New Brevoort Formspring

>Really excited for Mark Waid’s upcoming Avengers run and love the lineup. Seems fitting to post this segment from an interview with the late/great Dwayne McDuffie discussing fan response to his Justice League comic run before it even began-

“And before I knew it, I had broken what I call the Rule of Three. And that rule is, in popular entertainment, if there are three black people in it, it is a black product. You can have two black guys, although it’s a stretch. If you have three, it’s a black show.

“But there is a hardcore piece of the audience whose back goes up whenever you go into these issues, and they don’t even realize it. And what kills me about it is that when they’re writing about it, they’re always hyperrational. You know, Look the fact is, there are more white characters, and if you picked randomly, you would end up with all white teams. And the fact that there were three black people on this team is statistically ridiculous. It’s obviously a quota. And the quota arguments on fictional teams crack me up. Because who’s actually I’m sorry, is somebody losing a job here? Which fictional character is losing a job? There’s no connection. They’re not talking about what’s going on in the comics. They’re talking about what they think is going on in their lives (and that’s not really going on either.)”>

What Dwayne says is absolutely true, maybe even more so these days. That said, we didn’t quite manage to crack the Rule of Three on ANAD AVENGERS–but then, we were only working with a cast of seven in total.