Hip Hop Family Tree Book 3

Starred review from December 2, 2013
Originating as a webcomic serialized at Boing Boing, this oversize volume is an epic, exhaustive chronicle of the most culturally impactful popular music movement of the past four decades. With its roots embedded in the streets of 1970s New York City, hip-hop and rap slowly germinated as a DIY urban party phenomenon, weaving a powerful funky spell among the Big Apple’s people of color. Local deejays and rappers were catapulted into the scene’s spotlight overnight, and the battles for performance supremacy honed the skills of the form’s progenitors at parties and clubs, which soon led the sounds they created to be recorded and distributed on bootleg vinyl. As the movement grew, so too did its visibility, and the rest is international pop-culture history. The strip’s visual tone bears a borderline underground aesthetic that perfectly suits the material—brown-edged paper and antique flat color—with a semi-cartoony feel, reminiscent of the graffiti that helped define the graphic aspect of the movement. It’s a massive undertaking, but Piskor succeeds mightily in chronicling hip-hop’s formative years with riveting detail.

September 15, 2015
The third gathering of Piskor's smash webcomic, which Fantagraphics has also started releasing as a monthly comic book, affords as much amusement and well-researched history as its two predecessors. If Piskor follows his initial plan, this volume of the series is the halfway mark. Homing in on just two years of the early eighties, he spotlights producers Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin and the breakout of break dancing as well as the rise of the Beastie Boys, the Fat Boys, Run DMC, and Whodini. Piskor's art style, somewhere between Jack Kirby and R. Crumb, looks as good as, maybe better than, ever.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)