This week, we are offering reflections on the six nominees for the 2015 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work, while contemplating larger questions of the variety of ways comics can uniquely crystallize reality for readers.
Written and Illustrated by Ed Piskor
Published by Fantagraphics Books, Softcover, Color, 112 pages.
The second installment of this acclaimed graphic novel hip-hop history (originally serialized on the popular website Boingboing) covers the years 1981-1983.
Covering the early years of 1981-1983, Hip Hop has made a big transition from the parks and rec rooms to downtown clubs and vinyl records. The performers make moves to separate themselves from the paying customers by dressing more and more flamboyant until a young group called RUN-DMC comes on the scene to take things back to the streets. This volume covers hits like Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s the Message, the movie Wild Style and introduces superstars like NWA, The Beastie Boys, Doug E Fresh, KRS One, ICE T, and early Public Enemy. Cameos by Dolemite, LL Cool J, Notorious BIG, and New Kids on the Block (?!)! Full color illustrations throughout.
With Hip Hop Family Tree, we encounter some very different questions on the bases of a comic in reality. In some instances, comics seem perfectly suited for literary representation of reality, such as telling a compact and visually striking story, or schematizing history at multiple scales with iconic characters and symbols. But how does comics wind up being a medium that documents a topic seemingly antithetical to its affordances, namely, music? What Piskor does to capitalize on comics as hip hop history is to surround the sounds with every other related element of hip hop– and by elements, not just the elements of hip hop, but the personages and lineages, the vernaculars and fashions, the aesthetic in fonts and paper grain and samples of Jack Kirby visual tracks flipped over R. Crumb beats, a celebratory sense of the profane and magisterial, the hood and the highbrow, all interlaced in hip hop’s roots and branches. Here is almost everything that is hip hop except that which is most identifiably hip hop, the actual audio, to demonstrate the now-undeniable reality that the music is much more than sound, but it’s the culture.
Family Tree is indeed a paragon of the unique reality-telling talents of comics. Can any other medium trade so lucratively on the signifiers of both print media and other material culture, as HHFT does with the likenesses of “rekkid” labels and graphic logos juxtaposed with meticulously rendered hairstyles, dial-accurate recording equipment, and lush urban landscapes? As evocative as films like Wild Style (whose director authors this volume’s intro) or scholarly as books like Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop might be, can any other medium narrate a tour of hip hop with as much creator-reader give-and-take of pacing, proportion, and personality as Piskor’s masterwork, some pages hallowed to one brief Beastie Boys-Rick Rubin repartee, others encapsulating entire careers (or even Wild Style itself)? Nothing reads quite like comics– you can’t fly-over page-flip a documentary film and taste the whole palette of Piskor’s presentation as the smell of the paper wafts up to you, and you can’t unpack the wiles of savvy producers and tragedies of burnt-out wunderkins in a Jimmy Fallon musical tribute, and you can’t visualize how kung-fu/comic book/Kool Herc the bodily exercise of this music is in a prose history.
Hip hop is the preeminent cultural creation of its multimodal generation, and to me, Hip Hop Family Tree raises the question if any future cultural force of this kind will be better served by text-only histories, or if a book like Piskor’s with a soundtrack playlist to accompany it isn’t going to become the go-to means of conveying the “reality” of such phenomena. The reality of hip hop’s history includes the verifiable facts and the fantastic myths, the expository power of language and the poignancy of a human scene, the beats, the rhymes, and the flavor, the style, the potency of sequential and juxtaposed images.
Next up (tomorrow), the winsome and fearless child-like reality of Cece Bell’s “El Deafo.” You can keep up with the entire week’s look at the 2015 Eisner nominations for Best Reality Based Work here.
