Dwayne McDuffie was a comic writer who co-founded Milestone Media, which focused on characters and stories about racial and ethnic groups that are underrepresented in comics. He co-created characters like Static, Icon, Rocket, and Hardware in comics, and he was a writer and producer on animated series like Static Shock, Justice League Unlimited, and Ben 10.

He was born on February 20, 1962, in Detroit, Michigan and one of his earliest significant moments reading comics was discovering Black Panther. McDuffie graduated from the Roeper School for gifted children in 1980 and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Michigan. Then he earned a master’s degree in physics, and followed that by studying film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

McDuffie spent some time as a copy editor on a business magazine, before joining Marvel as editor Bob Budiansky’s assistant on special projects like the publisher’s first superhero trading cards. He worked on the Damage Control miniseries about a company that cleans up after battles, and submitted a book called Teenage Negro Ninja Thrashers as a spoof of how Black characters were treated in comics. McDuffie became a freelance creator, writing for Marvel, DC, Archie, and Harvey on titles like Avengers Spotlight, Deathlok, Monster in My Pocket, Double Dragon, and The Demon.

In ’93, McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Christopher Priest, Michael Davis, and Derek T. Dingle founded Milestone Media with comics published and distributed by DC. Their line of books predominately starred Black, Hispanic, and Asian characters, providing multicultural reading that was largely absent from mainstream comics. McDuffie served as the editor-in-chief of Milestone Media, overseeing titles like Hardware, Blood Syndicate, Icon, Static, Xombi, and others.

When Milestone stopped publishing comics, they developed the Static Shock animated series with McDuffie acting as writer and story editor. Working in animation, he was a staff writer on the Justice League animated series, story editor and producer on Justice League Unlimited, and wrote, produced, and edited Ben 10: Alien Force and Ben 10: Ultimate Alien. He wrote several DC animated films like Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, Justice League: Doom, All-Star Superman, and Justice League: Doom.

Returning to comics in the mid-2000s, McDuffie wrote issues of Firestorm, Fantastic Four, and Justice League of America. One of his last comic projects was writing the Milestone Forever miniseries about the Milestone characters before they joined the DC Universe. He passed away on February 11, 2011, from complications of emergency heart surgery.

Since his passing, McDuffie contributions to comics and animation have been honored in many ways. The Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics is given out each year at the Long Beach Comic Expo and the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Kids’ Comics is awarded at the Ann Arbor Comics Arts Festival.