Dwayne McDuffie was a writer I only learned to appreciate belately. At first I thought he was just another of the endless series of editors turned writers Marvel threw up in the late eighties and early nineties. It was only in hindsight that I realised McDuffie was much better than that, that his writing on Deathlok e.g. was something special, something Tim O’Neill did understand, that Deathlok was asking fundamental questions about the superhero comic:
I can’t think of many – any? – comics that have ever dealt so openly and lucidly with the most basic ethical questions at the heart of superhero fiction: what are the ethical responsibilities of power? When is it ethical to exercise power, and when is it unethical? It’s not simply “with great power there must come great responsibility” – that’s elementary. The real question is whether or not it’s even possible to exercise great power in a responsible fashion.
That was the sort of writer McDuffie was. If you look at his bibliography it looks a bit hit and miss and he never quite got the recognition he deserved. His stints on both Justice League of America and Fantastic Four were short, and in the first case, unhappy. But he was also a cofounder of Milestone, a much needed corrective to the whiteness of standard superhero comics, a not very appreciated corrective. He co-created Static, perhaps the most interesting and original new superhero created in the last twenty-thirty years and if you want to know how how important Static is, just look at how many non-comics readers remember the Static Shock cartoon fondly.
I didn’t know McDuffie as a person, only as a writer and occasional poster on the old rec.arts.comics newsgroups and as a writer I will miss him. The only book of his I actually have in the house right now is a collection of the 2006 Beyond miniseries, which is actually a good introduction to his strengths as a writer. Here you have a fairly silly concept, a sequel to the first Secret Wars miniseries, from back in 1985, in which a group of heroes and villains is yet again transported to the Beyonder’s Battleworld, to fight each other to get all their wishes fullfilled. It’s got a motley crew of characters, the most prominent of which is “killed” in the first issue, while the rest is so mismatched it shouldn’t work, but it does. It works because McDuffie has an excellent grip on each character, from the benign arrogance of Medusa, the gung-ho leadership style of the Wasp, Henry Pym’s insecurity and guilt, to Venom’s unpredictability and Kraven’s flippancy. He also knows how to tell a story, every issue ending on an upbeat, a climax. culminating in the penultimate issue, with the final issue wrapping the whole story neatly up. A fun story that showcases McDuffie’s talent; not the most important comic he wrote, but a good way to get to know him.
