Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, dc, entertainment, ken lashley, milestone, reginald hudlin

DC announces its Milestone plans at NYCC

Published Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:55:26 -0500

Hugh Sheridan reporting from NYCC for Bleeding Cool

DC Comics announced their plans for next spring's revival of the Milestone imprint at NYCC this Thursday.

Panelists included Jim Lee, Greg Pak, Reggie Hudlin, Ken Lashley, Kyle Baker, Denys Cowan, Derek Dingle, Alice Randall,

Several new series were announced :

Milestone by writers Reginald Hudlin & Denys Cowan and art by Ken Lashley

Static Shock by writers Hudlin and Cowan with art by Kyle Baker

Duo story by writers Hudlin and Cowan, writer Greg Pak, cover art by Jim Lee

Love Army by writer Hudlin and artist Ryan Benjamin

Earth M by Hudlin and Alice Randall, art by Denys Cowan and Bill Sienkiewicz

Hudlin is clearly very involved – he's Stan Leeing it and has a hand in each launch. Dingle talked about how Hudlin was in the offices at the time that the first incarnation was launching – but he was too busy with his movie House Party to participate.

Hudlin is still active in Hollywood and has a big movie called Marshall ( about a young Thurgood Marshall) coming out next Friday the 13th. He joked that it stars Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and Penguin (Josh Gad).

Hudlin talked about his approach to reviving these ideas – that you can't just repeat what was done before – so this is a new fresh take on the characters.

It's a total reboot, a new continuity set in a new universe they call Earth M – which was inspired by Geoff Johns apparently. Hudlin said he felt that the Milestone characters "work best separate from the DCU"

They talked briefly about some of the series:

Milestone stars Icon and Rocket. When pressed to reveal something about his plans he said you'll see Icon do "something Superman would never do".

Static Shock will introduce a new character called Amber, who will be very important to Static's world.

Duo is a story about a marriage which gets complicated by an accident involving nanobytes. Jim Lee did the character designs and will provide covers – he says he was excited to work with Greg Pak for the first time. The story "involves duality and mind melding" and was inspired by the Greek legend of "Athena springing from Zeus's head"

Earth M has a crime angle to it. Cowan talked about how excited he is to work with Sienkiwiecz – he said they have big ambitions for this book.

Then surprise guest Robert Kirkman came in. He announced that his AMC documentary series The Secret History of Comics is doing an episode on 90s Milestone called "The Color of Comics ". Arvell Jones Denys Cowan, Derek Dingle, Christopher Priest, even deceased creator Dwayne Mc Duffie as well a celebrities such as Method Man feature in interviews on the show.

The panel closed with an extended preview of the episode. One creator recalled how tough it was for black creators before Milestone, and how he once was looking for a job at a publisher only to be told "we already have a colored artist". Cowan and McDuffie approached Derek T. Dingle to work as an executive for the venture because he was the only one among them that "wore a tie" Dingle felt a heavy burden in the endeavor – saying that he remembered saying ''people marched and died so we could do this"