In Memory of Dwayne McDuffie, Comic Illustrator and Creator of Static Shock, a teenage African American superhero, I searched my archives to find that I had wrote a piece about him back in 2006. McDuffie was in Wilmington, NC for the Cine Noir film festival to receive the 2006 Cine Noir Trailblazer Award. What follows are my observations and a transcript of the Q and A between McDuffie and the audience.
While sitting back and watching Dwayne McDuffie answers questions from the audience at the Fifth Annual Cine Noir: A Festival of Black Film, I realized that he has one of the coolest jobs in the world. It’s not often that you can follow your early childhood dreams into adulthood and make a living off of it. Now, it wasn't easy, he still had to deal with that job that you inevitably have to take to make ends meet, but eventually, he found his own way into the comic book industry and made an impressionable mark for himself, and the genre, by creating a teenage African American superhero named Static. So much so, that he has co-created Milestone Media, Inc., a comic book company owned by African-Americans. He is a producer of the Cartoon Network animated series Justice League Unlimited, and he's also written scripts for "Justice League," "What’s Up Scooby Doo?" and "Teen Titans". His comic-book, Static, has become the popular animated cartoon "Static Shock." He is the producer and it has been on the air for five years. He has won awards (an Emmy award and the Humanitas Prize) that now precede his name when you introduce him and the latest award to add to his mantle (at least that I know of as I write this) is the 2006 Cine Noir Trailblazer Award.
At the Cine Noir film Festival, Dwayne McDuffie was at every screening, mingling with the crowd and enjoying the sights of Wilmington, NC. During a lengthy Q & A session, he answered questions from the audience that ranged from how he got his start, to what’s next for him. So grab a snack and sit back and read, THE MCDUFFIE CHRONICLES.
How long does it take to make an episode (Static Shock)?
McDuffie: We make them all at once. For each episode, we create the storylines, the music and the editing. We do about two or three stories a week. We do storyboards, we’re designing things, and the tricky thing is that everything you see on the screen, somebody has to figure out what it looks like and draw it. So if someone picks up a telephone, someone designed the telephone. Someone designed the floor, the walls, and all of the backgrounds that you see. It’s an enormous amount of work. So we do all thirteen episodes at the same time and it takes a little more than a year to get them all done.
How many people will work on a cartoon?
McDuffie: Besides the names on the credits, there are about a hundred people who work on an episode. That’s not counting outsourcing animators. We make the main frames here, and everything in between the main frames goes to Korea and they draw those over there. We have no idea how many people do that.
Are you using digital equipment?
McDuffie: We started to bring in digital processes and you can tell a difference from the early cartoons to some of the later ones; there’s more richness, smoothness and much more detail, but the problem is, the more we use the technology and make it easier by saying, “Oh, look at all the stuff we can do with the technology,” we make it harder on ourselves.
Static Shock broke the mold, what did that mean to you?
McDuffie: In 1993, the most popular cartoon was the X-Men, and Warner Brothers came to us to do a show similar to the X-Men. So we pitched a show that had a bunch of multicultural superheroes. We got our group together and came up with a storyline with Alan Burnett, the guy responsible for the Batman cartoon, and he’s a really brilliant writer. He wrote a terrific pilot and it didn’t sell, but to write the pilot he had to read all of the Milestone comics and he became a fan. So, he pitched pretty much every year, until one year they were like, “We want a teenage superhero. Okay, let’s do it.” And then the hard part started, which was convincing people that a fourteen-year-old black kid could be a superhero, which was by far the biggest problem. If you look at black kids in the media, they’re always presented as problems, and a lot of these executives couldn’t see it. “Why is he the hero? Is he doing something bad?” So it was a slow process.
What about other feedback about the show?
McDuffie: Well, one story that comes to mind is that I was in California around the day it first aired and I took my mom to Sam’s Club, it was a Saturday and I was just standing around and these two kids were singing the theme song, on the first day, so I was like, “Okay, that was really cool.”
Did you ever expect it to achieve the recognition?
McDuffie: Static Shock has been nominated for four Emmys, two for best series, one for music with Richard Wolf, he did the music for the Africa episode and he actually influenced nighttime live action television. The Humanitas Prize was for an episode called “Jimmy,” which was about gun violence in schools. Richie, Static’s best friend, is shot in school. I couldn’t believe that they let us do it, but not only that, they suggested it. We worked really hard on that and it was a fantastic experience.
How do you feel about comics in the movies? Is there a Static Shock movie coming soon?
McDuffie: It seems like every single comic book has been optioned to make a movie, because Spider-Man made so much money. We want to make a movie, but we want to make the right movie, and we have to say no sometimes, because the changes they want to make are not the changes we want to necessarily make, and it’s their money. It’ll take some time but I think we’ll get there. There really is a lot of interest.
What about Damage Control? (Damage Control is a fictional construction company which specializes in repairing the property damage caused by conflicts between superheroes and supervillains)
McDuffie: There was talk about making Damage Control into a movie. It was the first comic book I created. It was a comedy set in the Marvel Universe where all the superheroes live. The premise was there is an engineering and insurance firm that cleaned up New York City after The Hulk and The Thing would have a fight and wreck half the city. It was optioned by Village Roadshow, who did The Matrix, and they were on the third draft, but after 9/11 the movie was killed because having big buildings falling down in the city was not something people wanted to see. It might happen but it might take time.
What is the demographics of comic book readers and cartoon watchers?
McDuffie: The average age of a comic book reader is around 34-35, but for cartoons, the age is 6-11. Even with The Justice League which is considered an adult show and is shown during prime time. Comic books stayed with the readers who used to read them in the seventies and as they got older, the comic book just got older.
Is it easier to have the characters developed, like in television, and then write the storyline?
McDuffie: Not really, television is different from comics. Stories that are interesting in comics aren’t interesting in television. In television, you only have thirty minutes and you really have to get to the point. In comics, there are multiple part stories that run for years, like soap operas, where not much happens in an individual unit, and if you compress these stories into thirty minutes they won’t work.
What is your background? How did you get started?
McDuffie: I went to the University of Michigan and got my degree in Physics. I wasn’t really happy with my career path and I went through a crisis when I didn’t do very much. But the entire time I was in college, I made movies for fun and I wrote for fun and I thought maybe I could do this for a living. I took one of the films I made and applied to the University’s film school, got in, went for a year and a half and ran out of money. I took a job as a copy editor for a financial magazine. The magazine was like 96 pages of numbers and table of numbers and if you mess up people noticed. I complained about the job to a friend of mine who worked at Marvel Comics and he said there were interviewing for an assistant editor. I interviewed for the job they offered and took a drastic pay cut just to get out of my old one. I really started writing comics to make up the financial difference. I went freelance and started my own company with some friends of mine, Milestone where Static comes from, and just went from there. Static got picked up for television and it went pretty well, and then Justice League hired me.
Why the Midwest as the base for your characters?
McDuffie: Because I’m from Detroit and Dokata is a very thinly disguised Detroit. It’s more 70s Detroit because that’s the Detroit I knew and I like the Midwest.
What was your favorite comic book as a child?
McDuffie: I liked Little Lulu. I’m probably telling on myself because Little Lulu is supposed to be for girls. But I liked Little Lulu and Howard the Duck, most of you might remember the movie, but the comic was amazing and really funny. There was a comic called The Black Panther, which was about an African King who was also black superhero in Africa. It was set in his fictional country of Wakanda, it had really high technology, and I really enjoyed the comic book. He started in Fantastic Four as a villain, but what I didn’t realize at the time was that I was connecting with seeing black people in every parts of society, not just the good guy, not just the bad guy, but the street sweeper, the surgeon, everybody, it was like, “Wow, I can be anything,” and when we started Milestone, a big part of that was we tried to reproduce that feeling in kids. And certainly with the Static Shock cartoon we try to that and it’s on our minds a lot, but you don’t want to do it so much that it’s not fun.
How do you make a profit from your animations?
McDuffie: Animation is different from regular television. The money in television mainly comes from licensing. Most television shows make their money by selling the show to a network, the network plays a license fee and that pays for about half of what it costs to make the show and by the time it runs you break even and when you sell it into syndication and you start seeing reruns, that’s where you make your money. In animation, it doesn’t work that way, because the license fee won’t pay for the cost of the show and no matter how many times you run it, you won’t get your money back. Where you make your money is in merchandising, bed sheets or t-shirts with pictures of the character or the Holy Grail, a master toy license, where you get a major toy company to make a line of toys about your characters. Static, by the way does not have a toy character.
Why is that?
McDuffie: It’s not going to happen. The show ran for four years and it was at the top of the ratings for three of those years, when it went into reruns on Cartoon Network, it was the number two for almost a year. The only show that was doing better than Static was Family Guy. There are no toys; nobody wants to make toys for him. I’ve been told by licensing experts things like, black people don’t buy toys for their kids, which is a big surprise to me because I remember having toys when I was a kid, or that white parents are uncomfortable buying black toys for their kids. That’s what they believe and that’s another big obstacle we have to get past, that people only want to buy white toys, you know Dora the Explorer seem to be doing pretty good to me. When you’re the first to do something, you just have to break through. I think that the next guy(s) that come along are going to have an easier time; we’ll just have to see.
Comment from the audience: There are small figures of Static in the kid’s meal at a fast food restaurant and you can find these on Ebay selling kind of high. I mean there is a market for it, but you know people don’t want something they haven’t seen before and the manufacturers don’t want to take the chance the networks took.
McDuffie: That’s true, and to be reasonably fair, although I don’t want to be real fair, because they’ve had five years to do something, it is a huge investment and nobody wants to be the first one to say, “Okay maybe.” But on the other hand, their kids are wearing Michael Jordan shoes and listening to Lil’ Romeo records (I mean to say Romeo, he told me not to call him Lil’ anymore). By the way, Romeo performed the theme music for Static.
How much influence do you have on voice actors?
McDuffie: I have a lot. You have to sell it to the network, which coincidentally is paying for it. We’ve been really, really lucky with our cast, we’ve had Michael Jai White who played Spawn, Roscoe Lee Brown, Kadeem Hardison, CCH Punder, Carl Lumbly from Alias, and their all willing to do it.
Your thoughts on Aaron McGruder’s animated series, The Boondocks?
McDuffie: Aaron’s a good friend. The show is not there yet, I think it’s a slower pace for adult nighttime comedy and I understand what they are trying to do, but for me if you’re going to tell me jokes, tell it fast and move on to the next one. It’s a beautifully drawn cartoon, I love the script and everybody that works on it is really smart. And it will get better and has been renewed for a second season. He put the script on sabbatical for a few months because he’s working really hard on the show. This is his first show and I don’t think he had any idea about the amount of work to put into the show. It’s like eighteen-hour days for like a year.
Is the field growing for African Americans and is it primarily male?
McDuffie: It is growing. When I became a producer at Warner Brothers, there were six black producers on various shows. Right now I’m doing a show for Disney and it’s just me. But there are a lot of guys at Warner, the Cartoon Network, and there’s a fair number at Nickelodeon, and it is growing. These people are in positions of power not just working on stuff, they run shows, they’re directing, producing and running music departments, it’s not bad and it is growing.
Can you elaborate on the Disney project?
McDuffie: I’m doing a pilot, it’s a show called Go Boy 7, about a little boy who may be turning into a robot.
Do you constantly think of new ideas or different projects or are you focused on one project?McDuffie: The thing about being a freelance creative, in whatever you’re doing, half the job is looking for the next job, because no matter what you’re working on, no matter how solid, its going to end. When I came out to do Justice League, I really thought that show was going to be over at the end of 2002 and as it turned out, it just ended. The entire time I was at Justice League, I was also pitching shows and writing. I wrote Teen Titans and Scooby Doo and other shows that I’ve written for. You’re always looking for the next thing. I’ve got four or five things in various stages of development.
What about representation?
McDuffie: In regards to animation, if you got something to show, I always think its better to be represented so that you can get your ideas to the development stage because there are a lot things in development that don’t make it, and a lot of people do development for free and leave empty handed as opposed to being paid through stages of development and then when it doesn’t work you get it back and try to sell it to someone else, which is how you wanted it.
How do you present an idea and keep it secure when you make a pitch to someone and they say, “Its nice, but we don’t need it,” but you see it later on?
McDuffie: I have to say I have almost never seen an idea stolen. The thing is with every idea that anybody ever had, a thousand other people have had that idea. It really isn’t the idea; it’s how you do the idea. Static and Spider-Man are the same idea, it’s the same thing, we’re just doing different stuff. Superman and Batman are the same idea. So you can present things in a lot of ways, you basically make a verbal pitch, “I’ve got this great idea. There’s a teenager, he gets into an accident, and he gets electro-magnetic superpowers and he fights crime.” And they say, “Oh, okay, tell me more,” and you start to fill in the details. Some people bring pictures, when I pitch, I never bring pictures, because if the people who are looking at it don’t like the picture, you’re dead, and it could be just the art style. Some people disagree with me on that. Some people come in with toys, if it’s a previous property. Static was a comic book, so you can look at the book. A lot of television animation that’s going to be a movie is already presold. But if you’re coming in off the street, have a short write up of what the show would be and most people have art done for that. If you can get in to talk to the executives who can do something, at basically every studio, say, “I’ve got an idea for a pitch,” and nine times out of ten you can set up a meeting. Everybody wants the next Pokemon and no one knows where it’s coming from.
So Justice League is being let go, was it economics?
McDuffie: Yeah, Justice League had a run of 91 episodes and 52 episodes are considered a complete run. There’s two pieces, you lose money on the other shows you make. Every episode you make, you lose more money. The money you get back is on the licensing. You want to have enough shows for people to watch and keep selling toys, but you don’t want to keep making new shows to the point where the cost of making the show is more than what the toys are bring in. People think it’s around 52 episodes and that’s the main reason. The second reason is more in-house politics.
How do you approach the market with a live action animation kid’s oriented show?
McDuffie: You would approach it like a show. A couple of years back, a producer at Warner showed a lot of interest for a show combining live action and animation. I had just sold him another show and he wanted to know if part of it could be live action. If you have an idea, where it’s intrinsic and there is a need for animation and live action, there are a lot of people interested. Of course there are the costs that are involved because it will be a relatively expensive show, dealing with live action and animation. Nickelodeon, Warner, and I’m pretty sure, Disney would want to look at it. If you’re in a position where the more finished your project is, the more power you’ll have. For example, if you bring in just the idea, they’ll have a lot of influence on how it ends up and you’ll get some money, if you bring in a finished pilot, you’re in a better position to negotiate and you’ll get a bigger cut of the money or profit in the future. The biggest power you can have when pitching is the willingness to walk away. When you get so close to getting the show made, it is so easy to just let them do whatever it is they want to it, but if they can make up shows, they would make up shows. Look at the people who had enormous success because they walked away, J. K. Rowlings (Harry Potter), she didn’t need movie money and she told them they were going to do it exactly like the book. If she hadn’t said that, they were going to do the movies the way they wanted to. Tyler Perry has had the movie industry after him to turn his plays into movies for ten years. When he wrote the first draft, the studio said, “Okay we want to bring some people in to do a polish, and he said, “No, I don’t think so,” and they said, “Well, there’s no deal if we can’t polish it,” and he said, “Okay,” and he went home. A few years later he does it the way he wants it and it’s his. So willing to walk away is really hard, especially when you are so close and you can see it’s going to be a show or a movie, and they’re going to give you some money. You have to control it as much as you possibly can.
What impact has Japan animation had on American animation?
McDuffie: It’s killing us. Here’s the thing, in Japan they make the shows, show them on television and they’re already paid for, so when American networks buy them, they’re buying reruns. So if I wanted to buy a very popular Japanese hit, the cost will be about $30,000 an episode, you’ll have to pay someone to translate the dialogue, pay the actors to do the voices and you’ll have a show that looks as good as anything on American television and if the kids like them. There are hundreds of them because their show runs for years. So how much better does a show have to be that cost $300,000 an episode to make in America than a show that costs $30,000 in Japan? It’s really tough to compete. Fortunately, there are enough cultural differences that American shows that are created here tend to reach broad audiences more reliably than Japan shows, or occasionally there is something that is just huge and everybody loves. A lot of their shows seem strange to us our just like some of shows seem strange to them, like an American superhero show doesn’t touch them the same as it would us.
Other than your shows, what’s your favorite animated cartoon? The Governor of North Carolina likes The King of the Hill.
McDuffie: Other than the comics I mentioned, I like Dr. Katz, Home Movies and The Simpsons. King of the Hill is great. It’s weird because it breaks all of my rules, because there is no reason for it to be animated. It should be like a sitcom on television. For many years it was the best sitcom on television, and it was no reason for it to be animated except that the guy who created it (Mike Judge) came out of animation and that was his way in. It was a really well written and well-acted show. It doesn’t get a lot of credit because it was under the shadows of The Simpsons.
Do you plan to branch outside of the genre?
McDuffie: Absolutely, the thing about it now it that I have name recognition in the field so it’s a lot easier for me to get jobs doing stuff like what you did, but I’m interested in other things. If I had my pick I would probably do a romantic comedy, like “I want to do a romantic comedy. Great what have you done? Uhh, Justice League?” So it’s a little more of a sell.
So what does the future hold for Milestone Media?
McDuffie: I can’t say too much but I can say that we will be publishing some comics in early 2007. There’s another Milestone character that I’m working on a pilot for a primetime-animated show for BET.
On getting inline with BET, the only animation I’ve seen on BET was Hey Monie, about the life of a single professional African American woman, how hard was it connecting with them to do animation?
McDuffie: Soup2nuts did Hey Monie, Dr. Katz and Home Movies, I think they’re brilliant, I really love their shows. But BET is trying to change their image, they’re really trying to do shows that are not just videos and paid programming. They brought in Reggie Hudlin (Boomerang, House Party), who running programming, and he brought in one of the directors of Static Shock to run their animation shop and they’re doing tons of stuff. They’re creating a Saturday morning slate and a few new animated shows for nighttime.
THE McDUFFIE UNIVERSE
Q&A with Dwayne McDuffie, Creator: Static ShockWhile sitting back and watching Dwayne McDuffie answers questions from the audience at the Fifth Annual Cine Noir: A Festival of Black Film, I realized that he has one of the coolest jobs in the world. It’s not often that you can follow your early childhood dreams into adulthood and make a living off of it. Now, it wasn't easy, he still had to deal with that job that you inevitably have to take to make ends meet, but eventually, he found his own way into the comic book industry and made an impressionable mark for himself, and the genre, by creating a teenage African American superhero named Static. So much so, that he has co-created Milestone Media, Inc., a comic book company owned by African-Americans. He is a producer of the Cartoon Network animated series Justice League Unlimited, and he's also written scripts for "Justice League," "What’s Up Scooby Doo?" and "Teen Titans". His comic-book, Static, has become the popular animated cartoon "Static Shock." He is the producer and it has been on the air for five years. He has won awards (an Emmy award and the Humanitas Prize) that now precede his name when you introduce him and the latest award to add to his mantle (at least that I know of as I write this) is the 2006 Cine Noir Trailblazer Award.
At the Cine Noir film Festival, Dwayne McDuffie was at every screening, mingling with the crowd and enjoying the sights of Wilmington, NC. During a lengthy Q & A session, he answered questions from the audience that ranged from how he got his start, to what’s next for him. So grab a snack and sit back and read, THE MCDUFFIE CHRONICLES.
How long does it take to make an episode (Static Shock)?
McDuffie: We make them all at once. For each episode, we create the storylines, the music and the editing. We do about two or three stories a week. We do storyboards, we’re designing things, and the tricky thing is that everything you see on the screen, somebody has to figure out what it looks like and draw it. So if someone picks up a telephone, someone designed the telephone. Someone designed the floor, the walls, and all of the backgrounds that you see. It’s an enormous amount of work. So we do all thirteen episodes at the same time and it takes a little more than a year to get them all done.
How many people will work on a cartoon?
McDuffie: Besides the names on the credits, there are about a hundred people who work on an episode. That’s not counting outsourcing animators. We make the main frames here, and everything in between the main frames goes to Korea and they draw those over there. We have no idea how many people do that.
Are you using digital equipment?
McDuffie: We started to bring in digital processes and you can tell a difference from the early cartoons to some of the later ones; there’s more richness, smoothness and much more detail, but the problem is, the more we use the technology and make it easier by saying, “Oh, look at all the stuff we can do with the technology,” we make it harder on ourselves.
Static Shock broke the mold, what did that mean to you?
McDuffie: In 1993, the most popular cartoon was the X-Men, and Warner Brothers came to us to do a show similar to the X-Men. So we pitched a show that had a bunch of multicultural superheroes. We got our group together and came up with a storyline with Alan Burnett, the guy responsible for the Batman cartoon, and he’s a really brilliant writer. He wrote a terrific pilot and it didn’t sell, but to write the pilot he had to read all of the Milestone comics and he became a fan. So, he pitched pretty much every year, until one year they were like, “We want a teenage superhero. Okay, let’s do it.” And then the hard part started, which was convincing people that a fourteen-year-old black kid could be a superhero, which was by far the biggest problem. If you look at black kids in the media, they’re always presented as problems, and a lot of these executives couldn’t see it. “Why is he the hero? Is he doing something bad?” So it was a slow process.
What about other feedback about the show?
McDuffie: Well, one story that comes to mind is that I was in California around the day it first aired and I took my mom to Sam’s Club, it was a Saturday and I was just standing around and these two kids were singing the theme song, on the first day, so I was like, “Okay, that was really cool.”
Did you ever expect it to achieve the recognition?
McDuffie: Static Shock has been nominated for four Emmys, two for best series, one for music with Richard Wolf, he did the music for the Africa episode and he actually influenced nighttime live action television. The Humanitas Prize was for an episode called “Jimmy,” which was about gun violence in schools. Richie, Static’s best friend, is shot in school. I couldn’t believe that they let us do it, but not only that, they suggested it. We worked really hard on that and it was a fantastic experience.
How do you feel about comics in the movies? Is there a Static Shock movie coming soon?
McDuffie: It seems like every single comic book has been optioned to make a movie, because Spider-Man made so much money. We want to make a movie, but we want to make the right movie, and we have to say no sometimes, because the changes they want to make are not the changes we want to necessarily make, and it’s their money. It’ll take some time but I think we’ll get there. There really is a lot of interest.
What about Damage Control? (Damage Control is a fictional construction company which specializes in repairing the property damage caused by conflicts between superheroes and supervillains)
McDuffie: There was talk about making Damage Control into a movie. It was the first comic book I created. It was a comedy set in the Marvel Universe where all the superheroes live. The premise was there is an engineering and insurance firm that cleaned up New York City after The Hulk and The Thing would have a fight and wreck half the city. It was optioned by Village Roadshow, who did The Matrix, and they were on the third draft, but after 9/11 the movie was killed because having big buildings falling down in the city was not something people wanted to see. It might happen but it might take time.
What is the demographics of comic book readers and cartoon watchers?
McDuffie: The average age of a comic book reader is around 34-35, but for cartoons, the age is 6-11. Even with The Justice League which is considered an adult show and is shown during prime time. Comic books stayed with the readers who used to read them in the seventies and as they got older, the comic book just got older.
Is it easier to have the characters developed, like in television, and then write the storyline?
McDuffie: Not really, television is different from comics. Stories that are interesting in comics aren’t interesting in television. In television, you only have thirty minutes and you really have to get to the point. In comics, there are multiple part stories that run for years, like soap operas, where not much happens in an individual unit, and if you compress these stories into thirty minutes they won’t work.
What is your background? How did you get started?
McDuffie: I went to the University of Michigan and got my degree in Physics. I wasn’t really happy with my career path and I went through a crisis when I didn’t do very much. But the entire time I was in college, I made movies for fun and I wrote for fun and I thought maybe I could do this for a living. I took one of the films I made and applied to the University’s film school, got in, went for a year and a half and ran out of money. I took a job as a copy editor for a financial magazine. The magazine was like 96 pages of numbers and table of numbers and if you mess up people noticed. I complained about the job to a friend of mine who worked at Marvel Comics and he said there were interviewing for an assistant editor. I interviewed for the job they offered and took a drastic pay cut just to get out of my old one. I really started writing comics to make up the financial difference. I went freelance and started my own company with some friends of mine, Milestone where Static comes from, and just went from there. Static got picked up for television and it went pretty well, and then Justice League hired me.
Why the Midwest as the base for your characters?
McDuffie: Because I’m from Detroit and Dokata is a very thinly disguised Detroit. It’s more 70s Detroit because that’s the Detroit I knew and I like the Midwest.
What was your favorite comic book as a child?
McDuffie: I liked Little Lulu. I’m probably telling on myself because Little Lulu is supposed to be for girls. But I liked Little Lulu and Howard the Duck, most of you might remember the movie, but the comic was amazing and really funny. There was a comic called The Black Panther, which was about an African King who was also black superhero in Africa. It was set in his fictional country of Wakanda, it had really high technology, and I really enjoyed the comic book. He started in Fantastic Four as a villain, but what I didn’t realize at the time was that I was connecting with seeing black people in every parts of society, not just the good guy, not just the bad guy, but the street sweeper, the surgeon, everybody, it was like, “Wow, I can be anything,” and when we started Milestone, a big part of that was we tried to reproduce that feeling in kids. And certainly with the Static Shock cartoon we try to that and it’s on our minds a lot, but you don’t want to do it so much that it’s not fun.
How do you make a profit from your animations?
McDuffie: Animation is different from regular television. The money in television mainly comes from licensing. Most television shows make their money by selling the show to a network, the network plays a license fee and that pays for about half of what it costs to make the show and by the time it runs you break even and when you sell it into syndication and you start seeing reruns, that’s where you make your money. In animation, it doesn’t work that way, because the license fee won’t pay for the cost of the show and no matter how many times you run it, you won’t get your money back. Where you make your money is in merchandising, bed sheets or t-shirts with pictures of the character or the Holy Grail, a master toy license, where you get a major toy company to make a line of toys about your characters. Static, by the way does not have a toy character.
Why is that?
McDuffie: It’s not going to happen. The show ran for four years and it was at the top of the ratings for three of those years, when it went into reruns on Cartoon Network, it was the number two for almost a year. The only show that was doing better than Static was Family Guy. There are no toys; nobody wants to make toys for him. I’ve been told by licensing experts things like, black people don’t buy toys for their kids, which is a big surprise to me because I remember having toys when I was a kid, or that white parents are uncomfortable buying black toys for their kids. That’s what they believe and that’s another big obstacle we have to get past, that people only want to buy white toys, you know Dora the Explorer seem to be doing pretty good to me. When you’re the first to do something, you just have to break through. I think that the next guy(s) that come along are going to have an easier time; we’ll just have to see.
Comment from the audience: There are small figures of Static in the kid’s meal at a fast food restaurant and you can find these on Ebay selling kind of high. I mean there is a market for it, but you know people don’t want something they haven’t seen before and the manufacturers don’t want to take the chance the networks took.
McDuffie: That’s true, and to be reasonably fair, although I don’t want to be real fair, because they’ve had five years to do something, it is a huge investment and nobody wants to be the first one to say, “Okay maybe.” But on the other hand, their kids are wearing Michael Jordan shoes and listening to Lil’ Romeo records (I mean to say Romeo, he told me not to call him Lil’ anymore). By the way, Romeo performed the theme music for Static.
How much influence do you have on voice actors?
McDuffie: I have a lot. You have to sell it to the network, which coincidentally is paying for it. We’ve been really, really lucky with our cast, we’ve had Michael Jai White who played Spawn, Roscoe Lee Brown, Kadeem Hardison, CCH Punder, Carl Lumbly from Alias, and their all willing to do it.
Your thoughts on Aaron McGruder’s animated series, The Boondocks?
McDuffie: Aaron’s a good friend. The show is not there yet, I think it’s a slower pace for adult nighttime comedy and I understand what they are trying to do, but for me if you’re going to tell me jokes, tell it fast and move on to the next one. It’s a beautifully drawn cartoon, I love the script and everybody that works on it is really smart. And it will get better and has been renewed for a second season. He put the script on sabbatical for a few months because he’s working really hard on the show. This is his first show and I don’t think he had any idea about the amount of work to put into the show. It’s like eighteen-hour days for like a year.
Is the field growing for African Americans and is it primarily male?
McDuffie: It is growing. When I became a producer at Warner Brothers, there were six black producers on various shows. Right now I’m doing a show for Disney and it’s just me. But there are a lot of guys at Warner, the Cartoon Network, and there’s a fair number at Nickelodeon, and it is growing. These people are in positions of power not just working on stuff, they run shows, they’re directing, producing and running music departments, it’s not bad and it is growing.
Can you elaborate on the Disney project?
McDuffie: I’m doing a pilot, it’s a show called Go Boy 7, about a little boy who may be turning into a robot.
Do you constantly think of new ideas or different projects or are you focused on one project?McDuffie: The thing about being a freelance creative, in whatever you’re doing, half the job is looking for the next job, because no matter what you’re working on, no matter how solid, its going to end. When I came out to do Justice League, I really thought that show was going to be over at the end of 2002 and as it turned out, it just ended. The entire time I was at Justice League, I was also pitching shows and writing. I wrote Teen Titans and Scooby Doo and other shows that I’ve written for. You’re always looking for the next thing. I’ve got four or five things in various stages of development.
What about representation?
McDuffie: In regards to animation, if you got something to show, I always think its better to be represented so that you can get your ideas to the development stage because there are a lot things in development that don’t make it, and a lot of people do development for free and leave empty handed as opposed to being paid through stages of development and then when it doesn’t work you get it back and try to sell it to someone else, which is how you wanted it.
How do you present an idea and keep it secure when you make a pitch to someone and they say, “Its nice, but we don’t need it,” but you see it later on?
McDuffie: I have to say I have almost never seen an idea stolen. The thing is with every idea that anybody ever had, a thousand other people have had that idea. It really isn’t the idea; it’s how you do the idea. Static and Spider-Man are the same idea, it’s the same thing, we’re just doing different stuff. Superman and Batman are the same idea. So you can present things in a lot of ways, you basically make a verbal pitch, “I’ve got this great idea. There’s a teenager, he gets into an accident, and he gets electro-magnetic superpowers and he fights crime.” And they say, “Oh, okay, tell me more,” and you start to fill in the details. Some people bring pictures, when I pitch, I never bring pictures, because if the people who are looking at it don’t like the picture, you’re dead, and it could be just the art style. Some people disagree with me on that. Some people come in with toys, if it’s a previous property. Static was a comic book, so you can look at the book. A lot of television animation that’s going to be a movie is already presold. But if you’re coming in off the street, have a short write up of what the show would be and most people have art done for that. If you can get in to talk to the executives who can do something, at basically every studio, say, “I’ve got an idea for a pitch,” and nine times out of ten you can set up a meeting. Everybody wants the next Pokemon and no one knows where it’s coming from.
So Justice League is being let go, was it economics?
McDuffie: Yeah, Justice League had a run of 91 episodes and 52 episodes are considered a complete run. There’s two pieces, you lose money on the other shows you make. Every episode you make, you lose more money. The money you get back is on the licensing. You want to have enough shows for people to watch and keep selling toys, but you don’t want to keep making new shows to the point where the cost of making the show is more than what the toys are bring in. People think it’s around 52 episodes and that’s the main reason. The second reason is more in-house politics.
How do you approach the market with a live action animation kid’s oriented show?
McDuffie: You would approach it like a show. A couple of years back, a producer at Warner showed a lot of interest for a show combining live action and animation. I had just sold him another show and he wanted to know if part of it could be live action. If you have an idea, where it’s intrinsic and there is a need for animation and live action, there are a lot of people interested. Of course there are the costs that are involved because it will be a relatively expensive show, dealing with live action and animation. Nickelodeon, Warner, and I’m pretty sure, Disney would want to look at it. If you’re in a position where the more finished your project is, the more power you’ll have. For example, if you bring in just the idea, they’ll have a lot of influence on how it ends up and you’ll get some money, if you bring in a finished pilot, you’re in a better position to negotiate and you’ll get a bigger cut of the money or profit in the future. The biggest power you can have when pitching is the willingness to walk away. When you get so close to getting the show made, it is so easy to just let them do whatever it is they want to it, but if they can make up shows, they would make up shows. Look at the people who had enormous success because they walked away, J. K. Rowlings (Harry Potter), she didn’t need movie money and she told them they were going to do it exactly like the book. If she hadn’t said that, they were going to do the movies the way they wanted to. Tyler Perry has had the movie industry after him to turn his plays into movies for ten years. When he wrote the first draft, the studio said, “Okay we want to bring some people in to do a polish, and he said, “No, I don’t think so,” and they said, “Well, there’s no deal if we can’t polish it,” and he said, “Okay,” and he went home. A few years later he does it the way he wants it and it’s his. So willing to walk away is really hard, especially when you are so close and you can see it’s going to be a show or a movie, and they’re going to give you some money. You have to control it as much as you possibly can.
What impact has Japan animation had on American animation?
McDuffie: It’s killing us. Here’s the thing, in Japan they make the shows, show them on television and they’re already paid for, so when American networks buy them, they’re buying reruns. So if I wanted to buy a very popular Japanese hit, the cost will be about $30,000 an episode, you’ll have to pay someone to translate the dialogue, pay the actors to do the voices and you’ll have a show that looks as good as anything on American television and if the kids like them. There are hundreds of them because their show runs for years. So how much better does a show have to be that cost $300,000 an episode to make in America than a show that costs $30,000 in Japan? It’s really tough to compete. Fortunately, there are enough cultural differences that American shows that are created here tend to reach broad audiences more reliably than Japan shows, or occasionally there is something that is just huge and everybody loves. A lot of their shows seem strange to us our just like some of shows seem strange to them, like an American superhero show doesn’t touch them the same as it would us.
Other than your shows, what’s your favorite animated cartoon? The Governor of North Carolina likes The King of the Hill.
McDuffie: Other than the comics I mentioned, I like Dr. Katz, Home Movies and The Simpsons. King of the Hill is great. It’s weird because it breaks all of my rules, because there is no reason for it to be animated. It should be like a sitcom on television. For many years it was the best sitcom on television, and it was no reason for it to be animated except that the guy who created it (Mike Judge) came out of animation and that was his way in. It was a really well written and well-acted show. It doesn’t get a lot of credit because it was under the shadows of The Simpsons.
Do you plan to branch outside of the genre?
McDuffie: Absolutely, the thing about it now it that I have name recognition in the field so it’s a lot easier for me to get jobs doing stuff like what you did, but I’m interested in other things. If I had my pick I would probably do a romantic comedy, like “I want to do a romantic comedy. Great what have you done? Uhh, Justice League?” So it’s a little more of a sell.
So what does the future hold for Milestone Media?
McDuffie: I can’t say too much but I can say that we will be publishing some comics in early 2007. There’s another Milestone character that I’m working on a pilot for a primetime-animated show for BET.
On getting inline with BET, the only animation I’ve seen on BET was Hey Monie, about the life of a single professional African American woman, how hard was it connecting with them to do animation?
McDuffie: Soup2nuts did Hey Monie, Dr. Katz and Home Movies, I think they’re brilliant, I really love their shows. But BET is trying to change their image, they’re really trying to do shows that are not just videos and paid programming. They brought in Reggie Hudlin (Boomerang, House Party), who running programming, and he brought in one of the directors of Static Shock to run their animation shop and they’re doing tons of stuff. They’re creating a Saturday morning slate and a few new animated shows for nighttime.
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