The V

I only ever met Dwayne on Usenet and around these forums, but he always struck me as a great guy and a terrific part of early online comics community. He was also a tremendously underrated writer, especially considering the era in which he came up. Compare DAMAGE CONTROL to the typical Big Two book of 1989, or STATIC and ICON to the typical 1993 comic -- really good and fairly important works, I think.

Aaron Veenstra web | pod | mail Wii: 1265 0398 1520 0257 PS3: asveenstra

Damn.

I only got got to meet Dwayne once in person, but he was hugely congenial (and just plain huge!) and told some great stories in the brief time we got to speak.  It was a pleasure just to listen to him talk - and every bit of that showed up in his work.  Even when he must have been tearing his hair out in frustration, he told good stories that were a pleasure to read and watch, and those things aren't going anywhere.

Dwayne was a fantastic writer, who wrote one of my favourite comic books of all time in the form of Damage Control, and if he'd given comics nothing other than that it would still have been a great legacy. The fact that he also left behind Milestone and JLU, along with underappreciated runs on a whole bunch of series, is even more reason to mourn him. The biggest reason, of course, is that he was a stand-up guy who was always a welcome sight around here. RIP.

He was one V-ster I wish I met. It was and is always a joy to read and revisit his work.

I am just in shock. I never met the man, but I had some small interaction with him online and he was a decent, ethical and passionate creator responsible for untold hours of entertainment that my family has enjoyed for many years (and will continue to). I'll never forget the joy he brought me and my kids, and I'll never forget his honesty and commitment to what he believed in. There aren't many people in comics that set a standard like Dwayne did.

Thanks for creating this thread, Greg.

Thanks to Dwayne McDuffie, I care more about John Stewart, Hawkgirl, and large swaths of the DC Universe than I ever would have otherwise.  He had an incredible talent for humanizing DC's heroes without taking away from what made them so powerful and iconic, and wrote some of my favorite stories in any medium.  I never saw or heard of him behaving as anything other than a nice, stand-up guy, and like others here have said, I really wish I'd met him in person.  I already miss the stories he won't be around to tell.

Sad news indeed.  I thorougly enjoyed his Justice League cartoons and others that he was involved in.  I was just wondering why he hadn't posted here lately - I always enjoyed reading what he had to say.

Thanks for posting that.  I needed a laugh after hearing about Dwayne.

Yeah, I was thrown back by this too. I only met him once, in San Diego 2009. This was during and after his spotlight panel where he won an inkpot award. I recorded the panel and it's online here: http://www.thecomicbooks.com/Audio/2009-07-24-SD-DwayneMcDuffie.mp3  (45.8mb, 50:02). After the inkpot award it's Dwayne doing Q&A with his fans over a lot of his work in comics and animation. It's pretty funny and gives you a sense of how nice he was.

Still, I used to hang out on his message board and on occasion have traded e-mails back and forth about some specific comic history stuff. I am going to miss him.

Just shocking and awful.

H also wrote a fair bit for the various incarnations of Ben 10, and brought his same intelligent, well-plotted sensibility to those shows. I love the work he did, and I'll miss watching the stuff he'll never get to do.

One of my favourite bits of Dwayne's writing had to do with the somewhat infamous opening sequence to HARDWARE #1, which was a thinly-veiled metaphor for his experience at Marvel:

...which he later made a call-back to during his brief run on X-O MANOWAR (vol. 2).

The next page had protagonist Donovan Wylie on his therapist's couch, saying "I had no idea what made me think of that..." I loved that Dwayne was able to poke fun at himself in such a manner.

Thanks for the stories, Mr. McDuffie.