Milestones past

Back in the early 1990s, the comic industry went through something of a boom cycle. There were enough creators that were eager to escape the work-for-hire dungeons of the big two (Marvel and DC) and enough smaller companies that had been doing largely licensed fare (Dark Horse, etc.) to prove that it was viable to work outside the two colossi. The general feeling was that the only way to do "good" comics was to do "new" comics. The trigger event for much of this, of course, was the departure of some of the biggest artist names in the industry from Marvel to form Image Comics. Around the same time, former Marvel editor-in-chief, Jim Shooter, had found some investors to help him put together Valiant Comics, who picked up a lot of old Gold Key properties from the 1960s, like Solar and Magnus, Robot Fighter. Dark Horse soon followed suit with their first venture into superheroes and their Comics' Greatest World (headlined by Frank Miller's X) and smaller companies like Malibu also recruited veterans like Steve Gerber into their Ultraverse. It was that highly-competitive environment in which Denys Cowan and Dwayne McDuffie, long-time veterans of mostly Marvel books, decided to launch Milestone Comics, which is the subject of HBO's new documentary, Milestone Generations.

Denys, DC publisher Jenette Kahn, and Dwayne

I knew Denys and Dwayne very casually back then because Milestone was set up as an independent studio that happened to have a distribution deal with DC. But because they were independent both editorially and style-wise (or so they thought), they often showed up in the "small press" area of the larger comic shows, which is where we were with our Fifth Panel Comics. At one Motor City show, we had booths right next to each other. We were known for regularly having music playing at our booth, which I tried to vary on the regular so that everyone could find something they liked (I, of course, generally like all of it.) At one point, it was Dwayne who looked over and said: "Alright, who's the James Brown fan?" when the godfather had started belting out "Cold Sweat." Yeah, that was me. Those were good days because there were so many people trying to do something different with any number of motivations toward that difference. In Shooter's case, he was trying to directly challenge the powers-that-were by showing them how he could do a shared universe experience "better" (He was later fired by his investors in the same way, and for many of the same reasons, that he'd been removed from Marvel.) In Dark Horse's case, it was an attempt to do superheroes in the "more realistic" DH style. (They folded quickly and went back to doing their usual fare.) In our case, it was mostly an attempt to carve out a space where we could do our own thing, as well as be part of the movement that was shifting away from brightly-colored spandex as the main theme of the industry. (We, of course, didn't even have color in our books, except for a couple covers.) But Milestone wanted to stay in that vein of providing heroes for kids (and some adults.) They just wanted to make those heroes look more like the people that were often reading them and speak to their lived and living experience.

The documentary is pretty thorough in examining a lot of the motivation for and the creation of the company and the "Dakotaverse"; their nickname for their universe based on the metropolis where the first books were largely based. It also covers a lot of the later activity of the company, after they had shut down the comics division a couple years after the mid-90s market crash, and gone exclusively into licensing and the production of a cartoon based on Static, one of their first books and the best seller among them. Denys is pretty open about the difficulties that they faced but isn't bitter about it. Having worked in the industry for so long and having done so as a person of color, he was aware of how the world works. Plus, in my experience, Denys was the quiet one among the creative founders, while Dwayne was far more outspoken. The most salient issue for them, of course, was the fact that they wanted to actively engage issues like racism, homophobia, and teenage sex. As one might expect in Puritan America, it was the last one that was the tipping point for DC, in which they adamantly objected to a cover depicting Static in an embrace with his girlfriend with a couple condoms on the floor next to them. Milestone, despite being editorially independent, eventually conceded to DC's demands for an outer cardstock cover that would hide a lot of the artwork once word came back from distributors and outlets that that would also be objectionable to them. This, of course, is an industry that has had any number of problems with religious types and helicopter parents objecting when they discovered that comics aren't just for kids. But in this case, it wasn't blowback from the street. It was internal and Denys suspects that it was, in fact, driven by DC and it was easy for stores and distributors to follow along, not just because it was sex (just FYI: as in any other entertainment medium, sex sells in comics) but because it was Black sex.

Most of those at Milestone expressed the opinion in the film that I remember hearing back then, in which low sales were a consequence of people not wanting to buy "comics for Blacks", as if stories about Black characters were somehow exclusive to those who shared their skin tones, while White characters were for Whites. Here is where we veer into the usual absurdity of racism, often the unconscious type, in which there is irrefutably an impact from people not being willing to identify with others simply as human, regardless of identity. I think that's a fair focus for the film to take because it can't be denied that that was part of the cause of their demise in the comics world. But all of the detail I spelled out above is also pertinent. When the industry imploded because of the collapse of the speculator bubble (Newsflash, kids: If they're printing 20 million copies of a book, it's probably not going to be "collectible", which usually implies scarcity.), it took down multiple companies, including Valiant and Malibu, countless stores, one of the two major nationwide distributors (Capital City), and led Marvel into Chapter 11. So, yes, there were external factors having nothing to do with money that led to their demise. But money had a lot to do with it, too. On top of that, there were some internal factors because, in some cases, the books just weren't that great.

I liked Denys' artwork and I appreciated Dwayne's writing, but neither of those were really industry leaders. Would I have gone out of my way for a Cowan or McDuffie book because I knew they were on it, like I would an Alan Moore or a Jill Thompson? Probably not. I was interested in Hardware and Icon and Blood Syndicate and Static because I wanted to see those stories from their perspective. I wanted to see "different" superheroes from the usual pablum that was often dished out. But did I save those comics for last in the weekly pile because I was most looking forward to them? No. They were solid, but not earthshattering. And many of the later books, like Xombi, were more obtuse than insightful, especially for a monthly serial. So while I can see their argument that being identified as "Black" superheroes and not actually being able to tell the stories that they thought might resonate with the largely older audience of the time (which Marvel had recognized in the 60s and DC still refused to comprehend in the 90s) were both confining and probably had an impact on their success, I still think there was a lot more going on that the film didn't really cover. I do, however, appreciate the several minutes at the end talking about how Denys is still in the mix and still trying to lead new faces into the industry (Dwayne, sadly, passed away over a decade ago) and Milestone is the company that he's still using to do that. It's both a more diverse and still positive voice that could really add to the tableau if given a shot.