American comic book writer and television writer (1962-2011). He was born and raised in Detroit. When he was 11 years old, he read his first "Black Panther" comic, which he later described as a revelation for a young Black kid who never got to see himself as a superhero. The Black Panther wasn't a stereotype, not a sidekick, not comic relief, not a gang member. He was a hero and king who stood toe-to-toe with any other superhero. "In the space of 15 pages, black people moved from invisible to inevitable," he later said.
McDuffie graduated from the Roeper School in Bloomfield, Michigan, in 1980 and discovered his passion for storytelling after creating a Super-8 film that received acclaim from his classmates. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor's in English, followed by a master's in physics, then moved to New York City, where he attended NYU's Tisch School of the Arts to pursue a film degree. He got a copy editor position at Investment Dealers' Digest magazine; while working there, a friend got him an interview with Marvel Comics, which hired him on as an assistant editor.
At Marvel, McDuffie helped develop the company's first trading cards as well as writing comic scripts. The first major title he worked on was "Damage Control," which focused on a company that specialized in cleaning up after destructive superhero battles. He also submitted a fake proposal for a comic he called "Teenage Negro Ninja Thrashers" to needle Marvel about they way they treated Black characters in their comics. He started freelancing in the early 1990s, writing for Marvel, DC, Archie Comics, and Harvey Comics.
In 1993, McDuffie, along with other Black comic book creators like Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, Derek T. Dingle and Christopher Priest, founded Milestone Media, a comic book company focusing on multicultural comics. McDuffie was the editor-in-chief of the company and created or co-created many of the characters, including the lightning-slinging teenager Static. Milestone was able to get a distribution deal with DC Comics, which helped them make it onto comic shop shelves, and they were focused on an audience that was mostly being ignored by DC and Marvel -- but Milestone debuted right at the beginning of the comics industry slump of the '90s, and the company closed only a few years later.
After Milestone closed, McDuffie moved into writing for television, beginning with "Static Shock," an animated cartoon based on his character Static. He wrote 11 episodes, as well as story-editing for the series. He also had writing credits on "What's New, Scooby-Doo?" and "Teen Titans." When Bruce Timm's animated "Justice League" series came out in 2001, McDuffie was hired as a staff writer and was later promoted to story editor and producer before the series transitioned to "Justice League Unlimited" in 2004. He was also the writer, producer, and editor for "Ben 10: Alien Force" and "Ben 10: Ultimate Alien," and he wrote the pilot episode of "Ben 10: Omniverse."
McDuffie also wrote some direct-to-DVD animated films for DC Comics, including "Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths" and "Justice League: Doom."
After "Justice League Unlimited" ended, McDuffie returned to writing comics again. He wrote the miniseries "Beyond!" for Marvel, along with about a dozen issues of "Fantastic Four." He wrote "Justice League of America" for almost two years but was fired from the book when a comics gossip website revealed that McDuffie wasn't happy with DC Editorial interfering with everything he wrote and refusing to let him use characters like Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, and Captain Marvel in the series. (DC's and Marvel's editorial offices are notoriously heavy-handed about what stories get written. When the stories are bad, they can blame the freelance writers to protect their jobs. And they hate it when anyone tells the truth about the editorial offices.) He also wrote "Milestone Forever," a two-issue series designed to wrap up the Milestone Universe before it was transplanted into the DC Universe.
Probably the weirdest thing McDuffie was credited with was the creation of the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis, which greatly expanded the tongue-in-cheek theory that the entirety of the TV series "St. Elsewhere" took place in the imagination of an autistic character named Tommy Westphall, who was seen playing with a snow globe that had a model of the TV show's hospital in it during the series' final episode. McDuffie's even more tongue-in-cheek theory was that all of the shows that had crossovers with "St. Elsewhere," including "Cheers," "M*A*S*H," "The White Shadow," "Homicide: Life on the Street," "Oz," "The Bob Newhart Show," and "Newhart," were also fully imagined by Westphall, and that any shows that crossed over with any of those shows were also imagined by Westphall, etc., etc., ad infinitum. McDuffie meant his theory to warn comics readers not to be such strict sticklers for continuity -- but the hypothesis has been expanded with every new TV crossover and is sometimes taken fairly seriously.
On February 21, 2011, McDuffie died of complications from emergency heart surgery, just a day after his 49th birthday. The animated adaptation of "All-Star Superman," which he had scripted, was released the day after he died.
Someone as important to comics as McDuffie was and who died so unexpectedly was certain to attract plenty of tributes. "Justice League: Doom" was released a year after his death and included a documentary called "A Legion of One: The Dwayne McDuffie Story." A diner called McDuffie's appeared in an episode of the animated "Green Lantern" series. In the "Ultimate Spider-Man" series, the episode "Damage" was dedicated to him, and the CEO of Damage Control, Mac Porter, was modeled after him. The finale episode of "Ben 10: Ultimate Alien" was dedicated to McDuffie. In the 2011 "Static Shock" comic book series, Virgil Hawkins attended McDuffie High School. And in DC's "Naomi" comic, the lead character was named Naomi McDuffie.
Two comics awards were named after McDuffie -- the Long Beach Comic Expo presents the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics every year, and the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Kids' Comics is awarded at the Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival.
During his career, McDuffie was nominated for multiple Eisner Awards, though he didn't win any. He was awarded the Humanitas Prize in Children's Animation for a "Static Shock" episode dealing with gun violence and was nominated with other "Static Shock" creators for Daytime Emmy Awards. He was also posthumously awarded the Animation Writers Caucus' Animation Writing Award by the Writers Guild of America, West.
A few years after McDuffie's death, comedian Keegan-Michael Key, one half of the Key and Peele comedy duo, learned that he and McDuffie were half-brothers.