He was best known for co-founding the pioneering minority-owned-and-operated comic book company Milestone Media, which focused on underrepresented minorities in American comics, creating and co-creating characters such as Icon, Rocket, Static, and Hardware.

[5]When Dwayne McDuffie attended high school, he wrote a film as a class project. "

Hearing his classmates laugh appreciatively as they watched his Super-8 film was all the encouragement McDuffie needed to launch him on a career path that led first to film school, then to becoming one of the most prolific and inventive writers in the comic book industry."

[7][8] Going on staff at Marvel as editor Bob Budiansky's assistant on special projects,[9] McDuffie helped develop the company's first superhero trading cards.

As Dwayne describes it, “In the space of 15 pages, black people moved from invisible to inevitable.” 29 (Yang, 2014) After becoming an editor at Marvel, McDuffie submitted a spoof proposal for a comic entitled Teenage Negro Ninja Thrashers in response to Marvel's treatment of its black characters.

In addition, he wrote Monster in My Pocket for Harvey Comics editor Sid Jacobson, whom he cites on his website as having taught him everything he knows.

[13] In the early 1990s, wanting to express a multicultural sensibility that he felt was missing in comic books, McDuffie and three partners founded Milestone Media, which The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio, described in 2000 as "the industry's most successful minority-owned-and operated comic company".

We knew we had to present a range of characters within each ethnic group, which means that we couldn't do just one book.

[14]Milestone, whose characters include the African-American Static, Icon, and Hardware; the Asian-American Xombi, and the multi-ethnic superhero group the Blood Syndicate, debuted its titles in 1993 through a distribution deal with DC Comics.

His final writing credit was the Omniverse pilot episode "The More Things Change", which released in 2012.

In 2007, McDuffie wrote several issues of Firestorm for DC Comics, starting in January through to its cancellation.

[18] He was fired from the series following a Lying in the Gutters compilation of his frank answers to fans about the creative process.

[19] McDuffie married comic book and television writer Charlotte Fullerton in 2009.

On February 21, 2011, one day after his 49th birthday, McDuffie died at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, California, of complications from emergency heart surgery.

That same year, a diner named "McDuffie's" was depicted in the Green Lantern: The Animated Series episode "The New Guy".

In the 2011 Static Shock comics series, Virgil Hawkins' high school is named after McDuffie.