“Dwayne McDuffie on the realities of the Black writer in the comic book industry”

Shoegaze sent me this video. McDuffie is spot on about what it’s like as a minority writer. What strikes me is how funny, graceful, and downright genial McDuffie is about the whole thing. If year after year I were questioned about some “super sekrit omg minority conspiracy” during my career, I would be so bitter and angry. 

From McDuffie’s Wiki page:

In the early 1990s, wanting to express a multicultural sensibility that he felt was missing in comic books, McDuffie and three partners 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.” 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.

RIP McDuffie. You are definitely missed.