McDuffie says DC wasted his time over Milestone deal.
The creator of Static and founder of Milestone has stated that DC’s acquisition of the company’s characters was a waste of his time.
Speaking on his forum , the former Justice League Of America and Fantastic Four writer revealed that:
"Plans for a Static monthly were scrapped by DC last springBased on their actions, they never really wanted to
publish the Milestone stuff, they wasted my time. We could have done a
little deal for them to use Static without me having to spend so much money on lawyers."
Tensions between DC and McDuffie have been high of late, with the writer being removed from JLA after discussing how he was messed around by editorial, and this is just more trouble.
The Milestone heroes were created in the 1990s by McDuffie and other creators such as Denys Cowan in an attempt to provide more minority heroes. Books included Hardware, Xombi and Blood Syndicate. But the most popular character was the teenage hero Static, who went on to have success in his own cartoon series, Static Shock.
When DC acquired the rights to the Milestone heroes last year there was a lot of excitement, but it never really added up to much, Static is in the Teen Titans, the Shadow Cabinet were in JLA, and various Milestone heroes have appeared in The Brave and The Bold, teaming up with famous DCU heroes such as Black Lightning or The Spectre. But now, according to Dan Didio, there are no more plans to use the characters. It’s understandable why McDuffie is annoyed.
So if DC went to all that effort to obtain these characters, why aren’t they doing anything? Black Lightning creator Tony Isabella has a theory:
Call me cynical, but I still think the main reason DC makes deals to
publish characters like the Milestone characters, the Archie
super-heroes, Doc Savage, etc. is to keep someone else from publishing
them. They already get their butts kicked by the Marvel super-heroes
and they don’t want any more competition.
What do you think?
Posted originally: 2009-08-25 12:35:18