Ed Piskor’s HIP HOP FAMILY TREE is one of the cooler comics of the season—a detailed history of the music and the people who made it drawn in an obsessively retro style—and he’s getting a bunch of deserved press, including the above video from Time Magazine.

201310030410.jpg
He also sat down for an interview with Tom Scioli, a fellow member of the Pittsburgh Comics Mafia:

Piskor: You and I have had these conversations before where we don’t think much in terms of composing a single image, we’re not illustrators. You know we’re cartoonists, so interested in the storytelling, so the art to me it’s an appendage to tell the tale. I strive for clarity and readability. When I was a kid  it was about noodling, but I think that at least with my panel-to-panel transitions there’s never a mistake of where you should read, of how the story should flow. That was really on my mind. I’m really corrupted by all the interviews that I read as a kid and going to the Kubert School they stressed readability–

Scioli: And consistency. That’s something that I really internalized, too, from interviews.  They’d interview Joe Sinnott and it would be “consistency of each panel” and I really strove for that and valued that, but in recent years I’ve found that that’s not necessarily helpful to the reading experience.


Based on his choice in hats, I’m guessing that right about now, Piskor is probably spending more time being excited about the Pirates.