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[Denys Cowan] When you're a kid you're really focused on just drawing comic books.

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You're not thinking about, "I'm a Black comic book artist,

I'm gonna change the industry. I'm gonna do this, do that."

I wasn't thinking anything like that.

The only thing that matters is what you're trying to do.

Bring that thing that you want to do into existence.

No matter what.

My name is Denys Cowan.

I'm a comic book artist and comic book creator,

one of the founders of Milestone Media.

We founded Milestone in 1992.

I knew I had to start a company, do Black characters,

with Black people.

But I had no idea what it was going to be.

[narrator] When Denys Cowan and Derek Dingle were kids,

they drew and stapled together their own comic book.

Now they're doing it for real.

[man] Comic book heroes come in all shapes, sizes and sexes,

but they haven't always come in all races.

It is the first time in comic book history

that a major publisher, DC Comics,

has agreed to release and distribute an independent label.

For DC Comics, it's an opportunity to expand its market.

And for the African-American artists here,

it's the fulfilment of a lifelong dream.

[school bell ringing]

Oh, hello.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Today, we have a very important class session.

One based in literature,

but also rooted in history, art, economics

and political science.

Words and pictures have been paired together

almost as long as human language has existed.

But the comic strips and periodicals of the early 20th century,

gave people a new way to tell stories

and understand ideas.

Superman, Batman, the Flash

and other heroes became avatars of America's fighting spirit.

But those symbols mainly existed as white characters

created by white storytellers.

Characters of color made up only a small portion of the leading heroes.

And those heroes were often filtered through misguided stereotypes.

The mix of people creating comics in America,

up through the late '70s, was purely white male.

And the content of the books reflected that in many ways.

[Dwayne McDuffie] 99.9% of comic book companies, up to that point,

had been owned and run by white males.

[Paul Levitz] So, we're in the mid-'70s,

Jenette Kahn has arrived at DC Comics.

Jenette was passionate at having more diverse material,

more modern material.

When I came to DC, there had already been a few attempts

to have more diverse characters.

Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams had created

some Black characters.

Wonder Woman introduced Wonder Woman's sister, Nubia.

This is something, I think, we aspired to.

[narrator] The '60s and '70s brought a shift in the landscape of comic characters,

as the first mainstream Black superheroes emerged.

[announcer] First of the year, watch out for the adventures of our brand-new superhero,

Black Lightning,

written by Tony Isabella,

and drawn by a new, young super-artist, Trevor Von Eeden.

On the first panel here,

Black Lightning jumps...

so let's draw a new drawing from the top to the bottom.

-All right? -Yeah, but, if we do that, then...

[Denys] Black Lightning resonated with me

because that book came out when I was just getting in the industry,

when I was 14 years old.

Black Lightning was, to me,

the first feeling of representation

in mainstream comics.

It always cracked me up

that his Afro was attached to his mask.

Like, "Yeah, okay, that's some code-switching right there."

"When I'm here at school, I'm this fellow."

"When I put on this mask, I'm Black Lightning!" [laughs]

We love Black Lightning. He's great, you know?

I felt we could go even further.

[Paul] The business wasn't in great shape.

It wasn't unusual for new comics to fade fairly quickly.

It was hard to establish new characters.

Black Lightning ran about 11 issues.

He was the first tentpole for

having that kind of diversity within the line.

It was an adventure for all of us to see where we could take comics.

[Michael Davis] Every Black kid on the planet who's ever read comic books,

from the day they realize that every superhero was white,

has wanted to do a Black comic book company.

We've all had that dream.

Art allows us to dream,

but also, it exposes people who may not have our lived experiences.

Particularly in the superhero genre.

This modern mythology that reflects our cultural zeitgeist.

-[man 1] It's a bird! -[woman] It's a plane!

[man 2] It's Superman!

[Jason Scott Jones] 1980s DC Comics was Batman, and Superman.

It was a very white landscape as far as the storytelling,

the characters and the creators.

[Denys] Being a Black artist and surviving in this industry,

you weren't gonna get the same breaks.

You weren't gonna get the same kind of money.

You weren't gonna get a lot of the same things,

and you had to work twice as hard to do it.

[narrator] It's the late '80s,

and three up-and-coming Black comic creators

were working in New York City in a comic book industry

that still lacked diverse voices.

I've been in comics for about 17 years now.

And I've worked on Batman's 50th anniversary,

I worked on the Prince comic book.

[Dwayne] He's a world-famous musician and artist

who fights crime in his spare time,

when he's not in the studio.

Dwayne and I were doing Deathlok.

I had just done The Question.

We are doing major things in the industry,

but we're also running against major frustrations.

There were just certain things in America you knew wasn't for you.

You know, we could watch them or read them anyway, it was like TV.

Like, yeah there's a Black guy every once in a while,

and comics were pretty much the same thing.

As a reader of color, you would notice

whenever they would put the "Black" on a Black character's name.

It was like, "Really?"

Black Falcon!

Each decade, you get a little bit more access, right?

You know that the wheels of justice turn slow,

so we keep banging on the door, like,

"Hey, we need more representation," right?

Each generation, that voice gets louder and louder.

[narrator] Outside the comic book industry,

Black artists were harnessing a new energy.

[Reggie Hudlin] The '80s and the good old days of the '90s,

was a really amazing time for Black culture.

There were all these powerful threads happening simultaneously.

You had, of course, the explosion of hip-hop.

You know, you had Public Enemy and Russell Simmons.

Suddenly, the people who don't think their story is worth hearing,

realize it has value.

The ultimate message was,

we are going to be successful Black businesspeople

that profit from our artistic expression.

And we're gonna do it,

and we have complete confidence in ourselves.

You look at the Black film scene, the Black music scene,

the Black art scene.

No one is scared. No one's looking for approval.

Everyone's like, "Yo, we are going hard, it is our time."

[Denys] It's 1989. I'm at the New York Comic Con.

I walked into a room and Jim Steranko was there.

[man] The far-out artwork of Jim Steranko,

who revolutionized comic books like Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

and Captain America.

Either Marvel or DC had asked him.

They asked Jim Steranko, I swear to God this happened.

He says, "They asked me to create

some Black comic book characters for them."

He's looking at me, right?

He puts his hand on my shoulder and goes,

"But it occurs to me I'm not the best person to do that."

"Denys, do you know anybody who'd be good to do something like that?"

He's looking right at me, like...

Blink, blink. I'm like,

"I think I know somebody who could probably put something like that together."

He goes, "I'm just saying, you know, there's an opportunity here

and I'm not the right person to take advantage of that opportunity,

but you are."

Dramatic videotape shows what appears to be

a group of LAPD officers beating a suspect.

[reporter] The riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn tore the city apart.

[woman] I hoped somebody would care...

[voices overlapping]

When they walked out of there, they wasn't out of there 15 minutes.

Their police chopper came by and dropped a fire bomb.

They did it and that's arson.

...videotaped evidence of a crime being committed.

The jury found the defendants not guilty on all the charges.

Don't blame us for the division that the police did. That's absurd.

[Reggie] There's always Black tragedy.

People were definitely like, "No, no, we're going to take charge."

Whether it is David Dinkins running for mayor of New York City,

whether it's Jesse Jackson running for President,

it was like, "No, no, no, no ceilings.

We can do this.

Don't fight the power, be the power."

[all clamoring]

[Denys] I started thinking about the lack of things.

When you're at that age when you start, you know, in your early 30s,

you're at that perfect point where if you're gonna do something like that,

that's when you're gonna do it.

So now, I'm working with Sam Hamm,

and I'm literally staying with him in San Francisco,

and we're doing Batman's 50th anniversary comic.

We're working on this book together.

Sam goes, "You're listening to Public Enemy, right?"

This is Sam. He's the whitest dude ever,

"You listening to Public Enemy, right?"

I said, "Who?"

He gives me the cassette.

I put it in.

Put it on the headphones while I'm working.

["Rebel Without A Pause" playing]

? Yes, the rhythm, the rebel ?

? Without a pause I'm lowering my level... ?

[Denys] By the end of that week,

I was a different person than I was

[chuckling] at the start of that week.

So now I'm thinking about that conversation with Jim Steranko.

And I'm thinking about this music I'm listening to.

And I'm thinking about the comics I've drawn,

and I'm thinking about, "Where are the Black superheroes?"

And I had to do something about it.

San Diego Comic-Con in 1991.

Finally, like, I can't help but, like,

we gotta do this thing, so I called Michael.

Denys says, "I got an idea."

The day that Denys Cowan came up with the idea,

we were walking at San Diego Comic-Con.

[Denys] He meets me at the lobby, we walk around

the whole perimeter.

Back where they have the shops and stuff,

back to the front and we're talking.

And I'm pitching my idea about doing this Black comic book company

with Black characters.

And I said, "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard."

He's already in.

I just thought

that my boy was about to embark on something spectacularly meant to fail.

He's like, "Well, you're gonna need a writer,

you're gonna need someone who knows what they're doing,

'cause we don't know what we're doing."

I'm like, "Yeah, like who?"

"I'll call Dwayne."

So we call Dwayne who's at the Comic-Con.

"Dwayne, come downstairs.

We got something we want to talk to you about."

Dwayne looks at me and says, "You are nuts.

You are so nuts.

Who are you gonna get to do this?"

I'm like, "People behind us, we can do it." [laughs]

"You're nuts and I'm gonna be crazy for saying

I'm in. I'm in. All right, let's do it."

Then we said we gotta get a business guy

'cause we knew nothing about business.

I know a fella who... My friend, Derek Dingle,

he runs Black Enterprise.

If you run Black Enterprise, you gotta know about business.

[Derek Dingle] Denys brought all of us together.

He led the Milestone mission.

[narrator] Our heroes had teamed up to develop an idea

that would impact the world for generations.

A Black-owned comic book company.

Everything was figuring it out, really, from scratch.

So we go and we meet in different places.

[lowered voice] Don't want people seeing us,

because we were afraid if everyone saw us, they'd know we were creating

a comic book company.

And you have to remember, we're doing this while maintaining our regular work.

It was all uncharted territory.

How do you start a company, at all?

Who's gonna fund all this? You need money.

Actually, before that, you need to make a deal with somebody.

Well, how do you make a deal with somebody?

Maybe we should put together a book of all the characters that we're doing.

[narrator] They began developing the Milestone bible.

A manuscript that detailed every cultural corner

and nuance of their new universe.

Exposed to experimental tear gas

at a massive gang fight called the Big Bang,

nerdy high school student Virgil Hawkins

suddenly gains electromagnetic powers

and becomes Static.

Raquel Ervin,

a teenage dreamer frustrated by a lack of opportunity

soars through the skies as Rocket,

after convincing a superpowered Black man named Augustus Freeman,

to become Icon.

An extraterrestrial hero,

born in a distant galaxy and stranded on Earth,

this alien powerhouse uses his superstrength

to fight injustices that seem too big for anyone else to take on.

Frustrated and exploited by his employer,

genius inventor Curtis Metcalf

creates the high-tech armor, Hardware,

to take down the global conspiracy

led by the employer who's exploited him for years.

When unpredictable superpowers upend their lives,

members of rival street gangs come together as

the Blood Syndicate,

to try to change their neighborhood for good,

and the rest of their newly-formed multicultural world,

the Dakotaverse.

But they needed an ally.

[Paul] Denys showed up in my office one day with this book

of the original Milestone characters.

And I said, "We've been working on this thing."

No one had any idea we were doing anything like this.

And I said, "If you can read it over the weekend, let me know."

Both Jenette and I believed

these guys had the courage to try.

So, let's back them,

let's see if we can make this work,

and let's see if it finds an audience.

Monday morning, I'm getting a call from Paul Levitz saying,

"We read your proposal, I read your proposal.

It's really good." Boom.

We structured an arrangement that is both lucrative

to Milestone Media

as well as DC Comic Books.

One of the advantages of doing this arrangement

is having product that will bring new readers into the comic book medium.

The four Milestone creators handpicked the perfect team to bring their vision to life.

So I remember sitting up there one evening, sitting on the desk.

Me, Dwayne, Derek, and we were just talking.

But then they were like, "Why don't you join us?"

I was like, "I should join."

He couldn't, because he was doing a movie called Boomerang.

[Reggie] Boomerang was a real watershed moment,

not just for myself, but for that era of Black cinema.

But I had just started my movie career.

I can't be doing too much at once.

Let me just get good at one thing

before I start doing too much.

That's it. That was a mistake.

Dwayne was our Editorial Head.

Though, he wasn't going to be at first.

At first it was going to be Jim Owsley.

Christopher Priest, Jim Owsley, came up with the logo.

Brilliant!

[Denys] When we decided to pull the trigger on Milestone,

Jim decided to stay with DC and we understood.

When Owsley dropped out, Dwayne was like,

"They want me to edit, too."

He was like, "Oh, God. I have to edit them, too."

Everybody had 55 different jobs to do.

And what's unique about Milestone is that

most of the people just came off the street.

[Ivan] I had my own comic, Tales of the Closet

and I was getting a lot of attention for it.

I just saw that there was, like, this invisible bubble

or shield around it, because as soon as they picked up the book

and saw it's a gay one,

they would drop it like it was on fire, or something like that.

And Dwayne was one of these guys who picked up the book

and then he started talking to me about Blood Syndicate.

"I think I got a job for you."

I made some of the characters Dominican,

I made them Black Dominicans,

because we wanted to talk about colorism.

Masquerade was a guy named Morph,

and I made him transgender.

And they said, "Okay, go for it."

The way we broke ground, we didn't even know we were breaking ground.

We were just kinda being real.

We wanted to come up with a way to differentiate Milestone

from the other comic books.

[narrator] Milestone's innovations weren't just creative,

they were also technical.

The company revolutionized

the way comics were painted and printed,

by creating the Milestone 100-color process

to better represent the richness

and variety of real-world skin tones.

Milestone was painting the books by hand,

and whatever you painted, went and got printed.

This is part of why you had to be really good.

If you went out of the lines,

that's gonna print,

so you gotta start over a whole new page.

[Denys] So there isn't only one Black skin tone.

With the Milestone 100 process,

we were able to show the full range...

of that. But that was the only way to do it at the time.

[Noelle Giddings] Get the artwork printed onto this and paint right on the page.

Used Dr. Martin's dyes,

or watercolors,

little color pencil in there,

to give a little, you know, a little punch.

And it's rich-looking and beautiful,

and, you know, we were pretty proud of that.

We wanted to make our own thing

and control it and have total say over it.

[narrator] The Milestone creators empowered themselves

to tell Black stories.

And the comic book company known as Milestone Media

arose from their unified experience.

[Jim Lee] What I thought was really impressive about their launch is that,

the core of their characters,

the thematic elements were so strong.

Creatively, it was a tighter, cleaner,

stronger package. And if I could be so bold,

I think that was primarily Dwayne's,

you know, expertise as a writer.

[Dwayne] So one of the things that we tried to do was present a range of characters,

different socio-economics,

different backgrounds, different ages,

as much of a range of opinions as you can

in a little, tiny model of the world.

[Denys] It was just a whirlwind of activity.

So it wasn't like I paused and stopped,

really, and marked the moment when Hardware Number 1 came out

as bracketed, as "something special."

I was working on Issue Number 3.

When that book came out,

we probably went out, you know, got the copies and celebrated a little bit.

[Michael] Nobody knew we were going to be a success.

We just thought about getting out there

because it was important to get it out there. Period.

[Reggie] Denys and Dwayne are really like brothers.

And, you know, brothers fight.

"Man, I can't deal with you."

And then they come together.

Denys and Dwayne, if they went and took a creative meeting,

they could light up the room

with them having really cool ideas.

They brought out the best in each other.

They did amazing work together.

Dwayne and I would sit there. No paper, no pens, no nothing,

just look at each other

and start talking about what we wanted to do.

And we would just go back and forth like a tennis game.

Back and forth until we had a whole thing

that we can repeat to each other,

and then Dwayne would go off and write it.

'Cause Dwayne was more Milestone than any of us.

We did somewhere between 250 and 300 comics,

which is probably equal to the output

of every other Black publisher combined.

So, it's the early '90s.

Milestone's doing its thing and getting noticed

as being, like, a creative center

in that time in the culture.

Mike Davis, one of the men behind Milestone Media,

one of the founding fathers of Milestone.

Mike, tell us a little about Milestone

and the kind of comics it puts out.

Hello. Milestone is owned by four individuals.

Derek Dingle, Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan and myself.

All the characters are owned by Milestone Media.

All the characters are trademarked by Milestone Media.

The publishing rights, at this point, belong to DC.

And what that has done is given us rack space

right alongside Superman and Batman.

And you could do a lot worse.

[Noelle] The Milestone offices were in Manhattan.

23rd Street between 6th and 7th Avenue.

This is my office and there I am.

[Joseph Illidge] Milestone was the first company that I worked at

where hierarchy was not important.

So, any given day,

people would come in with their pages,

people would be talking about scripts,

and we would all be talking to one another.

[Matt] You'd get Dwayne sitting on a couch, holding court,

which he later told me was

consciously him trying to make sure that

everybody working there saw his face

and felt comfortable talking to him.

The Milestone bullpen was the funnest place to be.

[Joseph] We had the Black celebrities

come and hang out with us and we loved it.

But we were a special place to be.

[Jason] It was history.

Every week, there was a news crew there,

reporting on this amazing thing

of Black guys making Black characters and diverse characters.

[reporter 1] At New York's Milestone Media,

superheroes aren't just Black,

they also includes Hispanics and Asians.

[reporter 2] New York-based Milestone Comics

is rolling out four new titles

to take on inner-city problems, too.

It makes me feel good.

I get to see people like myself in the books.

They anticipate more characters, more cultural diversity

and more expansion of the market.

It's just as important for, you know,

Black and white children

to see Black heroes as it is to see white heroes.

[Paul] When you're writing well,

you're finding the truth in fiction.

And the truth in fiction

are the human things we can all recognize

and relate to.

Milestone reflected the many sides of Black life

and the many sides of Black people.

Icon & Rocket, it was my favorite book.

but Hardware...

It was somewhat more personal to me.

I'm a Black person working for a company,

one of the only two Black people on my level at DC.

And I would go home and read Hardware Number 1,

and I would think, "That's kinda me."

Static was a young kid just like me.

Young, Black, nerdy,

growing up in a multi-culti-like neighborhood.

And it just really shifted my perspective,

'cause, before then,

I had only seen characters who were white.

[Robin Chaplik] Getting to see myself represented.

There were numerous LGBTQIA-plus characters.

Not just multiculturalism,

but it was how can we make humanity

be in this universe?

I really, really, really appreciated

seeing Raquel

and dealing with teenage pregnancy.

But that amazing thing about that storyline

is that she was the hero of her own story.

It's not like she got pregnant and then was written out of the story.

No, she came back and was like, "I'm still gonna do this superhero thing,

and I'm gonna keep this baby.

I'm not gonna put this baby up for adoption."

I don't think any other book during that time was really saying,

in that way and saying it,

to the Black community nonetheless.

When we said everyone belongs here,

we mean it.

And it's such an incredible space for inspiration to occur.

[Curtis] Icon, he kind of reminds me of my dad.

He's got that same build,

that same kind of, like, very stern-looking face.

Somebody who knows who they are

and what they wanna do with themselves.

I saw this comic book. It had this duo of heroes.

They're standing side-by-side,

surrounded by these SWAT officers.

They had a line at the top of the comic book cover

that said, "Stop! Do not hop on cop!"

I never saw a comic book cover like that before.

They did a lot of things I don't think anyone else could do,

and command that same level of attention and respect,

that spoke to a broader message,

beyond the world of superheroes and comic books.

[Denys] I had seen fans before. I'd met fans,

but seeing how what we had done had affected people, even at that time,

and what it meant to Black people,

to gay people, to minorities.

Like, people literally coming up to us and sobbing,

and, you know, like, the whole thing.

When I was doing some sketches,

and this guy came up to me and told me

I got him out of the gang life.

He said, "Seeing myself on Blood Syndicate"

and finding out I was a Black man drawing Blood Syndicate

gave him another thought process about what he wanted to do

with his life other than just running with the gang.

To hear someone tell you they got you out of the gang life,

it just gives you relevance, like,

okay, this stuff means something.

And people weren't just invested in the comics and the characters,

they were invested in Milestone.

[Sheena] It's actually a hub of Black people getting paid,

because they're writing the stories,

they're the editors, they're the artists,

and so, you're actually sustaining people's livelihood

and giving them a chance to do the thing they love

and to be paid for it.

Everything was validated.

They validated everything that I had wanted to be for ten years.

Black people doing comics...

That was an amazing moment for me.

That was the first moment where I had full security and confidence

that I wasn't making a mistake.

What Milestone Media had done

in that first incarnation was blow everyone's mind,

prove the point and create characters that imprinted on a generation.

We sold a lot more comics than anybody else.

[Jason] Between the MTV interviews,

the Black Enterprise cover story,

it was just clear that, like,

we were doing what needed to be done in the culture

from our angle of it.

The conflicts came with how we would handle dealing with DC.

[Matt] There was a marketing campaign for the first issues

that had just the silhouettes of the characters with a question mark.

There was somebody in DC Marketing

who said, and it was a quote that we bandied about.

"You can't show that they're Black. Black is death."

There was a lot of frustration on our part.

It wasn't because we were being, like, willfully oppressed.

People weren't, like, beating down on us,

but there was a glass ceiling.

There were editors that didn't wanna work with Black people.

There were executives at DC that couldn't understand why we were doing

anything with this company, Milestone.

And Black people don't buy comic books,

so why are we doing this stupid experiment anyway?

And these were people who were tasked with selling our books.

I think the marketing department

always felt that Milestone was basically unsaleable,

despite the initial orders.

There were a lot of meetings with DC, Jenette Kahn and with Paul Levitz,

plotting out what we were gonna do with Milestone.

The look of comics and the whole atmosphere of comics then

was the speculation boom of the early '90s.

Comics started really hitting a big population.

They had, like, The Death of Superman.

People started speculating and it was all over the news.

[reporter] Superman died Wednesday.

E!'s Greg Agnew reports on a world without the first superhero.

[Greg] Superman meets his demise at the hands of supervillain, Doomsday.

Experts say the ultimate sacrifice

could be profitable for collectors.

[Paul] The mid-'90s, there was a really nasty stretch in the comic book industry.

Part of it was the end of a collectors' boom

that had gotten out of control.

Bill Sienkiewicz who is one of the artistic influential deities

in comic books did a poster.

It was a window poster

that said, "Milestone on sale here,"

in which he painted the Milestone characters.

This poster was to be something so high in quality and so compelling,

that there was no way that any retailer would deny it,

especially with Bill Sienkiewicz, who was white

acting as the ambassador, right?

A number of comic book stores never put that poster up.

We always had that problem with retailers not ordering enough of our books,

not promoting our books.

And one of the things was there was this misunderstanding

that Milestone was Black comics.

And that to be pro-Black meant that you were anti-white,

which is absolutely ridiculous.

You know, there was a lot of hate being thrown at Milestone

because it was like,

"Well, y'all just making money 'cause you're sell-outs."

Or they're good.

I mean, the term "hater," wasn't a thing yet,

but this was pre-hater haterism.

When I started working for Derek,

as the assistant to the President,

and working my way up,

the relationship between DC and Milestone

was a pretty good relationship.

And then Issue 25 came out.

[Denys] We wanted to do a story that addressed teenage Black sexuality,

but only in terms of Static, in the context of Static.

[Ivan] Dwayne said, "I want Virgil to lose his virginity."

And that's the big thing for the 25th issue.

I was like, "Really?"

And so, what we wanted to do was show that on the cover

in a responsible way.

I don't remember it in any great detail,

but I think part of it was there was

a condom package sitting there while the kids were making out.

[Denys] It was requested that we remove that condom off the cover.

I don't think Dwayne really liked that decision a whole lot.

[Dwayne] The compromise we came up with was

we put the cover on the inside

and we wrapped a black heart...

It was like a black border that was a heart and just the two faces kissing.

That was a huge, huge fight,

and I think a lot of it, it wasn't about sexuality,

it was about Black sexuality,

which makes people really uncomfortable.

[Paul] Dwayne felt that we were making that decision on a racially-defined basis.

I don't believe that to be true.

But, of course,

obviously, I have a level of implicit bias.

But I don't think so.

And you certainly can't find anything like that on any other DC cover

that we had done for a newsstand publication.

I think Dwayne kind of felt like DC didn't really understand

what was in the contract.

We sent it to DC, they approved it,

it came back, we sent it to the printer,

but when we sent it to the printer, it had a new editorial in it.

[narrator reading]

We didn't know that that editorial was going to be in that book,

but it was.

And... the fallout from that was incredible.

That editorial was basically...

We'll call it an impetus

for the decline and deterioration of the relationship

between DC and Milestone.

We tried different ways to come together,

but eventually, we had a rift that wasn't able to be healed.

We went from being star children

to feeling like, "Well, you guys don't really appreciate us, huh?

So we'll show you what it's like to really work with us

on a level where it could be."

[Jason] We would have to battle DC Comics every week,

because it'd always be somebody who'd figure out a way to slow down production.

Slowing down production for Milestone was death,

because it meant that people wouldn't get paid,

books wouldn't get sold.

The way we had it set up was

we would get an advance on every book,

and that's how we were able to keep things rolling.

The advances stopped, so we had to just fund it.

"Good luck with that, you guys who don't appreciate us."

There was an ultimatum presented,

and the ultimatum was that

if Dwayne McDuffie did not resign as Editor-in-Chief,

DC would end the relationship with Milestone.

I think that's when the decision was made

for Dwayne to step away from being the nominal editor-in-chief.

I'm sure he was still providing much of the editorial guidance,

and Denys stepped in on some of that.

It was an untenable situation.

I was feeling particularly put-upon.

Done all this work just to end up in a position where you're really struggling.

But we were all splintering off.

[Derek] We had a situation where

Denys decided to leave the company.

Eventually, sadly, it kind of unraveled.

[Joseph] Starting in 1996,

we began operating out of the DC offices at 1700 Broadway.

This was after a significant staff reduction,

in which our staff was reduced by

between 50 and 60%.

Dwayne and Derek continued on...

throughout that hard time.

I can't imagine what those guys went through there.

But I visited them a couple of times and it was not pretty.

We made good books. We were constantly listed

as some of the best books being produced,

best stories, best, you know, characters.

Dwayne's sense of things was so logic-based.

Like racism doesn't make sense.

That's why it didn't make sense to Dwayne.

That's why he never understood

how, if you made good content,

the thing wouldn't succeed.

That's why he and Milestone were so ahead of their time.

[Joseph] I don't know who made the call

for Milestone to close its doors for the first time,

and I was not there for the very last days.

I spent my last two weeks there completing Hardware 50.

For those last two weeks, Milestone no longer had the money to pay me.

So I finished that book for free,

because they had given me so much,

so I could certainly give them two weeks.

So I completed it and then I left,

and then, one month later, Milestone closed its doors.

[Denys] Oh, wow.

What are these, bound editions?

Xombi.

You brought these over from DC?

You got their only copies here [chuckling] in a box?

You're so crazy.

So now we're in, like, '98, '99.

I had been out in California for a while.

I'm doing storyboards,

I'm doing all kinds of stuff and working with different people.

Dwayne had left New York City.

He moved to, like, you know, not the good part of Florida.

Not the Miami, Florida, you know?

He was in Orlando.

And I would call and go, "What are you doing in Orlando?"

"Well, I'm just sick of the business, the business is sick of me."

And he was very depressed and cynical about it.

And I was like, "Well, you should come to Hollywood."

The Milestone characters disappeared almost entirely.

No more Icon. No more Hardware.

Bye-bye, Blood Syndicate.

Only one Milestone hero survived in a very unexpected way.

[theme song playing]

-[electrical buzzing] -[man grunts]

[groans]

[thief] What the heck is up with that?

[electrical buzzing]

You mean, "What up with that?"

Either use slang properly or don't use it at all.

[Denys] I get a call from Warner Bros. saying that

they were interested in pitching Static.

They ended up doing it. I ended up being a director

on the show for the first two seasons,

and ended up being right back at Milestone in a way.

I auditioned for Static Shock.

It was my first series lead role.

Up to that point, I had been doing a lot of guest work,

so this was the first time I was like, "Oh, this is my house."

Whoa, man, are you tripping?

Why would I do a whack thing like that?

The voice for Virgil...

To me, it was like, "This is what it would have been like

if I had gotten electrical powers at 14."

[as Static] The name's Static,

and I put a shock to your system.

At the beginning, a very much run-of-the-mill experience.

But when I found out more about him...

"Oh, it's based on a comic book."

There's a whole generation of people, kids

who have no idea that Static Shock,

aka Static,

was a comic book.

Since I'm kind of the youngest member of DC Editorial currently,

my first interaction with Milestone was seeing Static Shock on TV.

That was my introduction to DC as a whole.

I started college in 2000.

And that is the same year as Static Shock coming out.

You know, it was always on in someone's dorm,

because it was a Black hero.

[Joseph] The Static Shock cartoon would show all these Black kids

that they were not alone.

So, this is the world we fought for

and we have to continue to fight for.

Midway through Season 2 is when we called Dwayne...

to come in and,

you know, try his hand at writing Static and then working in Hollywood.

But that was a whole different trip,

seeing him again after all that time.

And I was surprised

that they were gonna work together,

because of how Milestone ended and everything that happened there.

But he literally said this to me.

He's like, "Don't you think more people should know who Static is?"

I was like, "Yeah." "Well, this is the way to do it."

And then you know what we did?

We picked it right up where we left off,

like it had never happened.

And the minute he hit town,

he started working and he never stopped.

I never knew how important it would be to meet a role model like you.

Role model?

Yeah, a Black superhero.

I don't know. It validates me somehow.

Heroes come in every color, my friend.

I know. It's just that sometimes,

I wish there was a Black superhero back home

for folks to look up to.

Oh, but there is.

Dwayne really exploded with his animation work.

He started writing Justice League,

which got, rightfully, a ton of praise.

[Dwayne] Really, the things that they're saying about their relationships

and how they feel about each other, they all mean it.

And we got to see them in ways that we couldn't see them otherwise.

[Reggie] Running Ben 10.

He was doing movies for DC.

So he was... really become a go-to guy for them,

which, I knew it.

So, it was glad to, you know,

to quote the Big Daddy Kane record,

"Damn it feels good to see people up on it."

[Robin] Oh, my goodness.

Oh, you look so beautiful.

[Edna Gardner] Why, thank you.

[Robin] Oh, you look so beautiful.

[Edna] Dwayne was just so different.

[Robin chuckles softly]

-He loved to argue. -[chuckles]

Loved to.

Oh, his vocabulary...

He told me one night, my, uh...

-encyclopedias was obsolete. -[chuckles]

[Robin] He had been on the phone with his mom.

I heard that he had run up the stairs

in his house,

and sat down.

But he stopped being able to feel his legs.

[takes deep breath]

Which is not a good sign. [sighs]

And ended up at the hospital.

[Charlotte McDuffie] Reggie Hudlin had this event planned for that Wednesday

at Golden Apple Comics in LA.

And Dwayne was scheduled to be there.

I had started a website that featured

and celebrated Black comics.

And I was going to do a launch party at Golden Apple Comics.

And I invited all my friends who were into comics.

But Dwayne never made it.

[stuttering] I was at the hospital

when they said he didn't make it.

And I said something like,

"The one indispensable person is gone," you know.

He is irreplaceable.

When you lose your best friend as an adult,

you don't run out and get another one.

There's just a hole, you know?

I had heard about Dwayne passing away

before the event started.

But we were like, "But we have to do it anyway,

and we kinda need to do it.

'Cause everyone's gonna want somewhere to go."

And what's beautiful is that

everyone shows up.

[Denys] A lot of people leaned on him.

Lot of people leaned on him and looked at him as the light,

you know, or as the rock.

Someone that they could really, like, "This is what I wanna be like.

And this is how you act in comics,

and if you wanna write the right way, this is how you do it."

Dwayne was that to a lot of people.

I got to tell him one day how much he meant to me.

And, um, he did the Dwayne thing.

He threw it back at me, you know, in the most gracious way.

"Oh, well, you know,

you are really smart. You would have figured it out anyway."

You know, all the things... Basically everything that I had said to him,

he's like, "You would have figured that out."

He just gave.

[Charlotte] This is one of my favorite drawings of Dwayne,

just because it looks so much like him.

John Paul got the...

mainly his shoulders, his posture.

"That's what happens to legends.

You're one of us now."

"Welcome to Dakota."

And I'm getting choked up as I'm saying it.

Hmm.

Okay.

[Reggie] After the event,

Derek and Denys kind of pulled me aside

and they said, "Man, we built this company

and, like, we just kind of let it go.

That doesn't make any sense."

[Derek] I said, "We got to continue this.

It's just too important."

Well, we don't need to talk about it.

It was written in neon,

what we need to do next.

"We've got to get this thing going again.

So, we want you to come in as a partner."

I was like, "Yeah," like, "I only make a mistake once."

[Static] Welcome to the City of Dakota.

The Big Bang protests changed everything,

including me.

[narrator] The Milestone relaunch reimagined Static...

Hardware...

Icon and Rocket...

...while keeping them rooted in the culture of protest and disruption.

And this is only the beginning.

[Denys] It took us to bring it back in the right way for it to really work.

And that took a lot of commitment on our parts.

This is for a new generation of readers.

These are people who have never seen Static before, know nothing about it.

But Milestone has always been about

the times we're in now.

[protestors chanting] Black lives matter! Black lives matter!

[Denys] We looked at George Floyd,

all the protests that were happening worldwide,

and the police response to it.

-[people clamoring] -[woman shrieking]

[Denys] So we used all that stuff to update

the Big Bang origin to reflect what was going on today.

Instead of a gang fight, which is what it was

in the '90s, when gangs were big,

we changed it to protests and George Floyd

and that kind of energy around it.

What is their context?

How are they gonna relate to it? That's what this is about.

In the original iteration of Milestone,

I drew Hardware, I don't know, for 24 issues, or something like that.

Almost two years.

And then, when we brought Milestone back,

I'm drawing Hardware right now,

30 years later.

[Reggie] People really dig our books.

We're gonna be expanding the line of books from three to six next year.

We have a live-action Static Shock movie in development.

We have an animated feature in development

that's gonna feature the whole Milestone cast.

We're moving really fast and really strongly.

In our first meetings about relaunching Milestone,

one of the things that Derek Dingle hit really hard was,

"So many people can't find their way into comics."

Even in our initial books, we wanted to make sure we had

new writers and artists working with the veterans on the books.

[Leon Chills] Reggie is basically, you know, the biggest blessing,

'cause he told me that Milestone was finally going to be relaunched,

like officially.

Then he asked me, you know, if I wanted to

write Icon & Rocket with him.

I didn't know how much I was gonna get paid or any of that.

It was just like, "Yeah, Reggie, I'm in, duh."

[Nikolas Draper-Ivey] Dwayne was so intelligent,

and I'm like, "I'm nowhere near as smart as he is.

Like, how I am I gonna live up to this? I can't draw like John Paul Leon.

Like, how am I gonna touch that?

And the reality is, you can't.

Best thing I can do is just be myself.

I've had moments where I think,

"Oh, man. One day, I'm gonna have to do this for someone else."

Like what Denys is doing for me,

someone else is gonna come along

and I'm gonna have to mentor them.

[Leon] When I think of working on this

and my son in relation to it,

I definitely look forward to the day of being able to hand a comic book to him

and tell him that I was part of bringing it to life.

Going to Golden Apple Comics to see my first-ever co-written comic book

with the GOAT, Reggie Hudlin in the store.

And I definitely want to make it easier for him to

be able to do it if he wanted to.

[Jim] It gives people creative inspiration, right?

To see themselves, not just in the characters,

but in the creators,

the talent community that creates this content.

We wanted to do it bigger than ever before.

And we found the perfect collaborator with Ally.

Ally is committed to creating a space

that authentically showcases Black communities.

And we've teamed up to create what we call the Milestone Summit.

It's this week-long program where people can come

and get training in all these different fields.

-It's not just about marketing programs... -Yeah.

...that, you know, get your brand out.

It has to also be financial investment in the communities,

or it's not real.

[Reggie] Black success has to be more than an accident.

We need to make it business as usual.

[Erica Hughes] We are at the time where people are looking for these stories,

and I think, to be in a position where

we're able to help tell those stories,

and change the trajectory of other people's lives

is very, very exciting for me.

The Milestone Initiative,

to me, is the single most important part

of what we are doing in this new wave of development.

It's bringing people back

who thought that they never had a chance and bringing them in.

[Reggie] So, our job

is to teach people the things they need to know

that they're not being taught elsewhere.

You are all here because you sought out something different.

And you're willing to be different, right?

So you have to make work that speaks to yourself,

that speaks to all the other folks like you

who aren't in this room,

and to convert the most unlikely person

who wouldn't be down with what you're doing,

but you present it so fly that they're down.

You push yourself for so long

and you don't think anybody's listening,

you don't feel like your voice is heard.

And finally somebody tells you, "I heard you."

[Atagun Ihan] You don't come across any program like this so it's very unique.

The genuine effort from them.

Reggie and Denys have just been dropping gems on us all week.

He's not stuck.

He's evolving and growing.

[Dorado Quick] You know, Ally is literally being an ally kinda right now,

as far as helping us getting into the industry

and getting that mentorship.

To me, it's all about giving people a clear path

towards a thing that they wanna do.

[Denys] It's been great.

And we know that the talent we get out of that program

is gonna be phenomenal.

It's already phenomenal.

Those people are already really good. I wanna hire them right now.

[narrator] The commitment to building future generations

is one that must be unwavering.

It's us. We are the torchbearers.

The legacy-holders.

Changemakers.

If anything ties the Denys Cowan from 1989

to the Denys Cowan of, you know, 2022,

it's the fact that he realizes that the job isn't done.

[Leon] Icon says,

"To inspire humanity to strive for their fullest potential,

to reveal to humanity the best part of themselves,

through my on-going example to make my adopted home

a better place to live.

Until all of humanity is ready to take their place as a mature species,

Icon is here to stay."

[narrator] And if you wanna see what's next

for the Milestone generation...

Just turn the page.

Remove the ceilings. Dream bigger!