I'm Looking At You
So over on Tumblr, Gail Simone makes an beautiful post commemorating the lives of her two personal friends, Perry Moore and Dwayne McDuffie. She also challenges storytellers, professionals and aspirants alike to continue the work of these two extraordinary men.
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For reasons that make no sense to me at all, I lost two very important and dear friends this past week, Perry Moore and Dwayne McDuffie.
Anyone who follows my message boards knows how I feel about these two guys. They were both gifted, intelligent, passionate, and beautiful inside and out.
And they spoke about the truth. They told the truth about homophobia and racism, not only in their lives, but in their work. Perry wrote the novel HERO, which was hugely important to many YA lgbtq teens, and Dwayne’s work with Milestone and particularly Static was a huge shot in the arm of reality for the comics industry. In short, they were true to themselves and their ideals, where many people did not have that kind of courage.
That’s not the whole of them…they were many other wonderful things. But for the purposes of this discussion, I’m focusing on one thing right now. That we lost two massively important voices for diversity in one stupid, horrible, awful week. And I don’t know who is going to step up to fill those shoes.
I don’t know who is going to write the next novel like HERO. I don’t know who is going to create the next STATIC. Because I have hundreds of gifted friends in comics, but I only knew one Perry and one Dwayne.
I ask my friends in comics to think about these two guys, and to think about the audience that we all KNOW is way more diverse than the mythology says. Why can’t your next character show that? Just give a little thought. We can correct that course.
But also, I look to aspiring creators. If you want to break into comics, I hope you’ll carry your convictions with you. Jobs are scarce in the industry and not always easy to get, and it’s very very tempting to want to play it safe, to not take chances. So it’s very easy to write stories and create characters that support the status quo. It’s easy to have Wolverine or Batman in every story. But we lose what makes comics so fascinating-the realm of the surprise, the revelatory power of not playing it ‘safe’ all the time.
If you are an aspiring creator, I hope you will take pen in hand (figuratively, most likely) and make a little vow to yourself to keep your convictions, those you display here and elsewhere on the internet. Promote diversity because it’s right, it’s smart, and it’s healthy for the industry.
If we’ve lost voices like Perry’s and Dwayne’s, then we need new voices that carry the same kind of truth and new people willing to fight the same kinds of battles. I hope some people out there look at the work Perry and Dwayne did, and are inspired to go forth and continue that legacy. Get serious about it. Make mini comics, make web comics, pitch to indy labels. Put your values in your work and get that work seen.
Perry and Dwayne are gone, but I hope their inspiration lives on stronger than ever.
So, I’m looking at you.
Do something about it.