Superhero Tuesday: the Milestone of Icon

Today, I'm going to talk about the groundbreaking comic company, Milestone.  Milestone was set in the Dakotaverse and, although published by DC, is a separate universe.  The company was short lived in print, but it was famous for more realistic portrayals of people of color.

The company is responsible for the creation of Static, Hardware, The Blood Syndicate, and possibly more importantly, Icon.

Icon

In 1839, an alien starliner malfunctioned and exploded, jettisoning a life-pod in the middle of a cotton field in the American South. The pod automatically altered the appearance of its passenger, named Arnus, to mimic the first sentient life-form who discovered him. That life-form was an enslaved black woman named Miriam, who saw the pod crash land and adopted Arnus as her son.^[

In the present, Arnus is still alive. He did not age visibly beyond adulthood; to disguise this fact, he periodically assumes the identity of his own son.  By the late 20th century, he is posing as Augustus Freeman IV, the great-grandson of his original human identity. Still marooned, Arnus/Freeman waits for Earth's technology to catch up to his lifepod's.  Secretly possessing superpowers that belie his human appearance, he has always performed quiet acts of charity.

However, when Freeman's house is broken into, he uses his powers for the first time in decades, an action witnessed by one of the intruders, Raquel Ervin,^[4] an idealistic teenage girl who was born in Paris Island, the poorest, most gang-ridden neighborhood in Dakota City. Her prospects seemed fairly bleak until this encounter with Freeman. After seeing Freeman use his powers, Raquel persuades him to become a superhero named Icon, with herself as his sidekick, Rocket.

Icon is portrayed as a very intelligent, somewhat stiff kind of person. Due to his upper-class job as a corporate lawyer and "proper" way of speaking, he is often criticized as being a "sell out" or "white washed". Icon usually prefers to do everything by the book instead of acting on instinct. During the majority of his series, he mostly fought plain street criminals and those who gained powers from Dakota's Big Bang.

Milestone and Dwayne McDuffie

Although Milestone comics were published through DC Comics, they did not take place in the DC Universe. Under an arrangement similar to the one DC and Wildstorm established later, all Milestone characters existed in a separate continuity that did not fall under DC Comics' direct editorial control (but DC still retained right of refusal to publish). Unlike Wildstorm, whose properties were bought by DC Comics, Milestone Media retained the copyright of their properties.

Fundamental to Milestone’s agreement with DC was they would not relinquish any of the legal or creative rights to their work. Throughout the negotiations, Milestone insisted on three basic points:

1. that they would retain total creative control
2. that they would retain all copyrights for characters under the Milestone banner
3. that they would have the final say on all merchandising and licensing deals pertaining to their properties.

In essence, DC licensed the characters, editorial services, and creative content of the Milestone books for an annual fee and a share of the profits.^[2] Dwayne McDuffie said that DC held up this agreement even though some of Milestone's storylines made them "very uncomfortable" as they were from perspectives that DC weren't used to.^[3] The biggest conflict they had was when an issue of Static showed the hero kissing his girlfriend, which DC didn't want to publish on grounds that it was using sex to sell comics (which many DC covers at the time did); Milestone covered most of the image as a compromise, and McDuffie believed it made DC uncomfortable because it was specifically "black sexuality".^[4]

All Milestone Media titles were set in a continuity dubbed the "Dakotaverse", referring to the fictional midwestern city of Dakota in which most of the early Milestone stories were set. Before any titles were published, an extensive "bible" was created by McDuffie and other early creators which provided back-story and information on all of the original Dakotaverse characters, as well as detailed information about the history and geography of Dakota. Cowan produced the original character sketches that served as a guide for the other artists.

Milestone was criticized by several black independent companies and creators for their DC deal, claiming that Milestone Media was compromising itself by working with a 'white' company like DC Comics and was being used by DC to undermine independent black companies.^[5] While this critique has been leveled it has never been explained how Milestone would have negatively impacted other black-owned comic book publishers.