About Dwayne McDuffie
Dwayne Glenn McDuffie (February 20, 1962 – February 21, 2011) was an American writer of comic books and television. He co-founded the pioneering minority-owned-and-operated comic book company Milestone Media, which focused on underrepresented minorities in American comics, creating and co-creating characters such as Icon, Rocket, Static, and Hardware. McDuffie was also a writer and producer for animated series such as Static Shock (based on the Static character), Justice League Unlimited and the Ben 10 sequels, Alien Force and Ultimate Alien. McDuffie earned three Eisner Award nominations for his work in comics. == Early life and education == McDuffie was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Leroy McDuffie and Edna (née Hawkins) McDuffie Gardner. He attended and graduated from the Roeper School, a school for gifted children in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 1980. One of McDuffie's first introductions to comics was when he learned of the character Black Panther at the age of 11. He described the character as not being "anyone's sidekick", but "his own hero, his own man", saying that "In the space of 15 pages, black people moved from invisible to inevitable." Of other Black characters in comics, he later said: You only had two types of characters available for children. You had the stupid angry brute and the he's-smart-but-he's-black characters. And they were all colored either this Hershey-bar shade of brown, a sickly looking gray or purple.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.