In January of this year, it was announced that Milestone Media was being revived, almost 4 years after the sudden death of its founder (February 21, 2011) Dwayne Glenn McDuffie.
Behind the revival were/are Reggie Hudlin, and artists Denys Cowan and Derek Dingle (also co-founders of Milestone), who begun discussing relaunching Milestone almost immediately after McDuffie’s death, to carry on McDuffie’s career-long efforts to diversify comics both on the page, and behind the scenes (and eventually on the screen).
Originally founded in 1992, Milestone began publishing comics in 1993 as an imprint of DC Comics. Although DC later integrated some of Milestone’s characters into DC’s superhero line (including the popular Static), Milestone retained ownership of all its characters and had merely licensed usage of the characters and the content they produced in the 1990s.
Hudlin said the trio had been "sorting out all the business" over the last couple of years, with regards to reviving the company, with plans to reboot past Milestone characters, as well as introduce new ones, and bring in a new group of diverse creators as well, to continue McDuffie’s mission of having a cast of characters that represent all races, genders, sexualities, and perspectives.
"There are all kinds of challenges that are facing people of color…that part hasn’t changed," Hudlin said in January. "What has changed is, there are a lot more characters of color in comics. What we feel is now, Milestone is necessary because of the types of characters that we do, and the viewpoint that we come from. We’ve never just done black characters just to do black characters. It’s always come from a specific point of view, which is what made our books work. What we also didn’t do, which is the trend now, is have characters that are, not blackface, but they’re the black versions of the already established white characters, as if it gives legitimacy to these black characters in some kind of way, [that] these characters are legitimate because now there’s a black Captain America. Having been a creator of these characters and a consumer, I always looked at it like, ‘Well, geez, couldn’t you give me an original character?’ Black Panther worked because he was original. Static Shock worked because it was an original concept. It’s a good time to come back and reintroduce original characters, as well as some new ones."
Indeed, indeed…
Dubbed "Milestone 2.0," included in the reboot plans is a new live-action "Static Shock" series, which is in the works with Warner Bros.
To find out more about what’s been happening behind the scenes since January’s announcement, Hudlin and Cowan spoke to Comic Book Resources (CBR), in a video-taped interview that was published just this afternoon. In the conversation, they discuss the rebooted company, its new agenda, examining whether Milestone 2.0 is possibly even more relevant in 2015, the return of writer Christopher Priest, and much more, in a lively conversation with CBR TV’s Jonah Weiland. Both parts of the conversation are embedded below:
