Fans of superhero media likely have at least some passing familiarity with comic book and TV writer Dwayne McDuffie, whose biggest contributions to the medium include co-founding the DC offshoot Milestone Media and its flagship hero Static, and helping spearhead the DCAU’s Justice League and Ben 10 franchises over on Cartoon Network. This past Friday, February 20, marked what would’ve been his 64th birthday, and it’s unfortunate that it also has to share oxygen with his death. On February 21, 2011, McDuffie suddenly passed after an emergency heart surgery.
At the time of his passing, the news came as a shock amongst the animation and comics communities. As friends, fans, and coworkers eulogized him, he was posthumously remembered in his final works like Justice League: Doom and Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, while comic book conventions in Long Beach, CA and Ann Arbor, MI created awards in his name that focused on comics and animation. His wife Charlotte Fullerton established a foundation in his name to grant scholarships to children at the school he grew up, and the DC character Naomi is named after him. And overall, he’s still remembered fondly today by those who grew up on his work, collaborated with him, or learned of him years after his death.
Whether it was for his general writing and storytelling skills, or what he strived to do for Black characters specfically, people loved Dwayne McDuffie. That’s what makes every year without him feel so heavy, with the 2026 anniversary of his passing taking on a particular weight as DC works once more to reignite long-term interest in the Milestone universe. There’ve been repeated attempts at this over the years, with DC using the 2020s to release several Milestone solo books, anniversary specials, and one-shots. As its mascot, a lot of Milestone’s future seems to rest specifically on Static: he gets to team up with Batman Beyond in the comics and is the only character in the line who seems to have something resembling a cinematic future.
Or he would have one, if there weren’t rights issues between McDuffie’s estate and the still-living Milestone co-founders Denys Cowan, Derek T. Dingle, and Michael Davis. So often, the fractured state of Milestone and its legal strife tends to overwhelm each other and discussions of Dwayne McDuffie as fans think about how Static and Milestone get repeatedly shafted whenever it’s not Black History Month. As some will tell it, Static is and has always been the next evolution of Spider-Man as a relatable hero who can grow up with his audience and potentially become an A-lister who never goes away or gets forgotten to history, and that it’s not happened yet is a failure is a blunder on DC’s end and a general failure on McDuffie’s legacy.
As for me, I wish McDuffie was still alive and around. I’m not a scholar or someone who took interest in the medium specifically because of his work, and I didn’t know him personally—I just feel he should still be here because that feels like the life he deserved. It’s a bit of pragmatic selfishness that comes from the simple act of apprecating talented people and wanting to see them go on to continue their work so others can feel about them more strongly and passionately than you and keep them alive in the cultural memory. The last few years have been so heavy with creatives across all industries dying younger than expected or when they clearly had more life and work left in them. And when it comes to comics, these losses hit harder owing to how popular characters like Static and Spider-Man have become for the corporations who own them while their actual creators or key contributors get little more than a mention in the credits and maybe a GoFundMe link for their loved ones to push down the line.
I don’t know what Dwayne McDuffie would’ve gone on to do had he lived past 2011, whether he’d still be in comics and TV, or what he and Milestone would do going forward. But I do know that he deserved to live to see 64 and beyond and continue doing what he loved while getting flowers for it.
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