Forever the Maestro

 “I’ve always felt that the cool thing about being a writer is that all you need is paper to do the job. The best thing to further what you do is write and read all you can. Read both stuff you like to see why its good and read bad to see how to fix. Doing that will help you see and solve problems in your own writing. 

“But I think the biggest advice I can offer is don’t just pick one story and stop, write as much as you can, as many stories as you can. The best thing about being a writer is, a writer’s craft is nearly perfect because a writer can go anywhere and do his craft.”

Dwayne McDuffie, writer, creator of worlds, legend.

A creator. A genius. A dreamer. 

An icon. An ideal. An inspiration.

A collaborator. A colleague. An intellect.

A friend. A son. A brother. A husband.

The Maestro.

Dwayne.

I think of the many writers who inspired me to create my own stories, Mr. McDuffie remains the keystone to the creator I grew up to be. His works resonated with me when I first picked up Hardware. 

This monologue has been forever etched in my psyche because it's much deeper than just a man talking about his bird.

“When I was a kid, I used to have this parakeet. Sometimes, when I’d open his cage to clean it, he’d escape. The little bird would see the backyard and make his move. Invariably, he’d head straight for the window, fast as he could and inevitably, crack his head on the windowpane. A barrier of glass, unseen and incomprehensible to him. So, he’d try again, over and over, Until, spent and defeated, he couldn’t try again. The bird made a common error.

He mistook being out of his cage for being free.

The parakeet died a long time ago, without ever enjoying the freedom of the yard. The boy grew into a man, who spent many years bumping his head against a similar barrier: a ceiling of glass, unseen and incomprehensible to him.

Unlike the bird, the man was capable of self-delusion. He believed, once aware of the glass, he could break through it. Many years later, he’s learned the truth: this glass is still too thick.”

This was Hardware echoing the opening lines of his first issue of his title almost two decades later in Milestone Forever, the last chapter of the Dakotaverse written by the late, great Dwayne McDuffie.

The original last line from Hardware #1 wasn’t three lines but this rather succinct, optimistic statement:

“The lesson is clear: Escape is an impossibility, until one perceives all of the barriers.”

And this sentence was highlighted by Hardware bursting through a skylight window. It was magnificent and awesome at the same breath. 

I connected to Hardware immediately. This was his story.

Hardware was also Dwayne McDuffie’s story. Yes, I know he wrote it. Out of all the Milestone titles, he spent the most time creating this tale of an arrogant jerk who thought the world owed him something and transformed him into a humbled, self-sacrificing hero who changed the world. But Hardware was also Mr. McDuffie’s story and was a creative venue where he displayed his displeasure at the comic book industry as a whole. He was a creator who created great things, but he felt like he didn’t get enough credit and felt that he was nothing more than a cog, expendable at best, replaceable.at worst.

He decided that if he couldn’t tell the stories he wants and create the characters he wanted at his former place of work, he was going to do his own thing. He found like-minded creators and co-founded Milestone Media in 1992.

And people hated them from all sides.

Maybe it was jealousy within the indie Black comic scene at the time that Milestone got a publishing deal with DC Comics and the characters were merely and grossly considered "white heroes in blackface" by some of those critics. 

Maybe it was because most comic commentators and comic shop owners said the titles would never work for their customers. 

Maybe it’s because most folks saw the titles as a “separate but equal” side of DC Comics where all the Black characters from that universe will end up.

All untrue.

People think of Milestone as “that Black comic company,” and while the company’s founders were Black as were the lead stars of three of the initial four titles, the books themselves had a wide array of diverse characters. There were Latin American characters that weren’t Cheech and Chong-like stereotypes. Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Haitians, and Cubans were there. You had Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, and Pakistani characters. You had Germans who weren’t Nazi-like villains. You had gays, lesbians, and transgendered heroes and villains. You had creators from all points of the globe. 

In a world where the average comic book creator and fan is a white male between the ages of 18-49, Milestone was an oasis for those that didn’t fit in that paradigm.

And it was fantastic.

That’s a part of Mr. McDuffie’s legacy that so many people only scrape at the top of. They still think of Milestone as “that Black comic company.”

In the years since his passing, the comic industry is, sadly, relatively the same as it was when he left.  Sure, there's a lot of diversity within the pages of mainstream titles, but the creators remain the same demographic for the most part. DC Comics spent a lot of money and time to reinvent their entire universe with the New 52 to attract the same demographics they’ve always attracted while sidelining a bulk of their characters only to return to the familiar status quo and completely humbled. 

The horror stories behind the scenes of the New 52 version of Static, called Static Shock after the popular animated series of the same name, were heartbreaking when you hear one side wanting to create a series but not really given a chance and the other side undermining everything the other guy was doing and deciding to do a series that was mostly action but no cohesive story.

That series makes me wonder how Mr. McDuffie would have handled it. I think he’d be in control considering, well, he created the character. Unfortunately, the beast that is the industry probably wouldn’t even put him on it, and he probably knew that. He remembered the time they got mad at him for "breaking the rule of three" on Justice League of America.

Even today in 2025, there are very few creators of color who aren’t of Asian descent working in the mainstream universes of DC and Marvel, and Black writers aren’t even there in the main books. 

Black writers and artists are out there, but they don’t get enough love in mainstream places outside of February.

And the less said about traditional comic book shops, a majority of which are still largely bigoted towards patrons of color and less inclined to stock titles with minorities in the lead, the better. They listen to “the market,” rather than outside the old paradigms and see anything that's not something out of the 1960s, that is, something that happens to feature or showcase any character that's not a straight white man in the lead role, as less than their ideal and often using the different terms to mark their disgust publicly without spewing epithets that would rightfully earn them public scorn.

Urban. Politically correct. Quotas. Forcing an agenda. Affirmative action hero. SJW. Woke. CRT. DEI.

Different words for the same bullshit from snowflakes to cowardly to call folks "nigger" out loud in public and not behind a computer monitor or cellphone. And yeah, I'm calling these bigots "snowflakes."

Cold, white, troublesome when they build up, easily melts when they're under fire. 

Mr. McDuffie had dealt with this throughout his career and his life. He was always criticized for putting Black characters up front and in the lead of nearly every comic story he put out, and he was unashamed of that, even though the loudest voices metaphorically spat in his face as he did that. 

But he never hated them. He was above that, as evidence in this passage from Deathlok Annual #1:

“Any group tends to have dehumanizing effects. Slapping labels and questioning the good intentions of those who see the world differently than you doesn’t help anybody. It DOES relieve you of the burden of having to listen. Or even think. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t make them a bad person.”

He knew the truth. It’s a glass barrier that keeps us all in, and that glass is still too damned thick. But there are chips and small cracks there now. 

Traditional venues are evaporating, and newer ones are being created every day. Creators are no longer tied to the big two and have many tools at their disposal to do their own thing. If the internet of 1992 was like the internet of 2025, perhaps Milestone would have been a digital comics network.

We have the technology now. And we certainly have the talent. The barriers are still there, and the glass is still too thick.

But at least we have perceived all the barriers. 

I can’t see the future, but I could make some stuff up.

I just wish Mr. McDuffie was still here, and it still feels unfair he's not. I would have loved to have seen him examine the world today, the good and the bad. Then again, I wouldn't want to see him fall into the morose abyss many Black intellectuals and so-called geniuses fell into and becoming egotistical and self-important, though his last name isn't West like those other two losers, so I think we're good.

I really wish he got the chance to know and acknowledge his half-brother Keegan-Michael Key as such. 

I think I just wanted to read more stories from him period. Would have loved to have seen him take on the modern media age of superheroes and just go all out. 

But I can't. Instead, I'm just remembering Mr. McDuffie on what would have been his 63rd birthday. He ascended and joined the ancestors 14 years ago tomorrow, February 21, 2011 at the relatively young age of 49. I'd like to think he’s somewhere in the great cosmos fixing the sun that still shines above us all. He's still inspiring us all to fly high and free, even if it's just for a day.