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Ed Piskor: By virtue of being born in 1982, it was already in the atmosphere on a routine basis, man. So the area I’m from—the neighborhood I lived in was predominantly black—there were constantly boomboxes walking up and down the sidewalk, all that kind of stuff. I remember the very first rap song that I owned, that we had in the house on wax: It was Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks,” because it was on a disco compilation that my parents had. I’m from Pittsburgh. It’s not New York City, but at that stage, which would be ‘85, ‘86, ‘87, hip-hop was in a sort of golden age of sorts.How has the hip-hop community responded to the series?
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.What rappers have gotten in touch with you?
De La [Soul]. Biz Markie. DMC is down. Chuck D will retweet my stuff. Grandmaster Flash will retweet my stuff. There’s a bunch, man… Some of these guys will try to [denigrate] other guys, and say, “Ah, man, he didn’t do this. He didn’t do that.” So I have to have a critical ear for the stuff I’m being fed. It’s good that they’re getting in touch, but when it comes to usability of information, I’m suspicious of stuff. I feel like I have a good bullshit detector. If it sounds too wild and I can’t find one other person who says the same shit, it can’t get put in the book, man.
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I’m putting together the strip for next week, and it’s gonna be a good one, man. It’s the introduction of L.L. Cool J into the mix. I hope to pencil two pages today; one of the pages is gonna be a splash page of the young L.L., because I think he deserves that.Nonfiction comics seem to have undergone a flourishing, of sorts. Do you have any opinions about that?
I actually don't think about this too much. I hate biopics and I don't really read many nonfiction comics, to be honest. Thinking about it, the only nonfiction comics that I've really ever read were autobiographical. There's room for everything in comics, though.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.
Well you know what it is: I think they all suck, so it’s like, “Let me make a good one.” That’s truthfully the spirit. So it’s like, “I’ll show you mooks how to do this shit.” It’s true, too—you can quote me on that. You have your outliers. You have your work by Joe Sacco. You have [Art] Spiegelman’s Maus. And that stuff is unassailable, untouchable. But now there’s been a graphic novel boom-and-bust kind of thing where people are getting these gigs to make stuff for big New York publishers. So there’s a lot of chaff. But just in general, in every medium, there’s a lot of garbage, and then there are the few outlying pieces of good work out there. I kind of live by this maxim, man, that the enemy of the best is the good. So if it’s passable, then that’s a failing grade to me, man. I’m just trying to digest the best diet I can, so I can make the best comics I can. That goes for film, that goes for prose books—I just have no time for something that is a C average.
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All my friends bring that up to me, and I really just don’t give a fuck about creating an academic text or something. I’ve never gone to college; I don’t even know how to write that shit. A lot of my information is from internet interviews and stuff like that. So I don’t even know how to cite that stuff properly. I’m from a position of ignorance, man, when it comes to that part—citations and shit. And I actually don’t care to pass, in academia and stuff like that. I mean, it’s pretty cool that different college courses do use my books, but I just want to make a cool comic. That’s just a different level of work.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.Around when does your interest in rap history start to terminate?
I’d say ’93, ’94, maybe. But then it goes beyond that a little bit. I’ve got six books in me right now—that’s my focus. I’m not sure how far that’s gonna take me.How far are you interested in taking the project?
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.What makes you believe the origins of rap should be honored in this way?
The narrative is about community and world-building and how word of mouth works. So at the Kool Herc parties at 1520 Sedgwick, the future of hip-hop—the next people in line—were all at those parties. Hip-hop as we know it is from a very congested area in the South Bronx. By virtue of that, everyone involved in it has a relationship with each other. So that was my whole thing. It’s like, OK, we’ve got this pressure cooker right here, man—we have all this energy—and if you play the six-degrees-of-separation game, you can draw clear lines back to any of these people who were at 1520 Sedgwick. So that’s the exercise, is introducing these early characters and showing how they all interconnect.Follow Lary Wallace on Twitter.