Charlotte McDuffie, widow of Dwayne McDuffie, has filed a lawsuit against Reginald Hudlin, Derek Dingle and Denys Cowan, claiming McDuffie’s estate has been excluded from plans for a planned Milestone Media revival.
The suit, filed in L.A. Superior Court on Monday, claims that after Dwayne McDuffie passed away in 2011, “two of his former business partners thereafter conspired with a third person to obstruct McDuffie’s widow from accessing financial information about the business, and then cut out McDuffie’s estate from Milestone Media’s revival.” You can read the complaint in full here or find it embedded below.
The lawsuit claims that Dwayne McDuffie owned 50 percent of Milestone at the time of his death, but that Hudlin, Dingle and Cowan created a “sham” company, Milestone Media LLC, which they could control without McDuffie’s estate having ownership interests.
Dwayne McDuffie, Dingle, Cowan and Michael Davis originally launched Milestone Media in the early 1990s to address the underrepresentation of minorities in comics. Through a publishing deal with DC Comics, they released titles like Hardware, Icon, Blood Syndicate and their most successful character, Static, who would later appear in his own cartoon and on the animated Young Justice. Unfortunately the comic market crash that occurred that decade hit them hard, and they stopped publishing in 1997. In 2008, DC revived the characters and merged them into the DC universe, which included appearances in Justice League and a short-lived Static Shock comic that debuted as part of DC’s “new 52” publishing initiative.
In 2015, the Washington Post broke the news that Cowan, Dingle and Hudlin planned to bring Milestone characters back in several media, including comics. DC co-publisher Jim Lee said that news about the return of the Milestone characters was on its way during this year’s Comic-Con International in San Diego.
Here’s the complaint in full:
Mcduffie Milestone Hudlin by gmaddaus on Scribd