Since I'm doing a Black Creators countdown this month, I didn't have time to do spotlights on black-created comics like I normally like to do in February. Instead, though, I asked the nifty comic book writer Regine L. Sawyer to do some spotlights on fellow black women members of her Women In Comics NYC Collective. Enjoy! - BC

Deborah Elizabeth Whaley is an artist, curator, writer, and Associate Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. She grew up reading and drawing comics; later on in life she started formal training in Cartooning. Presently, Deborah works in the mediums of acrylic, mixed-media, oil, and sometimes in watercolor. Whaley is now experimenting with silhouette and led lights, which creates a dynamic effect of luminosity and depth.

She created a video collage installation for the exhibition she co-curated: ‘Two Turn Tables and a Microphone’, and she contributed to a mural formerly housed at the Figge Museum.

In addition to curating, writing for exhibition catalogues, and being an art practitioner, she serves as an ongoing consultant for regional and national art exhibitions at museums and community art centers or serves as a guest panelist for panels on visual culture at places such as the African American History Museum in Cedar Rapids, IA, the University of Iowa Museum of Art in Iowa City, IA, Artspace in New Haven, CT, and the Hiphop Archive at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. 

Her recent book is ‘Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime’ (2015); it explores graphic novel production and comic book fandom, looking in particular at African, African American, and multiethnic women as deployed in television, film, animation, gaming, and print representations of comic book and graphic novel characters.

 Check out her website here for more info: deborahelizabethwhaley.com