Hip Hop Family Tree Book 2

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.

November 15, 2014
The second collection of Piskor's hip-hop history in comics may be a better place to start reading it than the first. Several longer stories are embedded in it, whereas the first volume was primarily a succession of one-pagers. For instance, the making of the groundbreaking hip-hop movie, Wild Style, occupies several pages, which allows gratifyingly better acquaintance with a handful of players amid the blizzard of faces and names the chronicle throws at us. A few continuing characters, such as entrepreneur Russell Simmons and record architect Rick Rubin, become the reader's old friends with this installment, and many others are no longer strangers. But as the book's end looms, a new generation of DJs is forecast, and only four years have been covered. There's plenty more to come, and Piskor's Jack Kirbyish drawing chopsmonumental figures in thrusting, dynamic action; flat colors that crush perspectiveconstitute precisely the sturdy vehicle to carry it as far as Piskor will take it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)