How Hardware Made Me WOKE

Thirty years ago, Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, and Derek T. Dingle founded Milestone Comics, a new universe of Black and diverse superheroes, brought to life by Black creators and other artists of color. While the Big Two publishers, Marvel and DC, weren’t necessarily averse to publishing characters and creators of color, such efforts were few and far between. The highest profile Black DC Comics character, John Stewart, had a multi-year stint as Green Lantern around the same time that James Rhodes was subbing for Tony Stark in the pages of Iron Man, and both of those titles were written and illustrated by white male creative teams. Diversity may not have been discouraged at the Big Two in the 1980s, but it wasn’t exactly a top priority, either.

It was in this environment that Dwayne McDuffie worked his way up through the ranks at Marvel, writing backup stories and fill-ins whenever the opportunity arose, an Avengers story here, a Wonder Man story there. Through these early efforts, McDuffie established himself as a thoughtful writer with a sharp sense of humor on Marvel’s classic heroes as well as his own creation Damage Control, a series he developed with artist Ernie Colón spotlighting the construction crew that takes care of property damage caused by superhero conflicts in the Marvel Universe. 

Meanwhile, over at DC, Denys Cowan was a well-regarded artist whose work leveled up when he teamed with legendary writer Dennis O’Neil to reinvent Steve Ditko’s philosophical, faceless hero The Question, for DC Comics in 1987, and many readers—myself included—became fans for life when Cowan illustrated screenwriter Sam Hamm’s Detective Comics story “Blind Justice” in a storyline published leading up to the June 1989 release of Tim Burton’s blockbuster Batman. Cowan and McDuffie teamed on a series starring Marvel Comics’ cyborg antihero Deathlok in the early 1990s to great acclaim and decent-enough sales, but both felt they could do bigger and better things within the mainstream comics industry.

Partnering with creative dynamo Michael Davis and entrepreneur Derek T. Dingle, they founded Milestone Comics and conceived of the first four titles for the fledgling comics line, to be published and distributed by DC Comics: Icon, Blood Syndicate, Static, and Hardware. 

The first of these titles, Hardware, launched 30 years ago, in April 1993, and it spelled out Milestone’s mission statement loud and clear in just three pages.

Curtis Metcalf—now the high-tech hero known as Hardware—recalls the lesson that his pet parakeet taught him as a child, that escape is impossible until one perceives all of the barriers. That observation is punctuated by a full-page splash depicting Hardware literally shattering a glass ceiling, just in case anyone was unclear of Milestone’s intentions. 

Metcalf, like McDuffie, was a young, Black genius whose talents were never fully appreciated by their employers, and who were never given the opportunity to fly. A less-ambitious talent may have been content to pick up freelance assignments scripting obscure and unloved Marvel characters for the primary purpose of keeping trademarks up to date, but McDuffie was meant for bigger and better things. Like Hardware, he and Cowan used the tools—even the same printing presses—of the people that were keeping them down and took on the entire system, shattering the glass ceiling in the process. 

While comics hadn’t shied away from social issues before–Green Lantern/Green Arrow pushed progressive politics in the early seventies, and Chris Claremont’s X-Men dealt with anti-mutant bigotry as an allegory against all social prejudice throughout the eighties–superhero comics were ultimately about protecting the status quo. Yes, there are some bad people out there, but justice will be served…eventually. Trust in the system, and things will all work out, probably. 

With just three panels, McDuffie and Cowan shattered my perceptions about the world around me. Instead of pondering questions like “What If…The Silver Surfer possessed The Infinity Gauntlet?” (on sale from Marvel Comics  just weeks after Hardware #1 hit comic shops), I asked myself, “what if America isn’t really the land of opportunity?” and “what if the system is inherently unfair?” While I didn’t immediately trade in my X-Men comics for The Autobiography of Malcolm X and it would be a few more years before I could discuss Richard Wright’s Invisible Man with the same authority that I could explain the Invisible Girl’s origin story, Hardware came along at exactly the time in my life that I needed to read it, and may be the most important educational comic book I’ve ever read. 

While Milestone, like many imprints that came along in the 1990s, fell dormant when the comic book industry suffered a near-total collapse mid-decade, that initial wave of titles is still as fresh and relevant today as it was thirty years ago, and an entire generation of creators has come of age with full perception of all of the barriers thanks to McDuffie, Cowan, Dingle, Davis, and the other Milestone creators. 

To learn more about Milestone today, including their mentorship of young comic creators, check out the DC Comics website.

The earliest issues of the four Milestone launch titles, Hardware, Icon, Blood Syndicate, and Static, are collected in The Milestone Compendium. Future editions will collect the entire original run of the 1990s Milestone titles.