COVE

Milestone Media is a company founded in 1993 by four young black men: Derek T. Dingle, Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, and Michael Davis. These men all had a background in the comics industry. This company was founded under the idea that it would be a black-owned company that created diverse stories with black characters as the lead of each of their new comic lines. The founding members believed in the importance of diversity and representation, up until this point it was hard to find many comics with leading characters that weren’t white. In his book Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans Milestone Comics and Their Fans, published in 2000, author Jeffrey Brown claims that “comic books have more or less managed to erase all evidence of cultural diversity. For decades young readers have encountered a defining and idealized image of heroism that was explicitly honest, law abiding, chaste, excessively masculine, and above all, white (3.)” He goes on to say the “central goal of Milestone in their attempt to address the lack of minority representation in comics, and the often stereotypical nature of that representation when it does occur, is to show the quality and diversity of African American life (31).”

In the book, The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, published in 2015, authors Frances Gateward and John Jennings talk about the diverse history of African American representation in comic history. They state in the introduction of their book, “the Black experience in the comics medium is a diverse one and deserves as many approaches as possible to understand its complex and vital histories.” While it may be easy to shrug off any serious claim of the power that comics have to change one’s perspective or have any real importance when it comes to representation. In his article, “Identity and Representation in US Comics”, Joshua Kopin establishes that comics are far from being only a popular cultural form that circulates among a particular audience and in particular ways. He goes on to say that they “have been used and enjoyed by a variety of audiences through a variety of different but related forms (comic books, comic strips, graphic novels, webcomics, and so on). Comics studies, therefore, is a discipline in which good work requires the acknowledgment of the multiplicity of audiences that comics reach (441.)”

Starting in the late 1960’s with the introduction of the first black superhero, Black Panther in Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four #52, black superheroes never really evolved past that of side characters. In the 1970s the comic industry began looking at the characters from the Blaxploitation films of the time to create similar styled characters. One of the most popular of these characters being Luke Cage, who’s initial run lasted from 1972-1986. Brown explains how these stereotypical blaxploitation heroes of the comics did not last for very long. By the late 1970s they had all disappeared except for the intermittent guest appearance in a more popular character’s book (22). There was not much development of any black characters until Milestone,  who’s new heroes published were understood as a rectification of the one-dimensional blaxploitation comics of the 1970s (Brown, 196). 

At a time when there were 1,200 comic titles being released per month, it was easy for independent publishers to get lost, or overlooked. Milestone Comics flourished where other independent publishers lost because of their deal with DC Comics. They created a deal where Milestone kept all creative rights and licencing of the comics and characters, and DC would serve as their distributor (Brown, 29). Co-Founder of Milestone, Dwayne McDuffie laid out that the main purpose of their company was to present diverse stories that were not ever seen on mainstream titles and to “break up the monolith” of the idea that only comics about white, male superheroes could be successful. Brown quotes McDuffie, “our goal is to increase the diversity of the comics industry by reflecting the complexity and the diversity of the real world that we all live in. We could have done just African American comics because that is obviously the experience that we understand best, but we realize that that is only one of many possible viewpoints that we want to bring forward for our readers (29).” Milestone comics was ultimately successful in reversing the idea of the stereotypical blaxploitation era black superhero through their stories and comic lines, in which their characters stressed compassion and intelligence rather than physical force (198).

Brown, Jeffrey A. Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans Milestone Comics and Their Fans. University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

Gateward, Frances K., and John Jennings. The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Rutgers University Press, 2015.

Kopin, Joshua Abraham. “Identity and Representation in US Comics.” American Literature, vol. 90, no. 2, 2018, pp. 439–448., https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-4564370.