"Black Folks Making Comics": Still The Budgie

“Black Folks Making Comics”: Still The Budgie

“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 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 want 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 founded Milestone Media in 1992.

And people hated them all for doing it.

Maybe it was jealousy within the indie Black comic scene at the time that Milestone got a publishing deal with DC Comics. Maybe it was because most comic commentators said the titles would never work. 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 year since his passing, the comic industry is relatively the same as it was when he left. DC Comics spent a lot of money and time to reinvent their entire universe to attract the same demographics they’ve always attracted while sidelining a bulk of their characters. At the end of 2011 and the first months of 2012, both DC and Marvel canceled titles featuring characters of color not connected to a legacy brand, including the revival of Milestone’s Static series, Static Shock. The horror stories behind the scenes of that series is 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. But the beast that is the industry probably wouldn’t even put him on it, and he probably knew that.

There are very few creators of color who aren’t of Asian descent 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 (otherwise, Black Folks Making Comics the blog wouldn’t even exist), 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.

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 2012, 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. And, like Hardware’s new bird at the end of Milestone Forever, we’ll fly high.