Sign Here, Please: Dwayne McDuffie

While I only have a few, I'm very pleased with my small collection of autographed comics. I've never bought a signed book, and I never will. There's no appeal in that for me. While the signature on the book is cool, what I like so much about it is the experience it represents, having met a writer or artist in person. Over the next few days, I'll share some of the ones I've managed to obtain, starting with Milestone Media cofounder Dwayne McDuffie.

While I'd always enjoyed Mr. McDuffie's work in comics (especially stuff like Hardware, Static, and Blood Syndicate), it was his writing on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited that really hooked me as a dedicated fan for life. When it was announced that he would be appearing at Cine Noir in Wilmington, NC, I immediately began making plans to attend. Winner of the Trailblazer Award in 2006, Mr. McDuffie hosted a "Superhero Cinema" panel, showing episodes of Static Shock and answering questions from the audience. I had the opportunity to pick his brain a bit more over lunch before I headed back to Charlotte, and it was a lot of fun to spend time chatting with a creator whose fiction has been such a great source of entertainment for me over the years.

My original plan was to bring a Static Shock DVD for him to sign, but I decided instead to go with the one-shot Fantastic Four Special he'd written. I'm not much of a Marvel fan in general, but in an old Marvel "Pro File" on McDuffie from a Marvel bulletin page in the '80s, he listed his, "greatest unfulfilled ambition in the comics field," as writing Fantastic Four. For that reason, the one-shot book seemed like the best choice.



Sign Here, Please: Dwayne McDuffie