Our documentary “The Shero Universe” is underway and we’ve been putting the grant we won from The Big We & Melinda Gates’s Pivotal Ventures to good use. Last month, I traveled to Washington D.C. to complete East Coast interviews for our upcoming documentary. While there, I interviewed three extraordinary women in comics.
First, there was Barbara Brandon-Croft, who in the 90s made history as the first Black female cartoonist to have a nationally syndicated comic strip with her “Where I’m Coming From” strip.
Then there was Dr. Deborah Whaley, a college professor at the University of Iowa who authored “Black Women in Sequence,” a fantastic book that goes over the history of Black women in comics.
And finally, I interviewed Karla Medrano aka Moon the Storyteller, a fellow indie comic book creator and author of the award-winning comic book “Luna the Queen of Mahru.”
It was an amazing week for all of us. My interview with Barbara Brandon-Croft was actually filmed at the Library of Congress where her original comic strips are kept in the vault. Things got even more exciting when the Library of Congress accepted my entire Shero Comics catalog of books into their vast comic book collection. This was a pretty big feat that I’m still smiling about.
My trip concluded with a two-day visit to the Holy Grail of museums for me…The National Museum of African American History and Culture. They had an Afrofuturism exhibit that featured the work of a few of my fellow Black comic book creators…including Tony Puryear and Tim Fielder.
Visiting NHMAAC has unlocked a new goal for me to get my work into that museum by any means necessary!
