Milestone Comics: Ahead of the Revolution
posted by Brian Johnson | February 24, 2017 | In Arts and CultureDiversity is important to maintaining America’s many unique qualities that make it the country that it is. Comics, while entertaining and fictional stories, also are great depictions and satires for the real world with real issues. However, among the vast representations within the world of comics, the issue of a lack of representations of minorities as superheroes remains.
This changed with the first major black-owned comic book company in America, setting its sights to dynamically change the output of comics and the characters as well as discussions within them towards an undiscovered world of potential.
The company Milestone Media, which created Milestone Comics, was founded in the year of 1993 by a talented group of African American writers and artists: Michael Davis, Denys Cowan, Derek T. Dingle and the late Dwayne McDuffie, who created a new revolution of creativity and social identity for different ethnicities, beyond just African Americans, in comics promoting intelligent and exciting stories with socially-conscious messages.
They all felt minorities were being misrepresented in stories, so they took the initiative to create their own comics with their vision that ended up leading to a cultural revolution. Despite being published through DC Comics, the staff at Milestone Media were all able to have complete control over the characters, stories and the standout themes that made Milestone Comics special.
Marvel and DC’s comics have made popular ethnic characters such as Blade, Black Lightning, and several more. Characters that Milestone Media created or launched included their flagship black teenager character Static, created by the founders of Milestone, who received his own highly successful animated television series titled Static Shock.
Within the years of 1993 and 1994 Milestone Media began to release its impressive array of characters, included along with Static were Icon, Hardware, Xombi, Shadow Cabinet and Blood Syndicate. From its successful run, Milestone Media Comics made about 300 issues from its titles and had sold a large amount of comics all starring mostly African American characters, but also featuring characters of Palestinian, Asian and other backgrounds and also promoted strong female characters.
Milestone Media efficiently invented its own universe, lore and style along with cool and intelligent characters that could equally compete with any comic company with quality and substance. Milestone’s comics had many critics that believed they were unsuccessful and that black comics could not sell, when in actuality Milestone was very successful and helped launched careers for writers and artists that are still working now. More importantly it created a legacy having characters that could relate and can reflect its readers which was the real goal of Milestone all along.
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