Hip Hop Family Tree, Volume 1

Originally serialized at Boing Boing, Hip Hop Family Tree, Volume 1 follows the "viral propagation of a culture." The narrative starts in the late 1970s in the Bronx and covers a large swath of events and figures. One of the great features of the large page format is that the riff on traditional Marvel Treasury Editions includes some rough paper and old-school coloring that makes the rappers and moguls appear as larger than life figures like superheroes. And there is a multitude of colorful characters in here, including graffiti artists, beat boxers, luminaries like Rick Rubin, Run DMC, Russell Simmons, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and Kurtis Blow; record companies like Sugar Hill Records, radio DJs, and club owners.

Image found at the Columbus Museum of Art

One of my favorite parts of the online version is its inclusion of specific songs highlighted in every episode. Although that feature does not accompany the book, the fine folks at Stumptown Trade Review have a 4 hour playlist of many of the artists and songs featured in the book here.

Accomplished creator Ed Piskor has done lots of nonfiction comics in the past, including working on American Splendor and a biography of The Beats with Harvey Pekar. Even his hacker book Wizzywig, which I absolutely loved, was based on reality. He is an excellent researcher and deft artist, and his imagery is an excellent combination of reality and super-expressive, cartoonish comics. Piskor manages to capture grit, enterprise, power, and frivolity with his pictures, but with his words he also does a sort of comic rapping, incorporating snippets of lyrics and song titles into his dialogue as well as setting up visual imagery and foreshadowing future events. This does not come off as too clever or cute but adds to the vitality of the narratives. I found this book to be a marvel of ingenuity and a testament to his great skills as a comics creator. He speaks more about his influences, career, and work on this book in this interview.

All of the reviews I have read online about this book have been glowing. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and called it "a massive undertaking, but Piskor succeeds mightily in chronicling hip-hop’s formative years with riveting detail." Win Wiacek called it "cool, informative and irresistible" as well as "wild fun and deliciously addictive."

Hip Hop Family Tree, Volume 1 is available from Fantagraphics. They provide a preview and much more here. You can also read most if not all of the comics online at Boing Boing. Piskor is still doing new entries in the series and reportedly will keep going for 5 volumes, until he reaches the time period his interest in rap music waned in the early 1990s.

On a side note, I met Ed Piskor this past summer at HeroesCon, and pre-ordered this book. He was an incredibly smart and polite man, and I am glad to show off the sketch he drew in my copy.

Slick Rick!

Citizen Rex

To close out Gilbert Hernandez Month, today I am looking at a book he co-created with his older brother Mario, Citizen Rex. This book collects a 6 issue limited series about a gossip columnist, robots, a secret tribunal of truth-seekers, black market prosthetics, family drama, and an android that just might be the next step in human/robot synthesis.

A facile way to describe this book would be to call it a cleaner version of Blade Runner, in the sense that this world is much more sanitary and well composed. The main story happens about 50 years from now and follows Sergio Bauntain, a gossip columnist who goes by the name Bloggo. He usually covers stories about local organized crime, much of it centering on the illegal trade of technological body parts, as such enhancements are all the rage. But he ends up catching on that the advanced robot CTZ-RX-1 was not actually deactivated and destroyed as previously though but is avenging his past mistreatment. All the while Bloggo is pursued by the Truth Takers, a mysterious group of vigilantes who seek the justice that the system does not seem to provide and who resort to sinister ways to get the truth.

Sample page from Comixology

There are a lot of moving parts and ideas in this book. Like any piece of good science fiction, it blurs lines between reality and fiction, human and machine, and the demands of family versus those of society. It is an exercise in action, intrigue, philosophy, and metaphysics. I thought the book was a very suspenseful, fun, and exciting read, using familiar sci-fi elements but crafting a narrative that seemed unique unto itself. Mario and Gilbert speak more about creating the series in this interview.

Reviews I have read about this collection have been very positive. The Comics Journal's Sean T. Collins called it "a dense, engrossing, and above all humanistic approach to the genre, and not a bad way to calibrate one’s behavior in the real world as well." Dominick Malloy called it "a uniquely deep story." Sarah Boslaugh summed it up as "a sci-fi epic overflowing with ideas and artwork soaked in retro cool."

Citizen Rex is available from its publisher Dark Horse, who provide a preview here.

Come hang out with me!

Monday December 2 from 3 until 4 PM EST, I will be hanging out on Google and participating in a webinar for the Literacy Research Association. The talk will be about graphic novels, research, and mostly about how they might be used in the classroom.

I am honored to be the featured speaker, and joining me will be this illustrious panel:

Host: Greg McVerry

Panelist: Laura Jimenez

Panelist: David Low

Teacher: John Weaver

Discussant:  Peter Guiterrez

Cameraman: Ian O'Byrne

You can check out more about what the webinar will look like as well as some past ones at the official YouTube page.

I hope some of you can join us!

The Troublemakers

The Troublemakers is one of Gilbert Hernandez's adaptations of a movie that starred Fritz, his psychologist character from Love and Rockets (she's on the right side of the cover). It is a paean to his love for B- or exploitation movies and a meta-fictional component of his Palomar universe. Casual readers do not really need to know any of that though, because the book holds up as a satisfying read on its own merits.

I am not going to tell you so much about the plot other than it focuses on a trio of grifters.

Vincene seems to be the craftiest, and she is always on the run.

Nala is a former magician's assistant with a bunch of tricks up her sleeve but is worried about getting too old to pull off more scams.

Wes, a frustrated singer, is trying to fleece his associate Dewey out of $200,000 so he can buy his own club.

These characters' allegiances are constantly shifting, and they double-cross each other in pretty much every way possible. Not so good for them, but great for a reader seeking lots of plot twists. The characters are surprising for who they reveal themselves to be, and the story at the end takes on a pretty surreal yet violent turn when 7 stray bullets find their marks. Hernandez speaks more about his work on this book in this interview.

All of the reviews I have read about this book have been very positive. Ron Richards wrote that Gilbert's storytelling ability here is "at the top of his game." The Comics Journal's Rob Clough summed The Troublemakers up as "a minor work in Gilbert Hernadez’s imposing catalog, yet it still shows the artist at the height of his powers, capable of crafting characters with surprising depth even in the basest of genre stories." The reviewer from The Beguiling remarked on the entire series of faux movie adaptations, "These books are delicious." I concur with these reviewers, and I found the book to be engrossing, compelling, and a lot of fun for both noir and comics fans.

A preview and much more can be found here from the book's publisher Fantagraphics. You can find an extension of the preview here.

Julio's Day

Julio's Day covers much more than a day as it takes place from Julio's birth in 1900 until his death in 2000. Over those hundred years, he ages, family members and friends die, and others are born. The effects of major events, including both world wars, the 1929 stock market crash, the Vietnam War, and the first Gulf War ripple through people's lives. The setting is an unnamed, rural, American village that calls to mind Palomar in its bucolic aspects.

Most of the pages in this volume were published in much shorter 1 and 2 page comics over the course of 6 years in the second volume of Love and Rockets, but here are combined to depict an entire lifespan. The cast of characters is large, and they age, appear, and disappear from the narrative, but Hernandez provides a handy reference page at the front of the book.

Reading the book as a whole, I am struck by how it is a deft combination of iconic and monumental scenes of family and childhood mixed with very local and personal happenings. This book displays some impressive vistas, and sometimes seems like a parable of sorts, with many versions of traveler tales. But it is also full of small, evocative moments, such as short exchanges, prayers, and glimpses into people's hope and aspirations. Also, love is a big part of the proceedings, because Julio spends his entire life living at  home with his mother as he cannot reveal or come to grips with his homosexuality. He has a few relationships over the years, but they are covert and unspoken.

I read this book at a brisk clip, finishing it relatively quickly, but there is so much here to digest and chew over, that I see myself coming back to it often in the near future. As The Comics Journal's Charles Hatfield wrote, it is pretty interesting to read and compare this book, which is about a century's worth of lives and societal changes, with Marble Season, which is much more about Gilbert's childhood and a specific moment in time. Certainly both offer different views of Hernandez's impressive range of artistic and narrative prowess.

All the reviews I have read about this book have praised its beautiful art and intricate storytelling. In a starred review from Publishers Weekly it was called "a marvelous and tightly scripted epic whose last page is a heart-stopper." Tom Spurgeon spoke to its complexity, "I felt this work more than I processed it intellectually, which is odd in that I think it's relatively complex and will lend itself to multiple readings and a truckload of spread-across-a-table analyses." Andy Shaw summed up, "Julio’s Day is a literary classic, and another incredible piece of work from a true master of comics."

Julio's Day was published by Fantagraphics, and they provide a preview and much more here.

Please consider funding this project

Artist Luke Radl and writer Jeffrey Wilson are working on a graphic novel adaptation of an interview with Noam Chomsky. It seems like an ambitious and thought-provoking work, so perhaps you can check out their indiego page, learn more about the project, and kick in some shekels.

Speak of the Devil

I took a little detour from Gilbert Hernandez Month yesterday, but today I am going back on track.

Speak of the Devil collects a 6 issue limited series that was on The Comics Journal's Best of 2007 list. The story is about gymnasts, family relationships, a mysterious Peeping Tom wearing a devil's mask, and a murderous love triangle. The main character is Val, a gymnast who lives with her divorced father and his new wife. She struggles with this new situation and also dates a boy whose family appears to be abusive. As these young people struggle through their lives, a mysterious stranger is terrorizing their neighborhoods, peeking in open curtains.

This mysterious figure is particularly fixated at staring in at Val's parents while they are having sex. I am not going to reveal many plot specifics, because I think this book relies on a sequence of revelations and escalations in the course of its narrative. But I will say that things take a sinister turn, and the second half of the book is violent and bloody.

The strongest aspects of the book are its pacing and its focus on a small set of characters. It reads like a Hitchcockian thriller, raising questions of psychology and propelled by shocking visual scenes. The story is unsettling and disturbing, and it is definitely not intended for younger readers, but it lingered in my mind. And the artwork is characteristically fantastic, incredibly well rendered and paced. You can see from the two-page excerpt above that Hernandez can tell a story that is both economical in its storytelling and sensational in its impact.

Reviews I have read about this book have been mixed or measured. Robert Stanley Martin called it "a terrible disappointment." Andrew Wheeler wrote that "Hernandez’s art is as assured and potent as ever" and also that he liked this book better than Chance in Hell. Jog also noted that the artwork was "top notch" and added that the story "eventually takes on an oddly lyrical tone."

Speak of the Devil was published by Dark Horse and they provide a preview here.