on television, more people saw it than read all of 45 issues combined.
[Dingle.]
The creative process was mostly Denys and Dwayne.
At that point, they patched things up a little bit.
I remember talking to Dwayne, and he said, "You know what? There are some things I can never forgive Denys for, but I can sure as hell work with him.
" [Cowan.]
We worked together on Static Shock, and once again we got along famously professionally, but personally, it was a lil it was a little trickier.
Because I was friends with everybody, even when people weren't getting along, I was talking to everybody.
After the success of Static Shock, Dwayne and Denys, I hear, were talking about a reboot of the whole Milestone line.
I felt it was important because these characters needed to be seen again by an entirely new generation, by the generation that missed them and by their kids.
That's when the germ of the idea about bringing it back started.
[Hudlin.]
I was excited to say, "Okay, let's get together," again, we're scheming on how to revive Milestone, the whole thing, and then it was over.
[music.]
[Dingle.]
I get a call from his wife saying that Dwayne was in the hospital.
Dwayne had had a heart attack.
He had surgery.
He had come out of surgery [Cowan.]
So we all thought he was going to be fine and that he was fine.
[Davis.]
He sent me an email from the hospital, and it was picture of Static Shock, the action figure [breaking voice.]
that was going be produced "Look what we created.
Look what we did," and then the next day, he was dead.
[Dingle.]
It was like somebody just hit me and took all the air out of me.
[Walker.]
I turned on the computer, and it said Dwayne McDuffie was dead.
[Dingle.]
You know, I always thought that Dwayne didn't realize how much of an impact his work had on people.
I mean, I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt, Dwayne McDuffie, I owe a massive debt to.
What he has given to comics, what he has given to animation, can't be overstated.
[Dingle.]
So many people coming to us and saying, "This needs to come back.
There's still a void.
" [Hudlin.]
And it was that pivotal moment where you just go, "Well, we just can't let it end.
" [music.]
[Dingle.]
We had a memorial service shortly after Dwayne's death.
[Cowan.]
I was fine until I saw Dwayne's mom.
When I saw his mom, and we started talking about her son, that's when I broke down, and she knew what kind of rocky relationship we had but none of that mattered, you know? None of that mattered.
What mattered was what we had done, and what we had shared, and the devastating loss.
[Dingle.]
People were starting to disperse, and I called Denys and Reggie, and I remember saying, "We can't let this die.
This is too important.
" [Cowan.]
That's when the germ of the idea for bringing it back started.
[Dingle.]
It was time.
Reggie Hudlin said, "We should talk.
" [Hudlin.]
"We can't just let it end like this.
We can't let it end at a memorial service.
" [Dingle, chuckling.]
Denys shook his head as he's always shook his head, "I'm in.
" [Cowan.]
I called Derek two days after.
We kind of patched things up and we talked about it, and I apologized for any of my miscalculations on how how I should have behaved, and he accepted my apology, and I really meant it, because Dwayne's gone and it won't be the same, but to me it's just as imperative now to to to build this again, and he agreed.
[Victor Lucas.]
Got some huge news at the Con.
Milestone Comics is coming back, and Reginald Hudlin is part of all of this, and After Dwayne McDuffie passed away, I met with Reggie Hudlin, who had been invited into the Milestone Media Group, so we took a number of meetings with him and Denys, and really just talked about the future of Milestone and these characters, and we saw that there was an incredible missed opportunity not having these characters out there.
Everyone at DC was excited about the idea of bringing it back to life.
This is going to be a new Milestone Media.
It's not a matter of doing what we did before.
It's about defining what Milestone Media means now.
[Cowan.]
Hardware is making another appearance, Blood Syndicate, we're relaunching Static Shock.
We're relaunching Icon and Rocket.
But the most exciting part is that we have a whole bunch of new characters that people are not ready for and they have not expected.
[Jim Lee.]
Who would have imagined that there would be so many changes in fandom, where you have people really demanding diversity and inclusivity, so the industry has changed quite a bit, and, frankly, it was the right time for DC to do this right now.
[music.]
[Brady.]
There's definitely been an evolution and progress since I was a child.
Not only have we come such a long way that Black Panther, the movie is even being made.
It's going to be a tent-pole movie.
[music.]
I'm so glad we're making the Black Panther movie now, and it's going to be just the way I had envisioned it, and I can't wait to see it.
[tires squealing.]
[music.]
[Luke Cage.]
I'm still not sure what I am.
To have Luke Cage on Netflix is, that's some powerful [bleep.]
.
When I heard they were making the Luke Cage, you know, I was a little apprehensive at first.
It's you.
Yeah, it's you.
Sweet Christmas.
[chuckling fondly.]
[music.]
I've watched little black kids dressed up as Thor and Captain America and Batman and Superman for years.
Last year, I saw little white kids dressed up as the Black Panther.
That, to me, is way more progress than anything I I can I can quantify.
I don't see any way you can look this renaissance not paying homage to Milestone Media.
They made it okay to be black and dream.
United we fight! This is a world that needs Milestone Comics in it.
It needs that example.
[Dingle.]
Milestone was a badge of honor.
It represented a change in the industry.
I must say, it's the most exciting thing that I've ever done in my life, other than growing up next to Denys with a stack of comic books from my brother's collection.
It's, um it's been quite a journey.
It's been quite a journey.
Being able to work with Derek again means more to me than, you know, anyone could possibly understand.
It's It's as it should be, because we started this together, so, you know, we're going to continue this together.
[music.]
[title music.]