A few words about my favorite Milestone character...

 

R.I.P. Milestone Comics writer Robert L. Washington III

Milestone Returning in 2010

looks like DC is finally getting the ball rolling on the long-awaited return of the multicultural Milestone Universe characters. they'll be wrapping up the dangling Milestone U storylines in the unfortunately titled book Milestone Forever in preparation for the incorporation of the milestone characters into the regular DC universe. here's what i read on Dwayne McDuffie's facebook :
Milestone Forever gathers the original artists from Milestone’s launch titles: John Paul Leon, Mark Bright, Chris Cross and Milestone Founder Denys Cowan, to complete the tales told in the original runs of STATIC SHOCK, ICON, HARDWARE, SHADOW CABINET and BLOOD SYNDICATE. Milestone Editor in Chief Dwayne McDuffie reveals the final fate of each of Milestone’s launch characters in a bittersweet tale that chronicles the literal end of a universe, and the birth of something new, with major consequences for the future of the DC Universe.
it will be dope to see my favorite Milestone artists, JP Leon, Chris Cross, Denys Cowan and the rest repping these characters (Shadow Cabinet was my JOINT! but ya'll don't hear me...)
-gM

carryin' the Cross

one of my favorite artists ever is ChrisCross. no, not the mack daddy and the daddy mack, i'm talkin' about the comic book artist probably best known for his jaw-dropping work on Captain Marvel (written by Peter David and colored beautifully by Chris Sotomayor) for Marvel, and Firestorm (with writer Dan Jolley and inker John Dell) for DC.

I was first exposed to his work on Heroes (not the teevee show!), the short-lived spinoff of Shadow Cabinet published by Milestone Comics in the nineties. it was clear that he had a love of anime/manga storytelling techniques, and his energetic pencilling has only evolved over the years. not long after that, he did one of the influential books of my life in the opus-worthy XERO with Priest in the late Nineties. the title character is Coletrane "Train" Walker- a professional basketball player of Lebron-like proportions who is as controversial as Michael Vick for his general badassness, and who also just so happens to put on a white faced prosthetic mask and kill people as a costumed bionic-powered government operative who can walk on water, phase through walls, and pull your medical records just by looking you in the eye!

XERO is one of the best comics i've ever read. it should be reprinted and collected into trade, because it would have the kind of effect (on a lesser scale of course) as a Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen (for MY money, the best comic ever created), in that i believe it would really cause people to become interested in comics who currently don't care... Black people are terribly limited in what they can see of themselves in comics. if this book (which has several black people in it) was collected, blacks would likely give it a look at say a bookstore or something like that.

anyways, ChrisCross, who Priest calls "one of the greatest comic book storytellers alive" has been up to a lot since then... there's a great interview with series ChrisCross on newserama.

read it, homie!

holla

samax.

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