You don't get this shyt over at Marvel
McDuffie was one of a very few black people working at Marvel at the time. When I shared a story that Dwayne told me about a Marvel editor who infamously kept a Sambo figurine on his desk, Wayne told me he’d heard the same thing from his late friend. It goes like this: Offended by the racist caricature curio, McDuffie, artist/Milestone co-founder Denys Cowan, and other freelancers who’d come through the offices would snatch the figure from the desk. “Yeah, they would steal it,” Wayne told me. “But [the editor] would always get another one.”
“Institutional racism at Marvel was something that got talked about,” Wayne remembered. “It was a small office. [Artist] Mark Bright would come in and suddenly we’d all be talking about how there are some artists at Marvel who didn’t want to be seen talking to two black people in the hall. People would go by and say, ‘Maybe they’re planning something.’