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Charlotte McDuffie Asks People to Remember Dwayne McDuffie on #GivingTuesday

Charlotte McDuffie, widow of Milestone founder and Damage Control creator Dwayne McDuffie, writes to Bleeding Cool,

Today is #GivingTuesday. Please consider a holiday season donation to #DwayneMcDuffie's gofundme,

RT this link to help me spread the word, & encourage your followers to do the same?

https://www.gofundme.com/f/dwaynemcduffiefund

Thank you, Rich!

-Charlotte (Fullerton) McDuffie, aka Dwayne's "McSpouse" :')

Here is the fundraiser, currently at $86,000 of a $100,000 goal.

Dwayne McDuffie (1962-2011) was keenly aware at a very young age that heroic protagonists who looked even remotely like him were no where to be found in the comic books he loved to read. Ethnically diverse characters were not only woefully underrepresented, but grossly inauthentic. Profoundly inspired by seeing himself reflected in the media as a hero for the very first time via the Black Panther, young Dwayne grew up to become a pioneer of diversity in both the mainstream comic book and animation industries, encouraging and creating widely inclusive, cultural variety with contemporary, non-stereotypical characters to represent the hero in ALL of us.

Today, a Dwayne McDuffie gofundme campaign exists to continue his legacy. The funds raised here by his estate and handled by his widow, Charlotte (Fullerton) McDuffie, are to help establish The Dwayne McDuffie Foundation, which will be a non-profit organization to award academic scholarships for diverse students. The fund will also continue to keep Dwayne's vision alive by managing and maintaining an archival website for research purposes, and applying on behalf of Dwayne's fans for his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Diversity in entertainment is an on-going effort, more important now than ever. In his all-too-brief lifetime, Dwayne McDuffie had only just begun his meaningful work that is left for us to continue.

Thank you all in advance for your contributions and for sharing Dwayne's vision.

Charlotte also told Bleeding Cool.

The rarely-shown video at the link was produced by my friends & me for Dwayne's memorial service at the TV Academy–and whether people donate or not, what Dwayne says on screen in his own words NEEDS to be heard by all….

We can do that;

And we can run a transcript too.

I read comic books casually, like most kids did in the 70s. I was a big fan of Spider-Man, a big fan of the Fantastic Four. I just never had met anyone who was anything like the black characters existed in comics. Blacks in comics for many, many, many, many years were drawn as subhuman, The Spirit which is a relatively realistically drawn comic. Ebony White could have been a gremlin. I'm not sure a modern reader would understand that he was human.

You just got into the habit of looking past that so you could have entertainment. When I was a kid, I stumbled across a comic book called Jungle Action, a comic that featured the Black Panther. I had a had an epiphany, I was just fascinated with that comic. Looking back it was this powerful sense of validation I saw, seeing myself reflected in the media as a hero. I think that really lit the fire that later became Milestone Comics.

Milestone was a bunch of guys who like comics who had had a certain level of success in the mainstream, but we wanted to make our own thing and control it and have total say over it. My own inclination was to create comics that were more contemporary – that meant all kinds of people, not just black people. I didn't want to become the black version of my criticism of mainstream comics. One of the major things I was trying to accomplish was to reproduce that feeling of belonging in a younger generation of readers.

But I'm going to San Diego and I see white kids dressed as Static or white kids dressed as clearly Jon Stewart Green Lantern, I'm like we're really getting somewhere because this is a guy who is going to be less inclined to make assumptions about who somebody is based on the colour of their skin. So yeah that's a win.

I'd like to write all kinds of different stuff. I've been really fortunate to work with the best guys. I'm very proud to have been part of it.

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