I miss Dwayne McDuffie.
The comic book and cartoon writer’s death a year ago at age 49 was a shock to the world of geeks.
Chances are you liked something that he touched in his career, whether it was Deathlok or Damage Control or Static Shock, Justice League or Ben 10.
But I never knew how much I’d missed McDuffie until recently.
DC released a retrospective on him as an extra on the video for Justice League: Doom, credited as McDuffie’s last project. I’d waited a while after getting the movie to watch the tribute, which talked to colleagues and friends and his wife.
I held off watching for a few days, and looking back I think I had to prepare.
The documentary opens with talk of how McDuffie was a classified genius-level intellect who attended classes at University of Michigan as a child. And when they cut to a photo of McDuffie as that bespectacled black boy, I saw myself.
Tears fell from my eyes.
Watching his story reminded me of my own life as a smart black person, and how my race and my intellect intersected to create the life I have. How people latched onto that intelligence as if it were some rare gift that I wasn’t supposed to have. As if it would change everything about my life, not just as a human being, but as a black person. And in this society, where I now am two university degrees and 200 miles away from that West Philly ghetto at a Connecticut town wine bar, that’s what happened.
I can’t help but think McDuffie encountered much of the same.
And when I think about my life and how it relates to him and his work, the blerd connection runs deep. He used comics to increase diversity and to insert black people in the superhero conversation, and in turn made us all more human by bringing the world to superheroics. He knew the expectations, and the limitations, and he delivered.
My brother read a lot of his Deathlok comics in the early ’90s, where he took the character and used his reanimated corpse as a metaphor on race and humanity. I remember the swells of pride watching his Milestone universe soar. And how he wrote Justice League as a funhouse mirror of a society you could trust, but only so much.
I think McDuffie channeled his black nerd experience into superheroes. It was easy.
Look at them: People of extraordinary power, ability, skill, who set out into the world to change it. They are compelled to do it through tragedy, heartbreak and pain. Or the cultural and familial heritage that says you must fight for our values, and in turn you fight for all of us. They wear funky emblems on powerful chests, carry the weight of their heritage on their broad shoulders.
All those ideas, all those themes, I’ve seen again and again through my own cultural lens of the Afro-American tradition. Frederick Douglass’ autobiography plays out like a bildungsroman the likes of Batman: Year One – the hero that rises from a grave of death and despair to transform himself into something untouchable, everlasting, extrahuman.
The black experience, in the general sense, has been one of the extrahuman. What else would you call those ancestors who survived the Middle Passage, slavery and Jim Crow segregation? Any black person who challenged a stereotype, especially of intelligence, were treated as if they were puppets and parrots of white knowledge, or witchcraft.
Phillis Wheatley knew this to be true. Wheatley, an African slave girl in 1772 who became the first black American writer ever published, had to undergo a trial – with witnesses, interrogations and everything – to prove that she wrote the poems attached to her name and wasn’t just reciting work of her white masters. There she was on that October day in colonial Boston, quizzed by Harvard-educated men whose names were etched forever into the American Revolution. I’ve been resume-checked and why-are-you-here’d more than enough times in my life, but damn.
And the black barrier-breakers held up in the history books had to leap through the “perfect” funnel. They had to be untouchable, unassailable in their character, or forever would they be villains. It’s what separated Martin Luther King from Malcolm X, Condoleezza Rice from Shirley Sherrod, Jackie Robinson from Barry Bonds, Whitney Houston before and after Bobby Brown, Tiger Woods pre-scandal from Tiger Woods post-scandal.
I’ve encountered and had those feelings myself.
That I had to be 10 times as good, to exert myself beyond anything anyone else would do. To be ever-noble and outclass everything. To be perfect. And so you build the armor; good grades here, a smiling face there, community service o the left, a clean-cut boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse. To show one hole in the armor, to show any weakness, would be my undoing.
Sounds like a superhero to me. Or John Henry, who worked himself to death to prove that he was every bit as good as a machine. Kinda funny that DC Comics turned that story into Steel, who was named John Henry Irons and looked like the superhuman-sized Shaquille O’Neal. Steel wears armor, too.
What saddens me almost as much as McDuffie’s death is that we knew so little about his life until now. To know he may have hid more than he shared, it makes me sad.
On the documentary, his friends say how he’d hide his past as a child prodigy, or they never knew that he read stacks of physics books every week and had a degree in physics (no wonder his sci-fi stuff was so good!). To hear that in high school he tried to hide his athletic talents for concern of not being seen as intelligent at his magnet school for gifted kids, or that he’d never smile because he wanted to be taken seriously.
And I know that so much of that attitude was affected by race. So much of that shield, that armor, forged by being perceived as not-normal – not just as a smart person, but a smart black person. I’ve done it. I’ve hid. I’ve shared, but only so much. Let people in only so much. It’s protected me, and it has hurt me by making me appear unapproachable.
So I’m working on sharing more of my personal self. Not a lot, but enough that maybe I can be a little less extra and a little more human to a few more people.
