>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Michael Cavna: All right. Good evening, guys. Thanks for making it out. We're up now with our
[inaudible] for the night. My name is Michael Cavna, columnist
cartoonist with the Washington Post, and I write the daily
comic grips blog and also did the syndicated
strip [inaudible] comics.com. It is my true pleasure to
bring an artist here who -- a graphic novelist --
who is just amazing, one of the true rising
stars in comics. Mr. Ed Piskor. He was self-taught, and he
was [inaudible] to two things that in 70's and 80's
culture throwing back. One was Marvel Comics. People like Jack Kirby,
this brilliant style and the other was hip hop. And so he's just taken
these twin passions and married them beautifully. He got his big break working with the great Harvey Pekar [assumed
spelling] who liked his style, liked what he did,
and they collaborated. He worked on American Splendor
and The Beats and Macedonia. And he had his great
book, a graphic novel about hacking called the Wizzy
Wig, but he had a vision. He wanted to do this
thing, not one book. And so he began doing hip hop,
telling the true history of hip hop, and works like a true journalist, a
true researcher, a true historian. And he does these beautifully,
and he does it in that awesome 70's
Marvel aesthetic, and it's just the coolest thing. And so this year, we got
Hip Hop Family Tree Book 4. We're getting to the 80's. We're getting to Dre. We're getting to Will Smith, and
they're going to keep coming. And beautifully, and I just -- I know he'll continue
to show that dedication. Let's hope we see it in other forms. Let's hope we see it on the screen. And moderating with him
tonight will be Damon Locks, Chicago based visual artist,
musician [inaudible] cool projects, many kinds, but he
works with unheard music of the [inaudible] archive
and puts it to animation, and he also has worked with the
Stateville Correctional Facility. He's a man of just many talents who
spreads creativity in many forms. It is my true pleasure to welcome to the stage Mr. Ed
Piskor and Mr. Damon Locks. [ Applause ] >> Damon Locks: How's
everyone doing? Welcome. Thank you very
much for being here. I am very excited to
be here and talk to Ed. One of the things I am interested
in doing is finding out -- since we have an opportunity to
talk to Ed, I want to talk to him about the work that he does,
but I also want to talk to him about being an artist and
how you make that happen and how he got to where
he was today. Because it's the book fair, I tried to do something a
little bit extra creative today. So I broke my questions up into -- >> Ed Piskor: Sun in my eyes. >> Damon Locks: Yeah. It is bright. I tried to break my
questions up into chapters. So I made chapter titles that are
hip hip or comic book related. So the first chapter is this. I like hot butter -- I'm like
hot butter on my [inaudible]. I'm like hot butter on
your breakfast toast. >> Ed Piskor: Right, right. >> Damon Locks: Okay. So that's comics, right? So comics are like hot
butter on breakfast toast. So comic books were at one
point like a niche genre and now we're finding that comic
books like truly are the myths of this American culture. So they're getting a format. They're getting highlighted in ways that as a comic book fan I couldn't
have imagined when I was a kid. >> Ed Piskor: Right. >> Damon Locks: What was your
first experience with comics and when did you know that
you wanted to do them? >> Ed Piskor: I think that -- I was
born in 1982, and the people who are around my age, a little
older, a little younger, we are the last vestige of the corner store
newsstand comic book fan. That's basically saying that I would
go to the grocery store with Mom, and there would be a couple of
spinner racks at the grocery store, and I could just choose a
couple of Spider Man comics, X-Men comics, whatever they had. You could almost be
guaranteed to not be able to get two consecutive
issues of anything. >> Damon Locks: Exactly. >> Ed Piskor: Because
it was very sporadic, but that was my introduction
to the forum. Most people my age would
probably have this similar answer. So I've always known comics. When I was a kid, it
was definitely a stack that I had that I didn't buy. It's almost like my Dad was
preparing for me to like, "Ah, kids read comic books." So while they were buying
onesies and stuff, he was stacking up some comics for the future
whenever I was old enough to start reading or whatever. But always read comics. Reading the Marvel and D.C.
stuff, what was really cool about that was instantaneously
once you're able to read, you see the credits page on
the splash page in the front of the book, and you could read
that this story was written by Chris Claremont
[assumed spelling], drawn by John Byrne,
inked by Terry Austin. So that -- >> Damon Locks: Good,
so good, so good. >> Ed Piskor: That created the
idea that these things are not made by an elaborate computer algorithm, that actual human beings are behind
these works, and from day one, I never wanted to be a policeman
or fireman or something like that. It was always -- always
going to be comics for me. >> Damon Locks: So once you knew that you would be a comic book
artist even as a young person, like what trajectory, like did
you make a plan that you're like this is how I'm going to do it? >> Ed Piskor: Yeah. The goal because I was very --
I had a lot of self-awareness, and I knew that my skills were
weak, I wasn't going to be one of these outlier 14-year-old
cartoonists, wonder kid genius types. So in a lot of those Marvel comics,
there would be an ad somewhere in the middle for the
Joe Kubert School of Comic Art and blah, blah, blah. So that was my goal for my entire
childhood through high school to just build a strong portfolio
that was good enough to be able to gain entry into that
amazing institution. I would read a lot of articles about
-- about the alumni of that school and how tough it was to get in there and how you really
have to be on the ball. You can never be late
with an assignment because they'll kick
you the hell out. And I was preparing
for all this stuff, putting together this big portfolio,
and I got in, and once I made it to campus, I'm looking around me. I was probably one of the younger
people to ever go to the school because a lot of people would take
a couple years off and maybe go to real university for
awhile or whatever. But I quickly learned that you -- if you have the money to afford
to get in, they'll let you in. So what I'm saying
is I was surrounded by a lot of knuckle heads. >> Damon Locks: But that
was your -- that was your -- >> Ed Piskor: My young -- my young
childhood, before that point, working up to that point I easily
made a thousand comic book pages that will never see
the light of day. So I have a bunch of them too. And it would vary from making my
own stories, which would be very, very -- four or five page things
that were meant to be bigger comics, but after three pages, I would get
a better idea and just abandon that, go do something else all the way up to just copying,
complete comic books. It's like I drew -- I
copied the first issue of Frank Miller's Dark
Knight Returns to just -- >> Damon Locks: So you copied? That was your way of learning
by copying the whole thing? >> Ed Piskor: Yeah, for sure. And I had my mother letter it because her hand lettering
was nicer, and when she would read the copy, she was like laughing
at Frank Miller. And I'm like, "What are you --
this is serious literature, lady." I almost divorced my parents
like Dominique Moceanu, the 1994 gymnast, gold medalist. I'm sorry. >> Damon Locks: No. That's okay. So about storytelling,
comic book storytelling. >> Ed Piskor: Yes. >> Damon Locks: Okay. So now -- now we realize, as
I said, comic books age huge. The comic book world is huge. Major motion pictures are -- every
year there's like ten of them. >> Ed Piskor: Right. >> Damon Locks: What -- what
can comics do in storytelling that other formats can't do? >> Ed Piskor: Well,
the marriage of words and pictures is nothing
to sneeze at. The ability to go back a
couple of pages and kind of revisit somethings can
be a storytelling component. You can draw something that
seemed incidental on one page. It could have some payoff five
pages later that makes you go back or upon second reading,
you're like, "Oh my goodness. This object was there
the whole time." There are -- there's -- I mean, we could talk about
that all day for sure. It's something I really like. The idea that you're
seeing this whole unit at once is an interesting challenge
to overcome because as a cartoonist, one of the big puzzles is trying
to capture the reader's attention and also their motives
so it's like you want to lead their eye in a specific way. And that's not easy to do. It has a lot of advantages. Like I said, my entire life has been
devoted to the art of making comics. But if we were to be
frank in our discussion, it's a tremendously
inefficient form of storytelling if we want to be honest about it. The amount of time put in to each
page and the yield that you receive in terms of how long it
takes to read is very fast. But it's the coolest -- what I like
about it most is it's democratic. It's -- you just need a pencil
and paper to be able to do it. You don't need a focus group. You don't need a lot of money
to put a comic together. So the budget can be endless. You mentioned the Hollywood movies that have these multi hundred
dollar budgets or whatever. To do -- to achieve the
same effect in a comic, you just need the price
of pencil and paper. >> Damon Locks: Right, right. And people can enjoy it for like
-- well, it used to be 35 cents. Now it's like $3? $4? >> Ed Piskor: Yeah. You remember the old
danger of comics when you were reading those
Marvel D.C. things was when you would get an issue,
and it would say still 50 cents because you know the
very next issue -- >> Damon Locks: That
it was going to go up. >> Ed Piskor: 55 cents. >> Damon Locks: Exactly. But I have a question
about storytelling. >> Ed Piskor: Yes. >> Damon Locks: Is that something -- okay, so when I used to try to
draw comics a long time ago, I only wanted to draw
the fight sequences. >> Ed Piskor: Yeah. >> Damon Locks: That's
all I wanted to do. I didn't want to draw them
sitting in their like fortress or driving a car or going
to the grocery store. But the question is is
storytelling in the comic book form, is that something that you can
learn or did you have already like an inate sense of how
to put something together. >> Ed Piskor: I was talking
with Gilbert Hernandez of the famous Hernandez Brothers
who put together Love and Rockets. I completely agree with
what he said to me. He said that he learned storytelling
from guys like Jack Kirby from looking at these
mainstream comics. And as human beings, we sort of have
something in our brain that's kind of attuned to pattern
recognition and stuff like that. So on an intuitive sense, I think
if you look at comics long enough, you kind of intuitively
figure out how they work. And that's an advantage that we
have by reading those X-Men comics that are kind of put together by
many people, and then it has to go like a gatekeeper to sign off
before the lowly artist gets paid or however that works. And I think it can be learned. The craft of drawing can be learned. When I went to that Kubert
School, there was a guy who knew that on an ideal face the width of the face is five
eyeballs wide, right? And he knew how the clavicle fit into the shoulder and
all of this stuff. His work had no soul to it. And that's the thing that
is kind of like built in, that you really can't teach. >> Damon Locks: Right. >> Ed Piskor: And that stuff is
very evident when you look at a lot of comics and you're just
like [inaudible], souless. It's very clear that the person
is drawing it because they live in Brooklyn, and they
have to pay $3000 a month, and they have to get this
done to keep the lights on. >> Damon Locks: One
of the things just out of my own personal curiosity
and luckily I can do that. I can ask this question. How to draw comics the Marvel way? Did that have any impact? >> Ed Piskor: Huge. >> Damon Locks: Okay, because
that book as a child, I ordered it and waited every single
day since the day -- the check had not even
arrived to them, and I was checking
the mailbox for it. >> Ed Piskor: Yeah. That book was in my
elementary school library. When we were learning
the Dewey decimal system, the first word I looked
up was comics, and that was the one
book that we had. And I would just take it out. I think in elementary school you
just keep the book for a week, but I would just take it out week
in, week out, and not too long ago, I visited that elementary school,
and they still have the same copy. And it has some blemishes and
imperfections that I put on there, and I remember putting
them on there. >> Damon Locks: Nice. >> Ed Piskor: I had
an eraser melt on it. Our house was so hot, and this
eraser kind of had some sort of chemical reaction with
whatever they binded the thing with that it just melted
eraser shape in it. That was me. >> Damon Locks: That's hot. >> Ed Piskor: Yeah. >> Damon Locks: Okay. So my next -- next chapter,
of course, [inaudible]. Yes, yes, ya'll, and you don't stop. Okay? >> Ed Piskor: These
are the chapter types? >> Damon Locks: This
is chapter type. Okay. So hip hop was
also something that -- whose relevance has grown over time. >> Ed Piskor: Yeah. >> Damon Locks: Like comics, it was
perceived as a niche of some sort. >> Ed Piskor: Right. >> Damon Locks: Now
has grown to being like probably America's biggest
export -- cultural export. Could be. >> Ed Piskor: One of them. >> Damon Locks: It
could be argued, right? >> Ed Piskor: Yeah, sure. >> Damon Locks: So how long have
you been listening to hip hop? >> Ed Piskor: Once
again, that was something that I was born into as well. The neighborhood that I grew up in
was -- it's predominantly black. I was one of the few white
kids in the neighborhood, and there would just be guys
walking up and down the street with the boom box that took like 16 C cell batteries
to last for one hour. Just playing different
kinds of music. My parents had some
disco anthologies that would have Curtis Blow's The
Brakes and the Chaka Khan song with the Melle Mel verse. I would hear this stuff
constantly, and that was the music that my friends would listen to. So I was kind of like a crowd clown. I'm like, "Oh yes, I want
to hang out with you guys. What are you listening to?" I spent all my money on comics. So I would kind of give them -- it was Magnavox tapes to
dub me their favorite stuff. And then I grew up through the
era where on MTV if you wanted to watch -- if you wanted
to see a rap music video, you had to watch Yo MTV Raps. And then as I got a little bit
older, that wasn't the case. The Yo MTV Raps kind
of became obsolete. It went away because
you would be able to see rap music videos
any second of the day. So it was extremely popular
at that time when I was -- it really hit its tipping
point around then. But I still kind of like did
it wrong in a way because -- you know to high schoo
kids, you can't listen to any music that was
six months old. It would be considered played out, and I would just keep
digging back further. I had this impulse to just
keep digging back further, and they were like, "Why are
you listening to that old stuff? My Dad has a Grandmaster
Flash record. Like that's not cool." >> Damon Locks: Okay. So what made you decide
you were going to put these two loves together? >> Ed Piskor: For a really long
time, I wanted to do some kind of comic using a lot
of hip hop imagery. A lot of my favorite kinds of hip
hop imagery, the fashion, graffiti, pre-Ed Koch New York, like scary
New York, like Taxi Driver New York. And I didn't know what
the kind of McGuffin of whatever this tale would be,
and then at a certain point, I was just thinking when it comes
to all the cartoonists that I know, many are fans of rap music,
but they could never beat me in a trivia contest. You know what I'm saying? Just the inherent knowledge
of the records that I have is probably
greater than most cartoonists, and I have the willingness
to do the homework to figure out the stuff I don't know. So I just -- all of a sudden
was like, you know what? I'm just going to make a straight
forward linear history of rap music, and it was off to the races . >> Damon Locks: Was this something that had been on your
mind for awhile? Had you had like tons of -- tons
of projects and tons of things that you've already done,
but you were like, "Oh, I'm still going to do this project. I'm going to make it happen
when I have this opening." >> Ed Piskor: Somebody sent me
an interview that I did in 2009 where I mention wanting to
do a history of hip hop. So it at least goes back that far. I was actually surprised that I said that because I think it was probably
just a frivolous conversation that I had with a writer who
I was very comfortable with, and I spit that out, but
I wasn't conscious of it because I didn't start
making the comic until 2012. Obviously, I have a lot of ideas. And this one, for whatever
reason, just felt exciting to explore at that moment. I was posting these strips on a
website called Boingboing.net, which had a built in
audience of I think like five or six million readers
per month or something. So when I did my first Hip Hop
Family Tree strip, it went viral. Within a couple of hours, tens
of thousands of people shared it on their Facebook accounts. It was retweeted thousands of times. >> Damon Locks: That's
where I first saw it. >> Ed Piskor: That's cool. That's cool. And then it -- I don't know. There's just something about it that gave me an incentive
to just keep it going. I was going to do it semiroutinely,
but then I got like some kind of -- some of the addiction that
"I like all this attention. I'm going to keep it rocking." >> Damon Locks: So -- I have
a question about structure, how you go about walking
into this giant project. In some ways, it reminds me
of the book, Please Kill Me. >> Ed Piskor: Yeah. >> Damon Locks: You know? Oral history, you know? But have you taken oral history -- like that's a format
where you can be like, "I'm going to read what this
person said, this person said," and you can just organize
it this way. So for me, this idea of taking
a genre of music, which had tons and tons of people involved and
try to create a linear kind of path through it, what was the
-- what was your process? >> Ed Piskor: As I said, I put this
work on that BoingBoing website. They were goodly [phonetic
spelling] enough to allow me to post a strip every week of almost
any kind of comics that I felt like. And that was my motivation. Let me kind of fill this slot each
week so that was the exercise. Comics, for me, it just -- it starts
as an exercise, to just test myself. And I wanted to see what it would
be like to be a weekly cartoonist. And you know what? It's hard. And I found that out the hard way. So it's like all right,
I got to fill some space. Every Tuesday, I put
out a new strip. And so I had this kind
of format locked in, and thankfully the history is fairly
in stone, and that gave me my kind of blueprint for how
to format this thing. As I said earlier, I was going
to do this strip semiregularly, but as I started accumulating
material for the first strip, I came across a lot of really
visually interesting stuff that I thought would
lend well to comics. So I'm like, "I'm just
going to do another one." And then as I would
flesh out that moment, I would learn about something else, and it continued that
way for 4.5 years. I'm taking a little bit of a break
right at this moment from it, but for 4.5 years,
that was the thing. I never had any lead time. I never had a buffer, so it's
like every single week -- >> Damon Locks: Just
have to keep going. >> Ed Piskor: 4.5 years
of just putting out a new strip every Tuesday,
do two new pages of comics. But even in that time, I was like
the books came out, and I would be on a book tour and traveling the
world so it's like I drew pages in Denmark and in Norway. It -- I was talking with some
friends, and they were like -- it's literally -- they
were like, "Man, it's literally like
being a rock star." I'm like, "Shut up." And they're like, "No, man." Because a musician is expected to continue making music
even when they're on tour. And I was like, "Yeah, but at
least those guys got private planes and stuff like that. Man, I'm sitting in coach like." >> Damon Locks: Now, I assume
-- do you have like a regimen, the way you treat your work ethic? Do you have to draw X amount
a day or week or month or -- ? >> Ed Piskor: Yeah. I mean, I think the more people you
would talk to who would know me -- I'm sort of known for my work ethic. And I have this keen ability
to just say F everything, and I'm just going to
get this thing done. When I started the Hip Hop Family
Tree comic, a routine developed. I knew that Monday is like
writing day, and that would consist of doing some interviews,
researching, all that sort of stuff. I would let all this information
swirl in my head for most of the day and then basically by 1 a.m. would
have some sort of eureka moment, like okay, it's all coming together. The comic will look like this. Draw it in pencil for
two days that week. Spend another couple days
inking it, color it in a day and then it goes up the next day. Wash, rinse, repeat 45 times. >> Damon Locks: Right. >> Ed Piskor: 45 times in a row. Then I have enough material
for a book, spend the rest -- and then that would become like
the most busy part of my year because I would spend the rest
of the year designing that book but also keeping the strips
going in the meantime. The covers take me a month
to do to just kind of play -- figure out all the possible angles
and ideas and design compositions. Yeah. >> Damon Locks: How did you
gain -- I mean Pittsburg -- is there a big hip hop
scene in Pittsburgh? >> Ed Piskor: It exists. >> Damon Locks: So how did you gain
access to people that you needed to interview for this
book or for the strips? >> Ed Piskor: Yeah. When I was putting that first book
together, nobody would talk to me. And then it became a New
York Times best seller, and then I started getting some
phone calls, and it would be like pretty cool guys
just like, "Listen, Ed. I just want to make sure
you get my part right when it comes down to it, man. Here's my number." And that was really cool. >> Damon Locks: I was going to ask
about that because like hip hop, within the genre especially
like the golden era of hip hop, authenticity was a really
big aspect of the genre. Like how authentic or how real -- >> Ed Piskor: Yeah. >> Damon Locks: Was that
something that you had to consider like transposing this
into a comic book? Like a comic theme? Did you have to figure out
what authenticity meant to a hip hop comic? >> Ed Piskor: Right. I think I understand what you mean. There are a lot of competing
ideas about this happen or that happened kind of thing. So as a for instance, in the
first book, there are no less than three -- at least three
people who I give credit for creating the term hip
hop because there's this camp who believes that this
person did it. There's this camp who believes
this person did it and so on. There are many moments like that,
that come up in the culture. And certainly as I began
interviewing and talking with more people, you would think
that the work would get richer based on that, but one of the ways -- one of the necessary tropes of
hip hop is self [inaudible], and destroying your
enemies verbally. So there was a lot of gossip and a
lot of stuff like where I was like, "You know, we're approaching seven
billion people on this planet. Can I talk to maybe one
person on this globe who can corroborate this
thing that you just told me?" >> Damon Locks: Right. >> Ed Piskor: So I think I was the
perfect age to begin this comic when I did because if I was 21 years
old, I would just be like, "Yes, sir, Mr. Biz Markie,
whatever you say." Yes, sir. Whatever. It would have been
a different thing, and it would have been
a big piece of crap. >> Damon Locks: Do you hear back
from people that are in the book? Like how do they feel
about the book? Like maybe Russell Simmons. Has he contacted you? >> Ed Piskor: Yeah. He got his president of Def
Entertainment or something to get in touch once, and they have a
bunch of projects in the works, and I think they were trying
to kind of like casually get me to tone things down because
he offered me these jobs to punch up scripts and stuff. And if you're unfamiliar, I draw
Russell Simmons the way he kind of was when he was a young
man, kind of used angel dust, had a severe lisp, had kind
of like wandering lazy eye. And that was -- give him
sort of [inaudible] approach. Anyhow, when he got in touch with
all that noise about doing this work with him, I still drew
him the same way. And then they never called again. And so I feel like they were
trying to throw me some bones so that I would be some kind
of dork, like, "Okay, man. I don't want to mess up this
opportunity to work with Russell." Whatever. >> Damon Locks: But there's probably
tons of people that are huge fans. >> Ed Piskor: Yeah, yeah. It's awesome to just kind
of do a little vanity search on Twitter every now
and again and then see that De La Soul retweets the thing. Or, you know one of the more
popular strips that I did was -- it was because Ice Cube shared it
on all of his social media accounts. And what I liked about that
moment was that it was a moment where Ice Cube met Dr. Dre for the first time before
they put together NWA. And the language that he used when he shared it, he
took ownership of it. So he's like, "Check out this
comic about when I met Dre." >> Damon Locks: Okay. >> Ed Piskor: He took -- owned it. And like millions of people
saw that thing thanks to him. >> Damon Locks: That's amazing. >> Ed Piskor: Yeah. Real cool. >> Damon Locks: Okay. It's clobbering time,
AKA [inaudible] smash. Now, Hip Hop Family
Tree is doing fantastic. People love it. Ice Cube is retweeting about it. How has this experience making the
work and presenting it and having such a positive feedback on it -- how has that affected
and changed your world as an artist and as a person? >> Ed Piskor: Well, I mean,
it's taken me around the world, and it's made me a worldly person. The book is in several languages,
and I get to go to the places where this stuff is translated,
and I get to meet the people of these other cultures who are observing the
work for the first time. That's awesome. I've created a sort of buffer
for myself so that I can -- so that I could think about
what my next step would be. The books have made it
possible for me to kind of design my career moving forward. So it's been positively
life-changing in a lot of ways. I got to collaborate with Public
Enemy and make some action figures, and that's my favorite
rap group ever. So -- >> Damon Locks: And
they play tonight. >> Ed Piskor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're showing our professionalism
by not being over there right now. >> Damon Locks: Yeah. It was hard. It was hard. I went there. I went there. I went, and I had the
worst case scenario, the worst of all worlds for me. I saw the end of Living Color. I'm sorry. I apologize to Living Color. But I saw them doing a
clash cover, and they -- to me it was just terrible. It was horrible. And so then I saw all of
the soundcheck and set up for Public Enemy, and
then had to come back. And as I was like three
blocks away from it, I hear Chuck D's voice coming, and
I was like, "You're taunting me." I tried hard. >> Ed Piskor: He's a pro. >> Damon Locks: I tried
-- I tried for both of us. I was like we got to be here. We have to see it. And I just didn't make it, you know? The world -- >> Ed Piskor: We love you, guys. Thanks for showing up. >> Damon Locks: That
-- that -- yeah. >> Ed Piskor: For real. >> Damon Locks: I was
going to ask -- oh. When you look at your
own work, what's -- what do you like best about
it and what is the most fun? >> Ed Piskor: I can tell you this, and it's taken me 32
years basically -- 30 years to be able to say that I
think that I found my own voice. The comics I make are Ed Piskor
comics, and it was not that way for the first 30 years of my life. I would read Love and Rockets
and want to make comics like Jaime Hernandez, and I would
read a Frank Miller comic and want to make a super hero comic
like Frank Miller, right? So I think I found my voice,
and I felt kind of like found -- not my niche but just
who I am as an artist. And that's awesome. And just the whole
process of comics, of making comics is completely
necessary so I'm talking about even rolling the
panel borders is -- there's a part of it that's
necessary, and it's all fun to me. It's like I get to basically
meditate for eight, ten hours a day and just kind of go into myself,
enter this almost zen-like state and at the end of the day,
I have a new comic page. And then after many days, I
have a books worth of stuff, and it's just like this very calming
thing that's -- can't beat it. If I was a kid traveling forward
in time, looking at myself now, it's like I'm exactly in a position that I've been planning
for my entire life. >> Damon Locks: That's
just super rare. I mean -- >> Ed Piskor: What can I say? I'm rare. >> Damon Locks: One of the things I
noticed about your work that drew me to your work is that as a fan of
both hip hop and a fan of comics, the way you approach making
comics is that it appears that you love the form
from top to bottom, from [inaudible] to
making the panels. >> Ed Piskor: The [inaudible] ads,
man in the 1970's Marvel comics. That guy with that crazy hair
trying to sell his ninja academy. >> Damon Locks: So that's something
that I think is super beautiful. How -- >> Ed Piskor: We have five minutes. >> Damon Locks: Oh,
we have five minutes. Okay, so let me see. I think I have two more
chapters, short chapters. Okay. Who the blank is this? Page me at 5:46 in the morning,
crack of dawn and now I yawn and wipe the cold out my eyes. See who's this paging me and why. Came you name some of the -- your
both comic book and hip hop heroes that you've been able to meet? >> Ed Piskor: Public Enemy. Last weekend, was at this comic
event SPX, and my publisher -- it's called FenoGraphics, and FemoGraphics this year is
celebrating their 40th anniversary. And I specifically
chose this publisher. One, because they gave me no kind
of editorial feedback on anything, design, format, whatever. But also the pantheon
of cartoonists who are under the FenoGraphics
umbrella are like -- to bring up another Olympic
reference that is less obscure than Dominique Moceanu, the 1992
U.S. basketball team, the Dream Team with Michael Jordan, Larry
Bird and Magic Johnson, right? So my cartoonist heroes
are like Dan Clowes. I don't want to say heroes on
camera because I know these dudes, and hip hop isn't -- doesn't
[inaudible] Clowes, Chris Ware, Charles Byrnes, Jessica
Abel, Joe [inaudible], these people who I'm
like in the family. That's the other kind of cool
thing is when I went to -- I mentioned SPX the first time,
it was about ten years ago and FenoGraphics was celebrating
their 30th anniversary. They were going to have
this big oral history book. It didn't happen for ten years
so they actually got it together, put it together for the 40th
anniversary and how cool because I get to be in it. Yeah. >> Damon Locks: I see some
-- look like comic fans, look like there are
some young people. This is the classic question, but
like what advice would you give in terms of like making comics? >> Ed Piskor: I think
that it's best to just be into it for the right reasons. Just don't expect to make
a lot of money upfront. Do it for the love. Do it almost for the tradition. Do it because you can't not do it. And you have to be relentless. You have to almost punt
your teenage years away. When all your friends are partying
and smoking weed and having sex -- >> Damon Locks: Don't
do that, don't do that. >> Ed Piskor: If you're
drawing, don't worry about that. If it pays off later,
something like that. You have to punt your teenage years,
and you have to punt your 20's and then the rest of your
life can be clear sailing. But -- so it really takes -- I had
this idea that it takes 20 years to get to be good enough to be
publishable and then it's going to take another 20 years
to create your masterpiece. Like I truly sort of believe that. [Inaudible] trajectory like I
haven't done my masterpiece yet, but I keep learning and I'm still
a student like any teenagers or whatever who are here. I'm the same as you. I'm still learning stuff. It's just I've been putting in
a little -- a few more hours. >> Damon Locks: Okay. I think that's a good
place to stop, right? >> Ed Piskor: Awesome. >> Damon Locks: All right. Thanks, Ed. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
