Our friends at Bleeding Cool alerted me to this video recording of an August interview Keegan-Michael Key (one-half of Key & Peele) gave to the "You Made It Weird" podcast, in which he breaks down his rather intricate family history (he’s a child of an affair; his birth mother gave him up for adoption, and she went on to marry some other man, and had kids with him, and more), revealing, towards the end of the clip, that he had 2 half brothers. I say "had" because he also says that both of them are dead.
Key wouldn’t name either of them, but he does give a little history on who one of them is; specifically he says: this brother "worked for DC comics and Marvel at different points of time in his career," and "was responsible for bringing characters of color" to each; he died in 2011 at 49 years old due to heart problems, and he lived in LA.
Upon hearing that, I immediately thought of the late Dwayne McDuffie who died in 2011 at 49 years old, from complications due to emergency heart surgery. And via the company he created, Milestone Media/Comics – a coalition of African American artists and writers, striving to positively address the lack of minorities in American comics – McDuffie did work with DC Comics (Milestone comics were published through DC Comics) and, solo, he scripted stories for Marvel, eventually becoming an editor there. And, yes, he lived in LA – Sherman Oaks specifically, before his death in 2011.
I don’t know why Key didn’t just say the brother’s name during the interview; of course I’m speculating here based on the information he provided that he is indeed talking about Dwayne McDuffie. I did search for any articles online linking Key and McDuffie, but couldn’t find anything definite.
Maybe someone reading this knows with certainty and can enlighten the rest of us. Or this will *revelation* will travel widely, that Key will have to eventually silence the noise, and fess up.
In the meantime, listen to the podcast segment below (the discussion on his half-brothers comes around the 6-minute mark; although the entire clip is worth listening to):
