Wednesday – 23 February 2011
It’s midweek, once again.

Last night was SaraRules!’ night to host her book club. This meant that my evening had a roughly two-hour “free pass” section in it. I took advantage of this and did a little gallivanting. I went to West Valley Hobbies and Best Buy. I was mostly just window shopping at WVH, but I went to Best Buy with a purpose: To pick up the just-released All-Star Superman. (I also picked up the first two seasons of Moonlighting, as a boxed set.)

When I got back home, I played DCUO for a bit. This time, I ventured to Gotham City. As bright and shiny as Metropolis was, Gotham was equally dark and menacing. I met Commissioner Gordon and Robin (voiced by Wil Wheaton) before heading off to my first mission. On the way to that mission, I noticed that I flew over Crime Alley. I’d heard that there was a Feat available for finding the Wayne Memorial – the place where Bruce Wayne’s parents were gunned down. So, I detoured to see if I could locate it. I did. Not only was there, in fact, a Feat awarded for finding it, but the designers actually put a couple of roses on the ground there. Nice touch.

After her book club was finished, SaraRules! and I watched All-Star Superman. The movie was an adaptation of the award-winning mini-series of the same name (1, 2), by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. It did a good job of condensing the story into 76 minutes, without losing much of the tone and flavor that Morrison brought to the story.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
I’m going to go out of my standard semi-alphabetical order for today’s entry.  Today’s person of note is: Dwayne McDuffie (1, 2).

Dwayne McDuffie was an American writer of comic books and television. His notable works included creating the animated series Static Shock, writing and producing the animated series Justice League Unlimited, and co-founding the comic book company Milestone Media.

McDuffie was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan and attended The Roeper School. He attended the University of Michigan studying physics, graduating with an undergraduate degree in English, and a graduate degree in physics. He then moved to New York to attend film school at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

While working as a copy-editor for a financial magazine, a friend got him an interview for an assistant editor position at Marvel Comics. While on staff at Marvel as Bob Budiansky’s assistant on special projects, McDuffie also scripted stories for the company. His first major work was Damage Control, a series about the company that shows up between issues and tidies up the mess left by the latest round of superhero/supervillain battles. While an editor at Marvel, he submitted a spoof proposal for a comic entitled Teenage Negro Ninja Thrasher in response to Marvel’s treatment of its black characters. Becoming a freelancer in early 1990, McDuffie followed that with dozens of various comics titles for Marvel comics, DC Comics, and Archie Comics.

In 1992, wanting to express a multi-cultural sensibility that he felt was missing in comic books, McDuffie co-founded Milestone Media, a comic book company owned by African-Americans. McDuffie explained:

If you do a black character or a female character or an Asian character, then they aren’t just that character. They represent that race or that sex, and they can’t be interesting because everything they do has to represent an entire block of people. You know, Superman isn’t all white people and neither is Lex Luthor. We knew we had to present a range of characters within each ethnic group, which means that we couldn’t do just one book. We had to do a series of books and we had to present a view of the world that’s wider than the world we’ve seen before.

Milestone debuted its titles in 1993 through a publishing deal with DC Comics. Serving as editor-in-chief, McDuffie created or co-created many characters, including Static. After Milestone had ceased publishing new comics, Static was developed into an animated series Static Shock. McDuffie was hired to write and story-edit on the series, writing 11 episodes. McDuffie was hired as a staff writer for the animated series Justice League and was promoted to story editor and producer as the series became Justice League Unlimited. During the entire run of the animated series, McDuffie wrote, produced, or story-edited 69 out of the 91 episodes.

On February 21, 2011, McDuffie died from complications due to a surgical procedure performed the previous evening.

And, the/another reason that I chose McDuffie for today’s personality: He wrote the adaptation for All-Star Superman, which was released yesterday.

Stray Toasters

Namaste.