In fact, Ed Piskor has only recently entered his third decade, and is far from being bitter. Growing up in Pittsburgh, PA, at a time when the Steel City was hit hard by the decline of its main industrial branch, Piskor started publishing small underground comics at a young age. Undeniably gifted, Piskor attended the Kubert School, and earned early underground success with his mini-series Deviant Funnies and Isolation Chamber, as well as his collaborative efforts with Jay Lynch. Fantagraphics. They publish pretty much the best stuff in America, basically. They have the license to do reprint volumes of the Peanuts comics, they also do Robert Crumb and everything in between… As for The Hip Hop Family Tree project, I just knew it would turn out pretty cool, because a lot of people were coming at me trying to publish it. So I had the option to see who I wanted to go with. Ultimately I wanted the book to look in a very specific way, and a lot of the companies didn’t quite see my exact vision. But Fantagraphics never said no, so the final book is exactly what I wanted. That’s why I worked with them, it wasn’t out of monetary gain or anything like that… It was more: If we’re gonna kill trees these days to make books, it better be the best looking books that we can. Pekar, Harvey. 1996. Getting Serious About the Funnies. Chicago Tribune. January 21. Available online: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1996-01-21-9601210089-story.html (accessed on 8 December 2018). Carpenter, B. Stephen, II, and Kevin M. Tavin. 2010. Drawing (Past, Present, and Future) Together: A (Graphic) Look at the Reconceptualization of Art Education. Studies in Art Education 51: 327–52. [ Google Scholar] [ CrossRef] Jones, Stephanie, and James Woglom. 2013. Graphica: Comics Arts-Based Educational Research. Harvard Educational Review 83: 168–89. [ Google Scholar] [ CrossRef]

This first volume covers a decade while the subsequent volumes only cover a year or two each, so I have hopes those might be better.However, it was really cool to see how this byproduct of DJ'ing (you need an emcee to hype the crowd up) evolved into a major genre of music that superseded the thing it was supposed to support. Particularly the fact that when hip hop groups (generally some rappers and a DJ) went to record, they would rap over live music and the DJ would do nothing, despite the fact that, at live shows, they were nominally there to support the DJ. Cooper, Martha, and Henry Chalfant. 1984. Subway Art. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. [ Google Scholar] Feitas essas considerações e ponderações, me sinto pronto pra rasgar todo meu estoque de seda: o valor jornalístico e histórico desse trabalho do Ed Piskor é zika! É o tipo de leitura que precisa ser ativa porque cada quadrinho acaba sendo verdadeira janela para o passado! That’s an impossible thing for me to answer because as I keep writing and putting stuff together, I keep finding things that are visually interesting and need to be put in the book. So the better way I can answer that question whenever it comes up is I can tell people I’m signed up for six books, and I’ve finished two so far, and I’m well over halfway done with book three. So just by gauging the way things are moving and how much information is being put into this stuff, the end of the sixth book probably will not get beyond ‘87. I feel it would take me a month or something to corral all my sources, because I didn’t start documenting them from the beginning. I’m just trying to do my thing and have fun, and that doesn’t feel fun to me. I don’t take liberties, man, and if I do, I call it out immediately. There’s that one image in the first book where the Furious Five gets their first advance, and they go out and buy dirt bikes. I just drew a couple of the characters doing weird jumps and stuff, and I call it out: “Artistic license.” ‘Cuz, you know, I have no evidence that they knew how to do dirt-bike jumps or whatever.

Piskor, Ed. 2012. “Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, DJ Kool Herc Spawns a New Culture,” Boing Boing (Group Blog), Jason Weisberger. January 10. Available online: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/brain-rot-hip-hop-family-tree.html (accessed on 2 December 2018). I did love the asides and reference to events outside of New York City and foreshadowing of people who would be important later in hip hop like Andre Young and Carlton Ridenhour. Really good, man. It’s almost like the book is officially a piece of hip-hop culture at this point, because different rappers will get in touch, and they want to make sure they’re a part of the story when it comes to their time.

Initiatives

From the very beginning, emphasis is placed on details that characterize people and places but not the data to demonstrate where we are chronologically. Even though the presentation is (presumably) linear, clearly certain events occur contemporaneously. (What worked marvelously in Pulp Fiction - does not function here) It's not until the very end of the issue (nigh '82) that we find out that most everything has occurred in a mere few years. Simple letter heads denoting the years when certain pivotal moments would have helped tremendously. Given the ambition of your own nonfiction-comics undertaking, I’m surprised you don’t have more appreciation for people who are doing similar things. Piskor, Ed. 2016. Hip Hop Family Tree: 1983–1985. [Gift Box Set]. Seattle: Fantagraphics. [ Google Scholar]