Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: X-Men: Grand Design
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 7/28/1982
WEBSITE: http://www.edpiskor.com/
CITY: Pittsburgh
STATE: PA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 28, 1982, in Homestead, PA.
EDUCATION:Attended the Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Comic artist and author. Mongo Wrestling Alliance, character designer.
AVOCATIONS:Comics.
WRITINGS
Illustrator of American Splendor: Our Movie Year; Macedonia, 2007; and The Beats: A Graphic History, 2009. Also author of Isolation Chamber and Deviant Funnies.
SIDELIGHTS
Ed Piskor has held a lifelong interest in comics, and now works within the comic book industry. Prior to launching his career, Piskor was a student in the Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art. He then launched his debut works, Isolation Chamber and Deviant Funnies, and his career was able to grow from that point onward. His most notable works include Hip Hop Family Tree and Wizzywig, both of which he created and published himself. Hip Hop Family Tree is particularly noteworthy because it serves as an illustrated timeline of the beginnings and progression of the hip hop genre. Piskor was bestowed with an Eisner Award for the series, which has received further widespread acclaim since its release and earned Piskor considerable notoriety. He has been partnered with Harvey Pekar, who wrote The Beats: A Graphic History and Macedonia; Piskor served as the illustrator for both of these works. In addition to his comic book illustrations, Piskor has also worked in television animation. Specifically, he was involved with Mongo Wrestling Alliance, a television show featured on Adult Swim, as a character designer.
In an interview featured on the Adventures in Poor Taste website, Piskor remarked that he has always admired the X-Men series in particular. The series stuck out to him from the very moment that he first began collecting comics, and he has nursed a love for it ever since.
X-Men: Grand Design is another one of Piskor’s comic book works, and serves as a love letter to the series. X-Men stars its titular band of mutant superheroes, and combines many classic storylines from the original comics. The series spans five issues total. Piskor handled every detail of its production, from illustration to writing; X-Men was ultimately published by Marvel. In the same interview on the Adventures in Poor Taste website, Piskor explained that the series is meant for long-time fans and new fans alike. The story contains many details older fans will recognize, while being kept simplified enough for new fans to dive into the material.
The story is presented from the points of view of Recorder and Watcher, who look on as the X-Men begins to form one by one. The first mutants to awaken are Magneto and Professor X. Piskor traces over their beginnings and treks through their early storylines, all the way to the debuts of several other noteworthy members of the team, including the Beast and Jean Grey. Piskor devotes just as much attention within the storyline to the X-Men’s opponents and their backgrounds. The story follows both sides through some of their biggest encounters and conflicts. However, it comes to center mostly on the story of Dark Phoenix, whose arrival on the planet Earth spells doom on multiple levels for both humanity and the X-Men alike. In addition to this storyline, Piskor also delves into some plots that have not received much attention over the years. While Piskor adds his own flair to the work, he also salutes the eras that spawned the original storylines through his art by adding several vintage effects. Piskor also took care to tweak the original storylines, so that they are able to flow together more fluidly. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: “Fans who have been following the X-Men since childhood will delight in Piskor’s dedicated ‘grand design,’ and it’s a luminous beacon for newcomers to join in the fun.” AV Club website contributor Oliver Sava remarked: “The series is a rollicking action-adventure but also a tribute to the work done by past X-Men creators, and Piskor’s appreciation and passion for these characters and their world comes through in every page.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, January 29, 2018, review of X-Men: Grand Design, p. 177.
Xpress Reviews, April 27, 2018, Jason L. Steagall, review of X-Men.
ONLINE
Adventures in Poor Taste, http://www.adventuresinpoortaste.com/ (December 8, 2017), Chris Hassan, “Cooler than Wolverine: An interview with ‘X-Men: Grand Design’ creator Ed Piskor.”
AV Club, https://www.avclub.com/ (December 22, 2017), Oliver Sava, “Ed Piskor breaks down X-Men history with style in this Grand Design exclusive,” review of X-Men.
CBR, https://www.cbr.com/ (December 20, 2017), Kiel Phegley, “Ed Piskor Remixes 300 Issues of X-Men History in Grand Design,” author interview.
Comicbook, http://comicbook.com/ (April 16, 2018), Jamie Lovett, “Interview: Ed Piskor Gives ‘X-Men: Grand Design‘ Its ‘Second Genesis.'”
Comics Beat, http://www.comicsbeat.com/ (December 18, 2017), AJ Frost, “INTERVIEW: The Past is Present in Ed Piskor’s X-MEN: GRAND DESIGN.”
Comics Journal, http://www.tcj.com/ (January 28, 2013), Marc Sobel, “The Ed Piskor Interview.”
Ed Piskor website, http://www.edpiskor.com (June 13, 2018), author profile.
Entertainment Weekly, http://ew.com/ (December 15, 2017), Christian Holub, “In X-Men: Grand Design, Ed Piskor tells the superheroes’ whole story.”
Fantagraphics, http://www.fantagraphics.com/ (June 13, 2018), author profile.
NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (April 5, 2018), Etelka Lehoczky, “From B-Boys To X-Men: Alt-Comics’ Ed Piskor Goes Mainstream,” author interview.
Paste, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (December 20, 2017), Sean Edgar, “Chris Claremont & Ed Piskor Reflect on the Grand Design of the X-Men Legacy,” author interview.
Trib Live, http://triblive.com/ (March 29, 2018), Rege Behe, “Comic book artist Ed Piskor’s master work, ‘X-Men: Grand Design,’ to debut April 3.”
Ed Piskor has been cartooning professionally in print form since 2005, starting off drawing American Splendor comics written by Harvey Pekar. The duo continued working together on 2 graphic novels, Macedonia, and The Beats. Ed began self publishing Wizzywig after developing a huge interest in the history of Hacking and Phone Phreaking. 3 volumes, making up 3/4 of the full story, have been published to date.
Recently Ed has designed the characters for the new Adult Swim series, Mongo Wrestling Alliance.
www.wizzywigcomics.com
Cooler than Wolverine: An interview with ‘X-Men: Grand Design’ creator Ed Piskor
Chris HassanDecember 8, 2017Comic BooksFeature
An interview with “X-Men: Grand Design” writer and illustrator Ed Piskor.
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The X-Men are… complicated. Evil clones, alternate timelines, false memories, multiple deaths and resurrections–it’s the kind of stuff that makes veteran comic book readers jump ship and rookies too intimidated to wade into the mutant side of the Marvel Universe. As a result, the idea of taking the complex X-Men saga, which began way back in 1963, and condensing it into a six-issue miniseries may sound like the type of madness you’d find in, well, an X-Men comic.
Fortunately, X-Men: Grand Design is being helmed by writer and illustrator Ed Piskor, who chronicled the early days of hip hop music to great acclaim in his Eisner Award-winning series Hip Hop Family Tree. As Piskor is a lifelong fan of the X-Men, AiPT! reached out to the comics auteur to chat about Marvel’s mighty mutants and what readers can expect to find in the intricately detailed retro pages of X-Men: Grand Design.AiPT!: When you were growing up, what about the X-Men appealed to you?
Photo by Garret Jones
Ed Piskor: I’m not sure what about X-Men captured my imagination but I can tell you it was a constant in my life from my earliest memories until I was about 12 or 13. I think, subconsciously perhaps, that part of the reason I’m doing this project is to investigate what appealed to me so much about the series.
AiPT!: Who was your favorite X-Men character?
Piskor: I’m not that kind of fan. I was more enchanted by the artwork when I was younger. I wasn’t part of any comics fandom when I was a kid so I just chose comics at the grocery store that looked the coolest to me and X-Men was better looking than Green Lantern comics or whatever other competition was on the spinner racks at the grocery store.
AiPT!: In previous interviews, you’ve said you hope X-Men: Grand Design attracts new readers. So, for those new readers, what makes this six-issue miniseries worth their time and what type of reading experience do you hope they have?
Piskor: It’s built for new readers but there’s plenty for the old guard to check out and chew on. I can’t answer any questions about “is it worth their time” or whatever. I’m not much a salesman, so I have no spiel. The beauty of comics as opposed to prose is that a reader can pick it up, flip through it, and determine if they want to give it a shot. The art buys the first impression. The narrative keeps the attention.
AiPT!: You’ve also mentioned you had a chance to spend some time with longtime X-Men writer Chris Claremont and talk about his contributions to the franchise. Was there anything he told you that made you look at his stories you grew up reading in a whole new light?
Piskor: Yep. I’m keeping it all to myself except for the stuff I dole out in my series. Keep you eyes peeled.
AiPT!: Having read the X-Men: Grand Design preview pages–and the original stories on which they’re based–it’s clear you’re making some changes to create a more cohesive story. It makes me think of the X-Men film adaptations. So, what do you think? Once X-Men: Grand Design is finished, should Fox just reboot the X-Men franchise using your series as the screenplay and storyboards?
Piskor: Sure, why not. It’ll sell more copies of Grand Design.
AiPT!: When doing your research and re-reading old X-Men comics, were there any moments you looked at with more mature eyes and found flat-out ridiculous? Personally, I’ll never forget the role Leprechauns played in The Phoenix Saga.
Piskor: Yep. Like you mentioned in the previous question, I am changing some things that don’t work for me. I’m still keeping and/or adding fun/ridiculous stuff but there’s a limit. You’ll have to find out in the second wave of my series if Leprechauns made the cut or not.
From Uncanny X-Men #103
AiPT!: Through the decades, there have been many stories about Marvel editors interfering with writers’ X-Men stories. X-Men: Grand Design is truly your vision of Marvel’s mutants, free of editorial interference. In your opinion, how important is it for comic auteurs like yourself to have free rein in mainstream comics, and what’s the potential benefit to both the readers and the publishers?
Piskor: It’s not that important at all because there’s plenty of space for auteurs elsewhere. Image, Fantagraphics, Dark Horse, NY book publishers, etc. The benefit to the readers is immense because they get an uncompromised vision, which will generally mean that the cartoonist is doing whatever the hell it is that they’re inspired to do. It would yield a way better product. Plus, if the creative team is completely housed inside of one brain, there won’t be any lack of cohesion among the disciplines which I see routinely in mainstream comics. I see writers trying to outshine the artists and vice versa. I see lettering that isn’t congruent with the artwork. I see coloring that doesn’t provide clear focal points. You get synergy with a cartoonist who does it all. You get a dictatorial mandate that the artist has to stand behind completely on their own with no weak links to point blame to.
AiPT!: The first Treasury Edition collection of X-Men: Grand Design will include a reprint of X-Men #1, which you’re recoloring. For the casual comic reader, what separates your version of Jack Kirby’s artwork from those that have come before?
Piskor: I can’t wait for the world to see. Simply put, the reader won’t have to worry about photoshop bells and whistles when they see my recolor. It almost can be considered a restoration of sorts to the original color which was perfect. When we start getting pure white paper and garish, computer color separations that’s when they start taking the Kirby out of Kirby. You’ll see what I mean.
AiPT!: You’ve said before that you stopped reading X-Men comics after Claremont wrapped up his first run. What did the X-Men comics lose following his departure that made you not want to stick around?
Piskor: I liked the artwork for a bit afterward so I kept collecting it for years but I found each issue almost completely unreadable. Claremont created characters that had so much individual definition. Subsequent stuff I tried to read just felt like caricatured versions of Claremont.
AiPT!: I’m curious, as you lost interest in the X-Men in the ’90s, how far into the present does X-Men: Grand Design go? Is the series’ present pretty faithful to what we’re currently seeing in the comics, or is it your vision of what the modern X-Men should be like?
Piskor: Just to about issue 280 tops. I’m not taking it to the present like I see suggested online. Marvel can certainly keep X-Men: Grand Design going after me if they wish, though. I jacked out of the Matrix when CC left and when Jim Lee helped form Image.
AiPT!: Are you in full X-Men: Grand Design mode right now, or are there other projects you’re working on simultaneously that we can look forward to?
Piskor: Lot’s that I look forward to. Nothing I can talk about. I am definitely putting every ounce of energy into Grand Design. I won’t be splitting energy or doing frivolous comics anytime soon.
AiPT!: Final question, and possibly the most difficult to answer… Cyclops: Is he lame, or just as cool as Wolverine, if not cooler?
Piskor: Well when I started getting heavy into making this book, I realized that I identify with Cyclops more than any character. But I know that I’ve never met a guy as cool as me so I guess there’s your answer.
X-Men: Grand Design #1 will be released December 20, and #2 will be released January 3.
Ed Piskor
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Ed Piskor
Born
July 28, 1982 (age 35)
Homestead, Pennsylvania
Nationality
American
Area(s)
Artist
Notable works
American Splendor
Wizzywig
Hip Hop Family Tree series
X-Men: Grand Design
http://www.EdPiskor.com
Ed Piskor (born July 28, 1982)[1] is an alternative comics artist operating out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is a former student of The Kubert School and is best known for his artistic collaborations with underground comics pioneers Harvey Pekar of American Splendor fame, and Jay Lynch who illustrates Garbage Pail Kids. He has a cult following amongst minicomic fans with his series Deviant Funnies and Isolation Chamber.
Piskor was fascinated by comics throughout his childhood. He was a great fan of mainstream comics such as The Amazing Spider-Man, but his interest in the alternative comics developed rapidly when, at the age of 9, he saw a documentary that had Harvey Pekar reading one of his American Splendor stories.[citation needed]
After finishing high school, he attended the Kubert School for a year, where met comics artists including Steve Bissette, Tom Yeates, John Totleben, and Rick Veitch.
His first major comics Deviant Funnies and the autobiographical Isolation Chamber are generally marked with dark humour. In 2003 he started his collaboration with Jay Lynch, and shortly after that with Harvey Pekar. Piskor's first major task with Pekar was illustrating stories of American Splendor: Our Movie Year, which elaborates Pekar's experience after the release of the movie American Splendor. Piskor also illustrated Pekar's graphic novel Macedonia, which was released in 2007 through Villard Books.
Piskor's series Wizzywig deals with Kevin "Boingthump" Phenicle, a young prodigy who becomes fascinated with social engineering, phone phreaking, and eventually computer hacking. As the series progresses, Kevin grows as well as his trials and tribulations with hacking. His endeavors make him legendary; his abilities are feared and also revered by many.
The character from the series, Kevin, is a composite of many well known phreaks and hackers such as Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulsen, Joybubbles, and many others.
Piskor's drawing has been influenced by 1960s and '70s underground comix scene, and he also points to Robert Crumb as a major influence,[citation needed] but comic critics have praised Piskor for developing his own artistic style.[citation needed]
In 2009 Piskor collaborated with Pekar on the graphic book The Beats: A Graphic History. The book was published in the UK by Souvenir Press Ltd and drew plaudits from Studs Terkel: “The Beats is as fresh and pertinent as the latest scholarly history, only far more entertaining.”[citation needed] The Beats tells the story of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and John Clellon Holmes who became known as The Beat Generation. This cultural revolution is seen through the eyes of the movement's key figures and its minor characters including Diane di Prima, Carolyn Cassady, Philip Lamantia, and others. The startlingly original graphic non-fiction work was highly praised in Vanity Fair: “Editor Paul Buhle’s graphic history The Beats — with riffs from cats such as Harvey Pekar and Trina Robbins — burns like a Roman candle.”
Piskor's Eisner Award winning series, Hip Hop Family Tree, is a historical account of Hip Hop culture and the artists that have shaped the genre.[2] Piskor has announced that he is writing a new comic for Marvel titled X-Men: Grand Design focusing on the history of the X-Men[3]. The first issue of Grand Design was released in December 2017.[4]
From B-Boys To X-Men: Alt-Comics' Ed Piskor Goes Mainstream
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Etelka Lehoczky
X-Men Grand Design 1
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With X-Men: Grand Design, Ed Piskor pulls off a feat very few cartoonists ever manage: He takes his unique aesthetic from the scruffy fringe of alternative comics to the world of mass-market superhero publishing. In this, the first of a planned three volumes, Piskor offers his own interpretation of the famous mutants' origins and adventures.
It's not a gig anyone would have seen coming, even if Piskor did spend a year at the Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art (Kubert as in Joe Kubert, the artist behind DC Comics' Sgt. Rock and Hawkman). Piskor collaborated with alt-comics legend Harvey Pekar on stories for American Splendor as well as 2007's Macedonia and 2010's The Beats. Then came the series that would make his name: Hip Hop Family Tree. Beginning as an online serial, Piskor's passionate tribute to the early days of hip hop grew to hundreds of pages in four oversized volumes. The books became bestsellers and garnered much acclaim, leading to an Eisner Award in 2015. And as Piskor tells me, that award provided an unusual stimulus for his current project.
You're known for Hip Hop Family Tree and for working with Harvey Pekar. How did you convince Marvel that you were the guy to tell a mainstream superhero story?
Enlarge this image
Ed Piskor is known for his work with comics legend Harvey Pekar, and his award-winning Hip Hop Family Tree series.
Garret Jones
I did a series of hip hop-inspired covers for Marvel in 2015. That same year I won an Eisner Award for Hip Hop Family Tree. I was ... kind of chasing a feeling of satisfaction or happiness, [and] when I got that Eisner Award, I simply did not feel that. Even walking up to the stage to pick it up, I'm like, 'Oh man. It didn't do it for me. Let me do something else.' And I tweeted that Marvel should let me make whatever X-Man comic I wanted to. I had that connection to Marvel [from creating] those hip hop covers, and the former editor in chief, Axel Alonso, hit me up and told me to pitch something.
What did you try to bring to the book that an artist who focused exclusively on superheroes might not bring?
I get to control every aspect of the page. A single person making a thing is completely [different] from a team of people. The collaborative teams [who create superhero comics] have to figure out a way to work harmoniously. Since I'm the only one putting pencil to paper, my harmonious creative team is sitting here right inside my brain at this very moment.
How does your book differ from mainstream superhero comics?
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Peace, Love And Realness In A Hip-Hop History
There are clear differences. Many ... are because of this divide [between superhero comics and alternative comics]. Artists who work on corporate comics — or whatever you want to call them — are doing a job, and generally speaking, they're people who just like to draw. Sometimes the art competes with the writing. And my work is a little bit more raw. I don't need to have the most perfect sense of anatomy or something. There's also a pop art or retro feel that just doesn't exist in any Marvel or DC comics right now.
Do you think that the divide between mainstream comics and what you might call alternative comics is as firm as it ever was?
[As] we're conducting this interview right now, I'm at a comic book convention, and I do think that the divide is there. There are very few people in mainstream comics who even know who the heck I am. Or for that matter, they don't know who Robert Crumb is, or Dan Clowes, [or] Lynda Barry. And I don't know who they are. ... My ideal reader knows both sets of materials. Part of the reason why I'm doing this project is to introduce myself to the reader of superhero comics. But the divide is pretty clear.
Do you have favorite creators who have bridged the divide?
Enlarge this image
Piskor says there's a pop-art, retro feel to his work " that just doesn't exist in any Marvel or DC comics right now."
Marvel Comics
The most interesting person that comes to mind at this specific moment is Stuart Immonen, who has drawn basically every superhero under the sun. Every now and again he and his wife will put out these really ... sincere comics that they do on their own. A huge influence on me is David Mazzucchelli, who did Batman: Year One and Daredevil: Born Again with Frank Miller. He did some amazing self-published comics, like Rubber Blanket. But part of the attraction for me [in] doing this [book] was that there aren't very many people who have bridged the gap in a very elegant way.
A big part of the book involves stories by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Roy Thomas, Chris Claremont and others. Why did you decide to revamp the work of such prominent masters in the field?
I have all those comics, but when people ... ask, 'What's a good X-Man comic to read?' I didn't have an answer to give them. There's all this built-in minutiae, history and legend already in place by the time you get to [any single] issue. My goal is to take all that great material and try to make a solid, very rich story with a beginning, middle, and ending that can be a satisfying "one and done" for the reader.
Did working on it make you nervous?
It did. I promise you, I'm still very nervous. I understand that I am in the shadow of giants. There's not one day where I don't feel some element of imposter syndrome or "Who the heck do I think I am?" But I also have to push that part of my mind to the back burner, because I have to feel like I am worthy of doing this or else the comic will just fall flat. So, I am kind of wrestling with myself in several different ways to get this idea on paper.
Ed Piskor (b. 1982) lives and draws out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is a former student of the Kubert School, has collaborated with Harvey Pekar, and put out the graphic novel Wizzywig. His New York Times Best-Selling series Hip Hop Family Tree, which was originally serialized on Boing Boing, has gone back to print numerous times, and won the 2015 Eisner Award for “Best Reality-Based Work." His series for Marvel, X-Men Grand Design, was released in 2017 to wide acclaim.
Ed Piskor Remixes 300 Issues of X-Men History in Grand Design
12.20.2017
by Kiel Phegley
in Comic News
Comment (1)
Most comics have a foundational story or moment — the kind of story where you can point a new reader towards the series and say, “This is the real stuff.” For Marvel’s classic Uncanny X-Men, that can’t-miss moment stretches over decades.
And that’s part of the idea behind X-Men: Grand Design, debuting this week from alternative cartoonist Ed Piskor. The writer-artist behind the critically acclaimed Hip Hop Family Tree series of non-fiction graphic novels stepped to comics biggest superhero publisher with a plan to remix the first 300 issues of Uncanny — a period where the book went from quirky cult favorite to the dominant series in all of comics with plenty of peaks in between.
RELATED: Why X-Men: Grand Design Is the X-Franchise’s Best Idea in a Decade
In Piskor’s version, that decades-long run was one massive can’t-miss story, and over the course of six extra-sized issues, he’ll retell the saga from his unique artistic perspective. This week’s beginning covers the origins of the X-Men team, with the behind-the-scenes saga of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original mutants.
CBR spoke to the Pittsburgh-based cartoonist this fall as Grand Design‘s first issue was coming together. Piskor was not shy about drawing connections between this comic and his hip hop roots as well as between himself and the titanic artists of the X-Men’s past. In the interview, he explained why Grand Design will be a sampling of everything readers remember about the X-Men’s formidable period, spanning from Stan Lee & Jack Kirby to Chris Claremont & John Byrne and beyond, while still providing a new sound.
CBR: I think my initial reaction to the announcement of your X-Men book was the same as a lot of peoples. Namely, “This sounds fun but very much not like a Marvel project.” How did you pitch them on this idea?
Ed Piskor: I put a tweet out there that basically asked my followers, “Wouldn’t you be interested in reading an X-Men comic that takes the first 300 issues and turns it into a 300-page story?” and it got retweeted and circulated a whole lot. This was after I’d sent another tweet out there saying, “Marvel should just let me do what I want.” So both of those got a lot of traction, and I just presented that to Marvel and said, “I think people are interested in this idea.”
It was very seamless and easy. It’s a corporation, so they had to get enough sign off to make it happen. But from those tweets to when I was able to put pen to paper was about six months.
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How did you approach this stylistically? Your well-known Hip Hop Family Tree book is more of a documentarian take on imparting information, but will this lean into something like a more traditional superhero story?
When you’re taking 8,000 pages of material and turning it into a 240-page story, there isn’t an infinite amount of room for exposition and character stuff. So it’s Piskor style. It’s documentarian, but I’ve created this MacGuffin for the series where Uatu the Watcher is kind of describing the events that he’s witnessed over decades. So he’s the cypher that the story goes through, if that makes sense. And Uatu, he doesn’t care about your petty human dramas. He’s like Joe Friday — “Just the facts, ma’am.”
Everyone who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s reading comics followed the X-Men at some point, but not everyone read everything. What were the parts of the mythology that you had memorized, and what was some of the stuff you had to discover to get this done?
That’s the thing. I was in a very privileged position growing up where I was able to collect Classic X-Men, the reprint comic, and Uncanny X-Men the series. So started reading Classic X-Men with the Arcade issue that John Byrne drew, and then I kept reading that until I caught up to the point where I had started reading Uncanny. I’ve internalized this material over 35 years. So obviously all the John Byrne stuff like “Dark Phoenix” and “Days of Future Past” I’ve read dozens of times. Everything else I’ve read probably four or five times — my favorite being [Marc] Silvestri and Jim Lee’s stuff. I was a kid of that era, and I’d never seen anything like it. Once those guys broke off and formed Image, I followed them. I was done with X-Men at that time. And when the Image guys started flaking out and not putting out books on time, that’s when I discovered the Hernandez Brothers and Daniel Clowes and all that stuff.
I sort of never looked back after that, and I’m into auteur cartooning by a singular person. So I always wondered what a Marvel comic would look like done that way — a comic by one person. It’s really cool to have the opportunity to do that myself without any other collaboration besides my editor.
This is obviously going to be Piskor-style in general, but as you’re making each issue about a different era of X-Men historically, are you altering your visual approach in order to say “This is what the ’70s were all about” or the ’80s or what have you?
Here’s the thing. It’s Piskor-style in as much as I’m doing it, but my style as an artist keeps evolving. If you look at page 1 of this X-Men series, it looks markedly different than the last page of Hip Hop Family Tree. I really want to step up my game. I don’t want to be wackest X-Men artist ever! And if you go through that lineage, it’s very clear that they used the best people in the field on those books. So that’s my competition. I have to improve. The work keeps getting more rigorous, and I think you’ll see that I’m growing by leaps and bounds.
Did you have any images or panels where you said, “This is burned on my brain, and I have to draw my version of it at some point in the series”?
I come from hip hop, and in hip hop, the core of everything is sampling. I have an ego into the stratosphere, no doubt. But I also recognize that if Neal Adams draws the Sentinels flying into the sun, that is such a beautiful, mind-bending composition…how can I compete with that? Most of the comic is my doing my interpretation of things. Whenever there’s an iconic moment, it’s an iconic moment. I might pay very close homage to that. Sampling is hip hop, and I’m hip hop to my core. Just because I’m working on a different comic doesn’t mean I stop having that kind of mind.
Even if you think about the work I did in issue #1 with Magneto on the cover where he’s levitating and power is gravitating from his hand, I just scanned in a piece of wood so I could get the wood grain to look like a warped magnetic field. It’s the same thing.
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How long in terms of man hours do you think it’s going to take you to get through this whole project?
It’s going to take a long time. Thankfully, as a cartoonist you have to manipulate your brain into getting the work done. You can’t set up barriers for yourself. And I think for myself, my own neurology, it would be a mistake for me to think about that too much. It’s a couple of pages a week. I found a rhythm. It’s a rhythm that Marvel likes and makes sense. So let’s leave well enough alone and let me hit my marks. I really spend every waking moment on this thing, and that’s no exaggeration. It’s seven days a week. This is the first time [during this past October’s New York Comic Con] since probably late February that I’m not drawing the comic. And the only reason I wasn’t drawing back then was because I was in France.
RELATED: Piskor Shares X-Men Grand Design’s (Not So) Secret Origin
I’ve heard from other guys who have worked at Marvel before say, “You think you know what comics is like, and you think you know what interacting with fans is like, and then you meet X-Men fans.” Are you prepared for the varied and wild response you’re going to get for this?
No doubt. I’ve battened down my social media hatches in a lot of ways so those little egg accounts on Twitter can’t get to me. I’ve protected myself in any way I can just in case. But thankfully a lot of people really seem to dig it. I’ve met hundreds of people over the past couple of days at this con who are enthusiastic about it. I think that’s going to show and improve when it’s in the comic shops. I think people are going to stand by it. I’d be surprised if they don’t.
X-Men: Grand Design #1 is available now.
Chris Claremont & Ed Piskor Reflect on the Grand Design of the X-Men Legacy
By Sean Edgar | December 20, 2017 | 10:00am
Main Art by Ed Piskor
Comics Features Chris Claremont, Ed Piskor
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Is it possible to count the number of X-Men comics that Chris Claremont has written? Spread across a spectrum of team and solo titles from the mid ‘70s to as recently as 2015—The X-Men, The Uncanny X-Men, X-Men: The End, X-Treme X-Men, The New Mutants, Wolverine, Nightcrawler—the narrative architect sculpted the foundation for the coolest superhero team in comics and beyond. While we’re still counting (and positing upward 350), there is one fact that can’t be disputed: Ed Piskor has read all of them.
Ed Piskor and Chris Claremont
Piskor isn’t a talent commonly associated with mainstream capes; his obsessively researched cartooning resulted in the hacker portrait Wizzywig in 2012 before he began Hip Hop Family Tree, an ambitious comic documentary that diagrammed the growth of beats and rhymes through the East Coast underground to global ubiquity. In Grand Design, Piskor is embarking on an equally daunting task: streamlining decades of X-Men lore into two handsome tomes, the first of which releases today. The project features the same nostalgic, aged-paper palette that Piskor employed in Family Tree, mimicking the joy of riffing through basement long-boxes to discover cosmic soap operas and super-powered bildungsromans. That aesthetic marries a clear and studied devotion to the source material—from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s first tales of outcast teens uniting to Claremont’s sprawling dramas, Piskor leaves no plot beat neglected.
To celebrate the X-Legacy—which should receive increased attention from both Marvel Comics and its cinematic translations now that Marvel parent company Disney bought back the film rights from Fox—Piskor chatted with Claremont about the winding roots of his creations, his approach to character and why innovative artists are so important.
Ed Piskor: I was thinking about how this conversation is a bookend in a way. I met you in January in France, and got to interview you at the Angouleme Comics Festival, which was fun. Here we are a year later. Creatively, what has kept you busy? Is there anything you can talk about?
Chris Claremont: Not really. A lot of things are in process. The difference between working in an environment such as Marvel and everywhere else, is that comics is an ongoing exercise in instant gratification. If one has a series, if one has a reputation, if one has a position, it’s simply a matter of getting the work out every month, every issue. Usually in a couple of months, bingo, it’s in the bookstores. You’re not producing work on spec, which means that you’re hitting deadline all the time. Whereas for virtually every other form of publishing, until you walk into a regular gig, like a book series or a TV series, you’re producing in hope. Bluntly, for most writers, novels take much longer. Mickey Spillane, for one, Nora Roberts for another, can produce a novel, apparently, instantly, which is breathtakingly cool, but ferociously intimidating for everyone else who are simple mortals.
Piskor: You say simple mortals, but let me ask about when you were hot and heavy producing comics. You’d do at least three a month for a long stretch there.
Claremont: Well, comics are easy, novels are hard. The thing is, the advantage in one respect for comics, especially if one’s a writer and not a writer/artist per se, you’re sketching out the story, you’re laying the structure for the penciller, who then brings it to visual life. So in effect, it’s conceptual shorthand as well as presentational shorthand. You have a three, a four, a six, or in a George Perez-sense, a 23-panel, page, representing a sequence of events. Whereas if one’s writing a novel, those moments, those events, those sequences have to be described. One has to figure out not only what is actually happening, but how best to present it in a way that’s exciting to read, and also makes sense.
X-Men #94, the first full writing credit X-Men comic by Chris Claremont. Cover Art by Dave Cockrum.
Piskor: When we were in France, I spent a lot of time in Paris, and I went to the Shoah Memorial. I saw some of your scripts were framed on display—it was for a Dave Cockrum issue. And if I recall correctly, it wasn’t the traditional Marvel method. You laid everything out, panel by panel.
Claremont: It varies depending on artist and circumstance. When Frank Miller and I were doing the Wolverine miniseries, the first issue I plotted of the series turned out to be a 23-page plot for a 22-page story. And I was telling him everything: character, description, place, sequence of events, how the character feels, emotional relationships, physical relationships. By the time we got to the fourth issue, the plot was a 20-minute phone call, where Frank and I bounced back the sequence of events, what I wanted to see happen, the way he wanted to tell the story, what would be cool in terms of the fight scene and the end. Then I typed it up so we both had a reference point, but it turned out to be two-thirds of a page. Everything varies depending on the facility and the ability of the other creative person. The kind of story I’d tell with Frank is different from the story I’d tell with Walter Simonson, is different from the way I’d tell it with Dave, is different from the way I’d tell it with John Byrne, is different from the way I’d tell it with Paul Smith. It’s an adaptive circumstance.
It’s something that relates to the old Marvel philosophy that people would be teamed on a book for a significant amount of time. In John Byrne’s case, it was three years. In Dave Cockrum’s case, over the course of his two terms on the X-Men, it turned out to be three years. John Romita Jr. was the same. When you’re talking about that length of time, you get to know what the artist likes doing, doesn’t like doing. What intrigues them, what is fun, what is enticing. The best exemplar of that would be the year’s worth of issues that Bill Sienkiewicz did on The New Mutants. That team-up was only going to be a one story-arc run with the Demon Bear, and we had so much fun that we kept it up. It became what was most interesting and challenging for us to do. We did a slumber party issue, which introduced Warlock, we ended up doing a three- or four-part arc, much of which was spent wandering around inside David Haller’s head, dealing with the demons in his own psyche—it’ll be really fascinating if they get around to that in the TV series, Legion. Whereas working on a series where your artists perhaps aren’t as close-by or in sync requires a lot more attention to detail; a lot more words on the page.
One artist working with me was complaining to Walter Simonson about it: “He writes so much, I don’t know what to do!” And Walter said, “If you just look at each page that he’s writing, and just break it down into what’s actually happening, there are usually only about five images. The rest of it’s all character description, dialogue.” I hope he said laughingly, “It’s as much for Claremont’s benefit as the artist’s. He wants to put the ideas down on paper so that when the time comes two months later and he scripts it overnight, he has an idea of what he wanted to say originally.”
X-Men: Grand Design Cover Art by Ed Piskor
Piskor: How would that work? Would you get the pencils FedEx’ed and then you would just have one day to put the dialogue together?
Claremont: It depends how late the book was. Ideally, if one were launching a title in September…Salvador [Larroca] and I on X-Treme X-Men was a classic case in point. We started the book at the start of the year in ’02 or ’03. My agreement with Marvel was that I do two books a month, but they had no second book for me, so Salva can pencil two books a month, so I just kept sending him plots, and he kept drawing the book. By the time we got to April, we had a half dozen issues in the drawer, and at this point Bill Jemas’ head exploded. We would have gotten to the end of the summer with a full year’s complement of stories finished, without the first issue having hit the stands, yet. He felt that was a little excessive. My counterpoint was that it’s Salva, it’s me, it’s the X-Men: it’s going to sell. What’s the problem? His attitude was, You’re asking me to invest a five-or-six figure sum in an untried series. If it doesn’t succeed, what do we do with the pages? At which point, Claremont with his usual pat, says, “Not my problem.” At which point, Bill made it my problem.
That’s the ideal. The irony is that Igor Kordey was just as fast and if we’d gotten a chance to do what we wanted to do, we could have gotten 12 issues of a revised Excalibur that never was. It would have been interesting, but that would have probably been a 12-issue series. It would have been an interesting choice whether people would have embraced it. I had the concept, we wrote the first two plots, and within three weeks, Igor had turned in 23 pages of layouts. At which point, Marvel ended their relationship with him, which for me as a creator, was heartbreaking, because we were onto something new and different. Igor coming through Sarajevo in the ‘90s knew what he was drawing. I had a first-person, unimpeachable source in terms of how to present Genosha in the aftermath of the Sentinel attack. It would have been a totally different visual presentation—a much more European visual presentation then American audiences were used to seeing.
Piskor: Certainly at Marvel.
Claremont: The thing I liked about his work on X-Treme X-Men was that even though the characters were recognizable, it was a different visual. For me as an audience, I found them surprisingly refreshing. This doesn’t look like anything anyone else is doing, but none of the characters were pretty, but they all had a fierce excitement and visual reality. They were fun. In the global, American comic omniverse: Marvel, DC, Image…you run down the whole list, it was a pleasant and intriguing change.
Piskor: That’s always the thing I’m looking for in mainstream comics. Quite frankly, that’s what attracted me to X-Men. If there was a house style, the best of the crop would be on X-Men. I was a boy in the ‘80s, and I came up through the Silvestri era and Jim Lee. They were vastly more exciting to look at then the rank-and-file John Buscema wannabes, who handled the art chores on almost all of the other books. And with these different artists who you worked with over time, there are storytelling changes beyond the visuals. These artists brought different things to the table. You had to do some improvisational jazz.
Claremont: It’s adaptation.
X-Treme X-Men #44 Interior Art by Igor Kordey
Piskor: That’s a good word for it. I want to go back to something that you mentioned earlier about your ideal situation of working for an artist for quite a while. I think it’s worth noting that “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and “Days of Future Past” come at the tail-end of building this synergy over years between you, John and Terry. I’m working on this X-Men project now [Grand Design]. When I was eight or nine, Classic X-Men #44 was on the spinner rack, and that reprinted the “Elegy” story, which to me, is one of the most important X-Men stories that I ran across. It happens right between the death of Phoenix and “Days of Future Past,” and you basically wrap up the entire series in a bun. And in a pre-internet world, for a kid who has zero disposable income, I basically had to starve at school and not eat lunch so that I had money to buy comic books at the end of the week. That “Elegy” story was an amazing CliffsNotes for the X-Men’s entire history. Jumping into your comics in the ‘80s, there was already this clear history, but what fascinated me about the regular series was that there was this stuff that would build over time. I would like to talk about “Elegy” a little bit. You have such a clear memory about so many of these stories.
Claremont: I guarantee you, other people would disagree with you vehemently.
Piskor: Sure, that’s how it goes. Can you recall the impetus? Was that a Jim Shooter thing? How did that come about?
Claremont: The impetus for “Elegy” was simple. The conclusion to “Dark Phoenix” was so last-minute, out-of-left-field, and John had already drawn the splash page for what would have been #138, which was the poster shot of Scott standing over Jean as she rests her hand in a pond on the mansion. Jean is alive, Jean is back to being his girlfriend, the world is alright again. That, and the story that went with it, got tossed out the window. Where were we going with this? So we had two things to do. One was to buy me some time to come up with a sense of structure and ideas in concert with our brand-new editor, Louise Simonson. And two, if the death of a character as important to the canon as Jean is to mean anything, then we have to take a moment and step back: what would happen if someone in one’s family, as paramount and important as Jean was to the X-Men, were to pass? Case in point, there’s a memorial service in Los Angeles, I believe Saturday, to Len Wein. Those of us who worked with him, even if we can’t be there in the flesh, well I hope we’ll be there in spirit to remember him and memorialize him. If that applies to real life, should it not also apply to the X-Men’s lives? Let’s do a moment to remind everybody who she is, why she is, why this moment is important and then, like the characters, wonder where we’re going to go from here. And, at the same time, give Scott the opportunity to do something that rarely happens in comics, which is grieve.
X-Men #138 Cover Art by John Byrne
The other advantage was, it would be a lot easier to draw. It gave John the chance to do something that I hope he enjoyed, which was touch base with all the seminal moments and characters and events of the X-Men’s history. The paradox being, of course, that as of that particular moment, it was a fairly limited history. The original series was only 60 issues, and New X-Men had only been around for maybe 40 issues going on 50. A lot of the visual moments were suggesting that there was more backstory then we’d have the privilege of seeing. But, at the same time, that can also be viewed as what happens in reality. Not every moment of passing is convenient.
Piskor: Novels work this way, too. There isn’t a requirement from editorial to make things palatable to the youngest of readers. You can leave some things up for interpretation.
Claremont: Or one could basically say, But I thought Ned Stark would be around for book after book of Game of Thrones. Surprise, not everybody gets out alive.
Piskor: That particular issue left such an impression on me, and a while ago before I started this project, [former Marvel Editor-in-Chief] Axel [Alonso] called my bluff. I put a tweet out there and said Marvel should let me make whatever X-Men comic I feel like making. He got in touch pretty immediately, and asked, “What would you want to do?” I immediately thought about “Elegy,” because if this is the only Marvel thing that I ever do, I want to draw it all. I love the X-Men, it’s my favorite comic, it’s kind of the only thing that I know, and only up to a point. When you were done, I was done. I was thinking about “Elegy”…
Claremont: If only I’d have sent Axel that tweet. [Laughs] That would have made life a lot more productive the last five years.
Piskor: It’s funny how that stuff works.
Claremont: [Laughs] My laughter’s probably a little different from yours.
X-Men: Grand Design #1 Interior Art by Ed Piskor
Piskor: I’m sure. You have way more history than me. But ultimately, you took all this work from Stan and Roy Thomas and put it into a single narrative. As a fan who read and reread your work and in later years read that older stuff, it’s something I’ve internalized for a really long time and having a shot to play around with your toys is a real blast. I know you were a trained actor before you got into the comics game. We’ve had several conversations and I’ve been meaning to ask you this every single time. I’d imagine there’s a lot of value in being a trained actor and thinking about motivations when you’re busy writing.
Claremont: I like to think that it’s useful in structuring out scenes between different characters. It’s useful in trying to imagine the different voices, the different personalities, the different presentations. It can be disconcerting or amusing or infuriating to be the person on the other side of my office door when I’m playing through scenes to myself. My wife or whoever’s outside is wondering how schizophrenic I’m getting as I bounce fictional moments back and forth.
Piskor: Do you develop your characters on the page as you’re writing the story, or do you come up with elaborate notes for the characters that you plan on tackling in a particular narrative?
Claremont: Yes. Yes to both.
Piskor: I see these two schools, and there are people who are dogmatic about one or two, but for my own taste I kept thinking it seems to have a mixture of both.
Claremont: This relates to the differentiation between the traditional, full-script presentation of creating a story, versus Stan [Lee]’s Marvel method. The irony of the last couple of years, is apparently that under Joe Quesada and Axel Alonso, Marvel has been evolving more and more toward the concept of full script, simply for the facility of making assignments. Plot format works most effectively when one knows one’s going to have a creative team together for a number of issues. If I take over, for example, Avengers, with John Buscema, as Roy did many times, and I know that I’m going to be with him for a year, then I can structure things out and sketch them and send them to him, especially knowing that John is such a phenomenal storyteller. The same with Stan and Jack Kirby. I know Stan’s attitude was: I’m running the company, I’m writing 15 books, I have an artist who loves nothing more than telling stories, therefore the plotting session can be so: Jack, got an idea? Yeah. OK, what is it? Yeah. OK. Or, I have an idea, Jack, draw this. OK. And there you have it. And then Stan looks at it, calls out those elements that he needed to focus on with dialogue or ignore, and off they went.
Working with Bill Sienkiewicz, the joy of plotting with him, A. is not knowing what he’s going to draw, which I think half the time applied to him as well, but suddenly something comes in from the sidelines that one never expected. Whew, this looks interesting. What do you think? Yeah, I think this looks interesting too. Let’s play with it. Dave Cockrum and I used to do that all the time. Suddenly, something would come in out of left field, and it would be oooooh, this is cool. Whereas other artists want slightly more firm and substantial ground under their feet.
Piskor: The storytelling component, while you need to have some ability with it, is to get it in the door nowadays. I’m out there in the wild at these cons, and I meet a lot of people. A lot of the artists are comfortable with this world of the full script. I sense that they just want to keep the pencils moving.
Claremont: From Marvel’s standpoint, there is less and less dependability these days that the same team will remain constant over an arc of story. Apparently, Todd Nauck and I doing a year’s worth of Nightcrawler, having the same team together for 12 issues, is unusual now. I don’t know. To me, I find it, as a reader and as a writer, somewhat self-defeating, because it usually takes most artists a couple, if not four or five issues, to get to know the characters—especially when you’re talking about a group book. You have not simply different genders, but ideally different personalities. If when we’re going back and looking at, say, The New Mutants, where everything was fairly cut and dry in terms of differentiation. Bear in mind this was all happening in the ‘70s. There is no internet, there is no table TV. There’s a 13-year-old girl, Rahne, from what’s perceived to be the boonies. She has less awareness of the dread and possibilities of the modern world then one would expect today. By the same token, the other 13-year-old is Roberto. He’s the son of a Brazilian billionaire. He’s totally first world, even though he’s from Rio, but he’s mixed race, in a country where mixed race means something, and not good. So his perception of life is totally different, and yet simpatico with Rahne’s feeling outcast, because she’s a shapeshifter. And then we have Dani, who’s totally American, and yet as a Native American, has a sense of being disenfranchised, a sense of being an outcast, a sense of being even more of being a loser in that sense than Bobby, being black. Then you have Sam. Well, he’s white. He’s tall. He’s handsome, but he’s poor and he’s from Appalachia. Then Xi’an. It’s 1979, she’s a Vietnamese refugee. They are all, in the most primal sense, outcasts. Even the one who’s the most first-world of them, which is Sunspot.
The New Mutants #19 Cover Art by Bill Sienkiewicz
You take all those tropes, and you play with them. Their body language should be different, the way they relate to each other should be different. The whole point of The New Mutants was that the oldest of them, Sam, and maybe Dani Moonstar…they’re 15. Rahne is 13. They are kids still. The whole point of being kids is half, if not two thirds of the time, they’re making mistakes. They’re screwing up. They win regardless, because they’re heroes, but much of their stories, much of their lives are defined by the discovery of life that all adolescents seem to go through: you learn things by tripping over them, by putting your foot in your mouth, by running into trouble. This is not how the X-Men handle things, because they’re all, except for Kitty, grown-ups. The New Mutants need Charlie as a teacher, and later, in the aborted evolution of the arc, Magneto.
The challenge for Kitty in all this is that, by rights, she should be part of the New Mutants. By the time they came along, she’d been part of the X-Men for so long that she’d been part of saving the universe twice with them. Being a 13-year-old with chops, she didn’t want to hang out with the little kids, and especially wear the stupid uniform. She’d earned a costume, dammit.
Piskor: Classic splash page—Paul Smith. Professor X is a jerk!
Claremont: Yes! Exactly. [Laughs] But that whole story, and especially the way she and Illyana relate to each other, relating to the story, I tried to make as much as possible, swiping from the 13- and 14-year-olds I knew, as true to life as I could get away with. It was a great advantage having one’s editor’s daughter be that age, and her best friend. At least for a couple of issues, they provided perfect material. It’s disconcerting to realize that’s now a quarter-century ago, if not more.
The point is that, what I find so depressing for me as a reader these days, is how completely the companies seem to embrace the idea that all we’re telling are the adventures of costumes, not of people. That to such a sad extent, again speaking as much as audience as creator, there seems to have been a stepping-aside of the idea of dealing with these people as real people, not as icons, tropes, whatever. That way, you miss A, the opportunity for lots of cool stories, and B, for enticing more readers.
Piskor: That’s always the thing that I appreciate most about our conversations that we’ve had over the course of this past year. Certainly, anybody can YouTube search your name and find hours of your history with this.
Claremont: Getting paid by the word.
Piskor: [Laughs] Sure. But what I really adore and what I find most inspiring is that you regard these characters that you created not as words on a page or lines on paper—you call them by their given name. These are almost real people to you in a sense, and in the way that you talk about them with such a reverence.
Claremont: Well I expect you’d hear a similar approach and a similar awareness and a similar passion and empathy from J.K. Rowling talking about Harry Potter and the students of Hogwarts, or of George Martin and the Stark family, if not everybody else in Game of Thrones. We are not creating icons. I was not creating icons when I wrote the The X-Men and the The New Mutants. I was creating people. What attracted me to Marvel, far more than DC, was the fact that Stan dealt with the Fantastic Four as people. Maybe not written the way I would write them, maybe not the way I see the people, but they were people. They did superhero stuff, but at base, it wasn’t Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Girl, Thing and the Human Torch. It was Reed, Sue, Ben and Johnny. And that, to me, was the paradigm. These are not superheroes; these are kids. And the X-Men are maybe a little older kids than the New Mutants. Excalibur are a more British group of nutcases than the X-Men, but they are all people. They all have desires, ambitions, fears—pick any emotion you like that have nothing to do with putting on a skin-tight suit and fighting supervillains. That’s the job. But there’s a life outside, or enmeshed within the job.
That was the whole core of the idea behind Scott and Madelyne going off after their marriage with their child and living happily ever after. It was not to divorce Scott from a life of being a superhero. He would obviously be coming back when needed to do that. But, it was to hold out the paradigm that there’s a reason we go through our adventures, our lives, as X-Men. To provide the opportunity for, better or worse, what’s perceived as a happy ending. A normal existence. Finding the person one loves, building a family, a future that they could embrace that embodies what we are all theoretically fighting for. That was why my argument, when X-Factor was created, was to resurrect Jean and recreate the original paradigm. It might be satisfying to fans. It might be satisfying even to corporate. But in terms of the characters: it is A, you’re saying to the audience those of you who mourned the death of Jean, we were lying. Tough luck. But more importantly, wouldn’t it be a much more interesting paradigm if you brought in someone else who would fulfill Jean’s shoes? In my case, I pitched her sister, but then had Scott and Madelyne and the baby come back into the X-universe, Scott takes over the team, but it becomes I’m doing something that is necessary. How can I balance that and my home life? My responsibilities to my wife and my son, verses my responsibility to the job and to the greater human reality. Obviously, my argument was not the winning argument in this case. As a result, we ended up with a lot of cool stories, beyond that. For me, as a reader, and as a creator, it broke my heart in terms of what it did to Scott.
X-Men: Grand Design #1 Interior Art by Ed Piskor
Piskor: It was very jarring, even as a little boy reading this stuff, because it was very abrupt when he left his wife, Madelyne and child to go with this newly resurrected Jean. I just chalked it up to maybe I’ll understand it when I’m older. And I have to say that I’m older, and it’s still a very abrupt and probably the least heroic thing that he could do. Where I’m at right now in the series is a little bit after the introduction of Caliban. And all that I’m thinking about is, how am I going to finesse removing Scott from Madelyne in a way that we can still empathize with the character? That was a dick move on his part, and there are many examples of this, where it’s very clear that there were editorial mandates that you had to meander around, or just try to make work. It would create a disconnect for a certain amount of time, until the reader understood this is the world we live in. I’m reading an issue of X-Men and they’re fighting the Brood, and when they come home, there’s a bunch of kids living in their house. Not only that, but there would be those little editorial boxes with the asterix that tells the reader to refer to a particular issue. The asterix box was pointing us to The New Mutants #5. At the time, I’d never heard of that comic. I just went to the grocery store—I’m not sure if it was a direct market book or something.
Claremont: No, there wasn’t any yet.
Piskor: Right. So it was like, who are these people? You grow to accept and understand, and that’s what you had to do with the Madelyne Pryor thing as readers.
Claremont: But the thing also was the way we structured books in those days, when the X-Men come back, and they burst in on the mansion to catch Charlie to discover all these kids watching TV, it’s as much a surprise to them as it is to the kids. In effect, the readers—if you’d never read The New Mutants before—you are in there with the X-Men as you learn who these kids are, you get to learn who they are.
Piskor: That’s the beauty of your entire span on X-Men. Any comic is somebody’s first comic, and there is a sense of wonder that you get if you just jump in, but you did do such an amazing job of jumping on top of that, issue after issue, to the point where it was cool. It would take a couple issues sometimes, but the reader could immediately fall in and start caring about the characters in a more significant way than the rank and files that were your, quote unquote, competition at the time.
Claremont: But that’s basic tradecraft. The first rule is you have to create a reality that makes the reader want to come back and see what happens next. The way I tried to do it, I’d create characters that the reader could instantly recognize, and hopefully bond with, and put them through situations that keep the reader on the edge of their seat. Hopefully, everyone is interesting enough, and the situation is interesting enough, that you come back next issue. The point, I guess, in those days, was take nothing for granted.
I find the idea of the recap page to be something of a waste. It’s the page nobody ever reads and it’s even worse because it doesn’t tell you who anybody really is. But it creates a reality where once you look at the story itself, I still have no idea who anybody is. It’s always a chapter of a trade paperback in construction. It never, ever reaches out to someone who is unfamiliar with the concept, unfamiliar with the characters, unfamiliar with the reality and introduces it to them. It assumes you know what’s going on. If one looks at any traditional, mainstream TV series…case in point: NCIS. Number one series on TV, it’s been that for 15 years and doesn’t look like it’s losing ground. The one thing you know in that and Law and Order and in virtually any mainstream series is, within the first five minutes, you know who the characters are—not simply their name, but their job. You know what the challenge is, what the objective is. You are given the basic notes that allow you to relax and watch the show. You can then explore the realities of the relationship in the way they interact, but you know who they are and what their job is. That almost never gets done anymore in comics. I can’t tell you the number of times I picked up a casual issue of a series and flipped through it and given up after three pages, just because I don’t know what the hell’s going on. I don’t know who these people are, they’re making dialogue references that mean nothing. And the visual tropes are utterly boring. [Piskor laughs] No, it’s not funny. It isn’t funny.
Piskor: No, I agree. I laugh to keep from crying, because I abhor bad comics because every comic is somebody’s first comic. If somebody comes across some boring, shitty comic, then they don’t continue reading, then that’s literally taking food out of my mouth.
Avengers Annual #10 Interior Art by Michael Golden
Claremont: If you go back and look at Dave’s issues of X-Men, the characters in a group are always doing something. Michael Golden, in our Avengers annual: cop walks into a room and Spider-Woman, Jessica Drew, is drinking a cup of coffee, but where is she drinking a cup of coffee? She is sitting on her heels, halfway up a wall. The first panel you see her, you instantly know, aside from the skin-tight costume, that she’s not like anybody else. And what does she do to have the conversation? She reaches her legs down and stands on her feet. But your first image of her tells you instantly, this is what she does. And it’s different from us. That’s how you need to look at this. What do these characters do that make them unique? How can we present that to the reader in interesting, different and enticing ways. And if you don’t do that, then what’s the point?
No one buys things out of habit. It not only makes it more fun to read, it makes it more fun to draw. If you can excite the interest and the enthusiasm of the artist, who knows what interesting ideas will come of it? Again, Bill and I just sitting down and bouncing ideas back and forth. Me flipping through John Bolton’s sketch files, and saying, “Wow, let’s use this as an image.” And we suddenly have a great foundation for a story. What’s the point of locking yourself into a specific limitation, when you’re dealing with creative minds? If I can hook up with someone like Igor Kordey, who brought a unique vision, an exciting vision, a different vision…why not give it a shot and see if we can strike an equivalent chord in the readership? Who knows, suddenly you may be off on another hit series—or not, but at least take the shot.
Piskor: I think that’s a great closing statement. Chris, every time I talk to you I consider myself to forever be a student of this medium. And every time we talk, you always provide me with a lot of material that I need to digest and think about and reinterpret into my own work. I am forever grateful that, and I mean that sincerely.
Claremont: You’re welcome.
In X-Men: Grand Design, Ed Piskor tells the superheroes' whole story
Christian Holub December 15, 2017 at 06:25 PM EST
How does one even explain the X-Men? What started as a simple idea (that some humans are born as “mutants,” gifted with extraordinary unique superpowers as both a blessing and a curse) has generated decades of the most colorful, fantastic, convoluted stories in all of comics. The X-Men have gone to space, they’ve gone to the future, they’ve gone to other dimensions and the inner hearts of white-hot suns. They’ve battled their ancestors and their descendants and alternate-reality duplicates of themselves. To name just one example, there are currently three different versions of the Beast, all from different timelines, running around the Marvel Universe. Fox’s X-Men movies tried to make this sprawling mythology cohere by making Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine the leading man, but that didn’t do justice to the dozens of other characters that have steered the comics over the years. It would be a herculean task to make this all harmonize, and yet Ed Piskor has set out to do exactly that with his new comic X-Men: Grand Design.
Grand Design begins with the telepathic pacifist Charles Xavier and the magnetically-powered freedom fighter Magneto as young men, and then follows them as they form their teams of X-Men and Brotherhood to fight for the fate of the mutant race. Xavier believes mutants and humans should live in peace, while Magneto wants mutants to reign supreme over humans, who he blames for his suffering during the Holocaust. That’s the core concept, but many other characters and elements have been introduced into the stories over the years. Piskor’s task is to make it all work as a single story.
“What I’m doing here is a kind of remix, incorporating my own specific tastes on top of what already exists,” Piskor tells EW. “In a lot of ways, all of those X-Men comics you know and love, I am thinking of them as extremely elaborate notes that were constructed over 50 years so that I could make this comic. I have to look at it through those eyes, or else it will just be a piece of fan fiction, and I think this is more than that. Things will change to fit my narrative. To most readers, the changes will not be controversial, but there are some bad editorial decisions in the past that were corny, and not in a good way. Like, Jean Grey coming back was an editorial mandate thrust upon Chris Claremont, who already had a specific vision in play but now needed to do this other thing. He had Cyclops married to this woman Madelyne Pryor, they had a kid, and then he’s thrown this curveball of Jean coming back. He instantly has Cyclops leave his wife and kid for Jean Grey. I can’t think of a more unheroic thing to do, and it’s not even explored in an interesting way. Take that example, multiply it by a few dozen, and you have the groundwork for what I’m trying to do with Grand Design, which is to make a cohesive, fun, accessible, complete story with a beginning, middle, and ending.”
Grand Design arrives on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jack Kirby, who co-created the original X-Men team with Stan Lee. Many other creators have made their mark on these characters over the years (from Claremont and Grant Morrison, to Dave Cockrum and Jim Lee), but they nonetheless retain the visual pop and kinetic ferocity of a Kirby comic. Piskor is taking a different approach.
“I have such reverence for Kirby. I think of him every day. But there are Marvel and DC fans who only know the superhero idiom of comic storytelling, which is to say, the Jack Kirby idiom. I’m a fan of all comics,” Piskor says. “I like manga, I like French European albums, I like a lot of newspaper comic strips. The storytelling method I use is a storytelling pastiche of all that stuff. I am trying to do the least Kirby X-Men comic ever made.”
Luckily, Piskor is used to making comics about a complex history with a sprawling cast of characters. His previous massive project, Hip-Hop Family Tree, was a four-part comic about the history of hip-hop and ended up giving him some important lessons for working with the X-Men.
“The thing that makes this a full-circle exhibition is when I embarked on Hip-Hop Family Tree, I knew it would involve an ensemble cast of hundreds of characters. I desperately needed examples of this in comic form to use as a reference point, and Chris Claremont’s X-Men takes the cake in that regard,” Piskor says. “He had so many characters to juggle and had to give them all due time, and I thought he handled them all with great panache. It’s like I got my Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours of practice in dealing with a huge convoluted history. It was an amazing education — I did Hip-Hop Family Tree for four years, it was like an undergrad program. Now I’m in grad school, and that’s the X-Men. I will be forever a student of this medium.”
X-Men: Grand Design hits stores on Dec. 20. Check out a preview below, in which the original X-Men team assembles for the very first time.
INTERVIEW: The Past is Present in Ed Piskor’s X-MEN: GRAND DESIGN
You are here: Home / Culture / Interviews / INTERVIEW: The Past is Present in Ed Piskor’s X-MEN: GRAND DESIGN
12/18/2017 9:30 am by AJ Frost
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One of the challenges for any new reader of mainstream superhero comics is finding the right launching point to start one’s fandom. Sure, there are endless Recommend Reading Lists, Looper videos of the greatest storylines in human history, or the occasional in-person guidance from a knowledgeable sage, but there is never a certainty that the first story will provide enough reference to keep one hooked on the material. And because of the expansiveness of stories that have accrued over decades of continuous publication, finding the perfect genesis can be tricky.
Indeed, one of the most challenging comics for newcomers to take stock of is X-Men. With hundreds of characters and many thousands of pages of material, finding the best place to start is a Xavierian task. Luckily for X-Men neophytes, Marvel is preparing to launch one of their most daring experiments to get readers up to speed with the mythos. Beginning on 12/20, Marvel unleashes X-Men: Grand Design, a limited prestige format series that ties together thousands of pages of X-Men comic lore into a compact 240-page narrative.
The singular creative force behind Grand Design is indie cartoonist Ed Piskor, whose Fantagraphics series Hip Hop Family Trees showcases his love of larger than life characters, Bronze Age aesthetics, and carefully crafted art. Grand Design in Piskor’s thesis about the role that the X-Men play in the contemporary imagination. But even more so, Grand Design is one of those dream projects where the idea is so bold and so fresh that it captures a rare feeling of exhilaration. Not too long ago, I had the chance to chat with Ed about where the idea for Grand Design came from, the lingering political and social relevance of X-Men, and what the future of auteur artists working in the realm of mainstream comics looks like.
AJ FROST: I think the way that you got to create and pitch Grand Design is really going to become part of comic book legend because, from what I understand, you tweeted out to Marvel that you had this vision to create the ultimate X-Men story. Do you remember when the idea for Grand Design popped into your head? And what was your reaction when [former Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief] Axel Alonso contacted you to move forward to put your idea onto paper?
ED PISKOR: The idea was in my head for a while, to be honest, but just in a trivial, nerd way. And as much as I’ve read all the [X-Men] comics, I do not consider them to be infallible. I always had some idea about making them all work together as a unit. I can sell water to a whale, so I make it sound it so cool. A lot of people who know me know that I like X-Men and, very often, a girlfriend will try to relate in some way. When people ask me “What should I read? What comics should I read?”… I frankly can’t point them to any X-Men comics because no matter which one you give somebody, there’s so much baggage that comes along with it that can leave a casual reader in the dust. It occurred to me that there should be an X-Men comic that one can point to highlight all the cool stuff that the series has to offer.
Like you said, I did just randomly put a tweet out one day. It was probably at a moment [mid- to late 2015] where I was really full of myself because—if I think about it correctly—I just got the Eisner for volume II of Hip Hop Family Tree and was in the works of selling Hip Hop Family Tree as a TV series (like a development deal). All this good stuff was lining up. And I just put that tweet out there, ya know? Like ‘Marvel should let me make whatever X-Men comic I want to make.’ I did a hip-hop variant cover for an X-Men comic for Marvel and that was the first thing I did for them. The characters they had me draw… I just had no connection to them. I had no idea there was a girl Wolverine. Angel had these weird fire-y/metallic wings. There was a black girl with an afro who I’ve never seen before ever. I was telling my friends: ‘It’s like I’m drawing the Legion of Super-Heroes or something.’ Just all these characters that I don’t give a crap about.
That kind of went along with the tweet. It wasn’t enough for me to say that Marvel should hire me to draw X-Men because I don’t want to draw any of that stuff now. Ultimately, when I put the tweet out there, there was some artwork to go along with it and it went viral. Axel hit me up pretty rapidly and told me to pitch something. This thing that had been swirling inside my head for a long time was the ideal subject because if this is the only Marvel thing that I draw, then I get to draw all of the X-Men…. All the stuff that I love.
I got the contracts in early 2016 and put pencil to paper in February 2016. And here we are.
FROST: Oh, so you’ve been working on this since early last year, even though it was announced this year?
Ed Piskor
PISKOR: Oh yeah.
FROST: You had to keep it under wraps, though. I bet that was tough.
PISKOR: It was a very vague under wraps. If you go through my Twitter feed, I’m just posting all this X-Men ephemera. And if you look at the comments, you see a lot of people asking ‘Ed, are you doing the X-Men comic? What’s the deal here, man?’ And I would just say nothing. With Hip Hop Family Tree and a comic I did before that called Wizzywig, I was five-six years of finishing a page and posting it online immediately for the world to see. So, it was tough to keep it completely quiet. But I needed this extra year to work in silence because I am the only guy making this thing and it takes a long time. Hip Hop Family Tree has put me in a position where I don’t have to rush. I’m not going to have the most gigantic body of work by the time I die, but you can rest assured that’s it’s gonna be the best I can possibly do.
FROST: When I was doing research for this interview, I went back to a Reddit AMA you did about three years ago. Somebody asked if you would ever do a book for Marvel. You responded: “I would love to, but I’ve been so spoiled the last five years by being able to do whatever I want. I would need them to make a lot of concessions creatively.” Were you surprised that, in the end, Marvel in fact did make so many concessions in support of the vision for Grand Design? Why do you think they allowed you to do that?
PISKOR: I am surprised. The bad reputation amongst creators that the Big 2 has is that they are these protectors of multi-billion dollar properties, so they have a proprietary need to keep it corporate; no fuss, no muss. You can’t upset the people in Kansas with what you do. And, frankly, looking at the books, I can see evidence of that. There is nothing from the Big 2 that has really inspired me to even give them a shot for the last twenty to twenty-five years. I’ve been interested for, basically my whole life, in seeing what an auteur DC or Marvel comic would look like. We’ve gotten pretty close with some comics out there, but they all, at the very least, have two people working on them. I want to read comics made through the vision of just a single person. That’s what I like about comics.
Art from X-Men: Grand Design by Ed Piskor
[For Grand Design], there’s been no schedule, really. They understand the amount of work it takes one person to do everything; everything about it is pretty much my construct. And the fact that it’s coming out in a series of these two-issue bursts was an idea I had. I told them, ‘Guys, there’s at least 75 more weeks worth of work here. We’re halfway done. What if we break it up and put it out into these two-issue installments. I kind of proved it successful to put out one trade paperback a year with Hip Hop Family Tree. By the time the second one comes out, the first volume sells the same amount as the second and you move on from there.
FROST: So the plan is to do two individual issues published as a trade for each of the six issues?
PISKOR: Two issues per trade and then I am re-coloring a classic X-Men comic for the trades. Each trade will be about 120 pages and the format of the books is comparable to Hip Hop Family Tree in terms of scale and dimension. I’ve never been a fan of how the Big 2 handle their reprinted material in terms of the color and the paper stock. Marvel sent me the files to classic comics so I’m going back on the weekends and any free time I have available. I’ve recolored X-Men #1 by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby and, for my money, it’s the best Kirby color reprint in existence, to be honest. I will die on that hill defending that statement because I feel that….
FROST: What are you thinking?
PISKOR: Well, I’m just not a fan of these color reprints. The effort that is put into presenting the material isn’t what I would do. So you’re going to get see what I would do and I think people are going to respond amazingly to it.
FROST: Is there a plan to do an omnibus edition once all the issues are released?
PISKOR: You know, that’s years in the future; it’ll take awhile to put these all out. It’s not in my mind. But this is Disney we’re talking about though and they’ll get every dollar out it they can, I’m sure. The way I work as a creator… I think of all audiences involved here. Each issue stands alone as a unit. Certainly, the first trade is going to be a full meal, but obviously, if you read them all together it all works too. There are different audiences for it all. In fact, if you take a look at the cover for the comic book issues, that is an aesthetic that is built for the Wednesday crowd—the people who would go to the comic shop (interested in their favorite characters’ costumes, yadda yadda). I’m very vocal at every level; I’m sure I’m annoying to all various departments within Marvel. I was in touch with the collections people and I bugged them vigorously to allow me to draw a fresh cover for the trade because this thing is going to be in Barnes & Noble. My mom goes to Barnes & Noble so I needed that cover to communicate the idea of what the X-Men is at a rapid clip. That cover caters to a more literary crowd.
I just think of it in all those stages because there are various audiences; it’s not homogenous. It’s all over the place.
Variant Cover Art by Ed Piskor
FROST: Let’s take a broader view for a moment. I’m not even sure if the movies have been addressing this, or even the recent comics so much (that’s more about me not reading current X-Men because I have no idea where to start usually)…
PISKOR: Sure…
FROST: But do you think there’s still a political and social importance to X-Men. Is there any anymore? And if so, where do you see it?
PISKOR: [Laughs] Yeah, sure. At its root, X-Men comics are about people who are different from you and who potentially pose some kind of threat. Sure there are political/social implications that will probably be there forever until we are one mixed race sometime in the future. I don’t lean on that for any particular reason other than with sticking with the material; I’m just trying to make a cool X-Men comic. Obviously, the X-Men are normal people with special powers and people who don’t have those powers are freaked out by it. There’s going to be prejudices involved.
It’s really funny that when Marvel made the announcement and there were people who were excited about me doing this or not… I’ve just been in the indie comix space for so long that I wasn’t prepared for this kind of crowd that exists online. You know, where there is a faction of people who look for every slight and are vocal about it. And then there is this other crowd that is impotent rage, fucking white dudes. They’re all knuckleheads of a stripe. The pissed-off white guys are like: ‘We gotta be careful about this one man because this could go social justice warrior right away.” And then the social justice warrior people are like: ‘Here we go! We have another white guy making comics about discrimination!’ So, it’s really can’t win at all with any of them.
FROST: Taking a look the entire project, what was the most challenging part of condensing, as you say, 8,000 pages of X-Men history into 240 pages? In other words, what was the challenge, but also, what was the most exciting aspect of being able to look back at all the work that had come before and create a singular story?
PISKOR: You pose this question in a past-tense manner, but I’m really only a little more than halfway finished. There is still a lot of opportunities for me to pull what’s left of my hair out of my head. Basically, every single night I earn the opportunity to get in bed and pass out because it is an exhausting—exhaustive—project. I bought the biggest bulletin/cork board that money can buy (which is the size of an elementary school chalkboard) and it is full of post-it notes, push-pins, and string tying one pin to another. It looks like insanity. But that’s kind of my default setting. If I do anything, I’m going to give it my all. It’s going to be at the front of my thoughts until it’s over. The entire thing is challenging. I’m learning a lot as a student of comics. I’m learning a lot about the value of one panel and what you can accomplish in one panel (or with one panel). It’s a pretty intense boot camp.
Reference Materials. Courtesy of Ed Piskor
Comics at its best, for me, is a complex logic puzzle that you have to unravel to get to work. Every day is a pleasure on this thing because it is so complex. It’s taken over my thoughts. I dream about it. It’s not an undertaking of the weak, ya know? This is not an undertaking for a guy who is of the mentality of ‘Punch the clock, sit down for eight hours, and then clock out.’ Your rank-and-file cartoonist is not going to be able to do this.
FROST: Up to this point, how has Hip Hop Family Tree prepared you for creating a broad, linear story? But going back further to your work with Harvey Pekar… did his sense of storytelling ever slip its way into your work?
PISKOR: Absolutely. He and I worked on two bigger projects, one called Macedonia and another called The Beats about the Beat Generation. In the latter book, when it goes from panel to panel, there might be months or years of time that transpire between them, so you have to choose the right moment and talk about it in a concise way. That’s what I picked up from Harvey and what I brought to Hip Hop Family Tree. This X-Men comic brings things full circle. When I was doing Hip Hop Family Tree, I knew I had an ensemble cast with hundreds of characters and I wanted to look at some reference for comics that were able to handle that volume of characters. I came up with two things: Chris Claremont’s X-Men and Larry Hama’s G.I. Joe. So I re-read and absorbed all the X-Men comics again around that time [working on Hip Hop Family Tree] because I had to give all these characters a fair shake; Claremont was pretty good at doing that. So now with Hip Hop Family Tree, I have my ten thousand hours of practice of just playing around with hundreds of characters. Now I can bring what I’ve learned through that process to my X-Men project and that’s what I mean about it being full circle. The storytelling style is not that different. And, in fact, when I do my next project, I’m going to do what I can to do a comic book about one character who is the main protagonist rather than two hundred and fifty.
The power of a single panel. From X-Men: Grand Design #1. Art by Ed Piskor
FROST: So we touched a little bit about the notion of auteur cartoonists. Do you think, following your model with Grand Design, that the Big 2 publishers will pursue this avenue more often? Or do you think was more of an exception to the rule?
PISKOR: Money talks. These are corporations. And if my comic is a hit, they’ll want to replicate that. So it’s possible there will be opportunities. I’ve handed this comic with that thought in mind, with a responsibility of giving the Big 2 incentive to do more of this kind of thing. I took it very seriously. DC did Bizzaro Comics years and years ago. Marvel did Strange Tales just a couple years ago. And these were anthologies that got independent comics people to do eight-page stories. They’re novelty projects; they’re jerk off projects. Nobody took them seriously, from the creators all the way up. I didn’t read any of those comics and feel like I saw anybody try to do the greatest Spider-Man comic in existence.
The thing about being one person making the comic is that I have my whole creative team with me wherever I go. There are lots of cartoonists who do work for the Big 2, but they just write—maybe they write a lot—but something tells me that their energy is split up pretty deeply amongst many things. I would bet they would save all their best ideas for themselves on projects that they own. I am actively not doing a project that I own, in which I get 100 percent of the money, in order to put all energy this thing. I just don’t know if any other cartoonists are in that position to be able to do that. It would have to be Dan Clowes or Chris Ware. Something tells me that they’re not going to be doing the next issue of Squirrel Girl.
FROST: Dan Clowes doing a Squirrel Girl comic would be interesting though…
PISKOR: Listen man, he understands pathos. He would do a good job.
Fried Pie variant cover to X-Men: Grand Design #1. Art by Ed Piskor.
FROST: Last question for ya. If someone was to come into Grand Design fresh, with no experience with the X-Men except for maybe watching a movie or two (or hundred…), what is the one thing that you would hope they would get out of reading your book?
PISKOR: Honestly, I don’t come at the work in those terms. I like to think of myself just as an artist, even though I’m dabbling in a commercial enterprise here. It’s up to the viewers to interpret the materials as they will. What I will say, though, is that I’ve built my career on bringing new readers into the game. I did a comic called Wizzywig which was about computers and high tech; I did Hip Hop Family Tree and that absolutely brought new readers into comics (or, at least, people who haven’t messed around with comics in a really long time). With Grand Design, I hope to introduce people to the X-Men and hopefully, they dig the property as much as I do. That’s pretty much all I can say.
Comic book artist Ed Piskor's master work, 'X-Men: Grand Design,' to debut April 3
Rege Behe | Thursday, March 29, 2018, 7:27 a.m.
Garret Jones
Ed Piskor
Garret Jones
Ed Piskor
Ed Piskor book signing
When: 4 p.m. April 4
Admission: Free
Where: Phantom of the Attic, Oakland
Details: 412-621-1210 or pota-oakland.com
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In 2015, Ed Piskor earned an Eisner Award for "Hip Hop Family Tree, 1981-1983, Vol. 2." The equivalent of the Oscars or Grammys for comic book artists and writers, winning such an honor would elicit excitement from almost any cartoonist or comic book artist.
Except Piskor.
"They call my name and I'm walking to the stage to pick up the ... thing, and from that moment forward I didn't even want to work on 'Hip Hop Family Tree' anymore," Piskor says. "Whatever feeling of satisfaction of chasing (success), it just wasn't giving it to me. I wasn't getting what I was looking for. I'm not even sure what I was looking for … I felt a little bit full of myself."
So Piskor — who uses Twitter but follows no one on the social media platform — sent out a tweet to his nearly 12,000 followers, with an X-Men sketch attached and a caption:
"Marvel should let me make whatever kind of X-Men comic I feel like making."
Inside an hour, Marvel responded, wanting to know Piskor's pitch. That led to "X-Men: Grand Design" — the Homestead resident's history of the X-Men universe. A special edition being released April 3 includes the two previous editions of the X-Men series by Piskor, and his recolored version of X-Men #1 from 1963.
"If you interview a cartoonist of or around my age (35), they'd say X-Men was basically one of the best and most reliable comics you could count on — month in, month out — thanks to the writer Chris Claremont," Piskor says. "Marvel also made sure to put all of the best talent they had at their disposal on those books. The art always looked fresh and beautiful."
Piskor is considered one the most versatile and respected artists working in contemporary comics. His resume includes collaborations with Harvey Pekar, the comic book artist whose life was made into the film "American Splendor"; the Wizzywig series that was called "the next big thing in graphic novels" by Rolling Stone magazine; and the "Hip Hop Family Tree" series of books that were critically acclaimed bestsellers and will be displayed at the Smithsonian Museum of American History later this year.
But the X-Men series is arguably Piskor's masterpiece. Joe Wos, a pop culture historian and syndicated cartoonist who founded the ToonSeum, says, "X-Men Grand Design is the most apt title for any comics work I've ever seen. It is truly grand in its design.
"(Piskor) is well-versed in the history of the comic book and its creators," Wos adds. "It's one of the things that makes him so good at what he does. He's an educated artist. He researches, dissects and reassembles the history of the X-Men in a way that has never been done before. It's something he brings to every project he takes on."
Nike campaign
Because of "Hip Hop Family Tree," Piskor was asked to work on a Nike sneaker campaign. That paralleled his X-Men project and required a stretch of 60 days, "working 16 hours, at least," to meet deadlines.
But that's what Piskor has always wanted: long solitary hours in his studio, with no distractions.
"The process of doing the work is everything to me," he says. "Just sitting at the drawing table is incredibly meditative. I'm kind of a loner by nature so to have this kind of monastic lifestyle really lends itself well to comics making."
Piskor approached the X-Men canon as if it were a slice of modern day mythology. His pitch to Marvel was "setting myself up for an impossible task," as he recalls it — take 300 issues of X Men and have it make sense in 240 pages.
Judging from most of the reviews, Piskor achieved his goal. There will undoubtedly be more opportunities to work with other franchises and artists he admires. He's comfortable being part of an industry he loves.
But Piskor's end game is surprising for a successful artist who "has the ink-stained soul of an artist of the golden age," according to Wos.
"I promise you this, man," Piskor says. "I have a number in my head of what I need to reach in terms of monetary success. And then I'll go full Salinger. I'll still do the work because I love making comics, but I'm going to become more inaccessible. It's just more pure that way. … At a certain point, how much money do you need? Then you can start to explore really crazy, out-there ideas that your fans and readers will enjoy, but you don't have to worry about selling a lot of it."
Rege Behe is a Tribune-Review contributing writer.
Interview: Ed Piskor Gives 'X-Men: Grand Design' Its 'Second Genesis'
By Jamie Lovett - April 16, 2018
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Cartoonist Ed Piskor is about to enter the second phase of what is arguably the most ambitious X-Men story ever told.
X-Men: Grand Design takes decades of X-Men stories and continuity from the very start in the Silver Age through Chris Claremont's storied run and gives it singular, cohesive narrative vision.
The first volume of X-Men: Grand Design covered the Silver Age era and is now available in Marvel Treasury Edition format. The second volume of the trilogy, Second Genesis, is set to debut in July.
ComicBook.com spoke to Piskor about where he is now in his grand plan for the X-Men.
I read the X-Men: Grand Design Treasury Edition, and it is unlike anything Marvel typically published. It is the same design you used for Hip Hop Family Tree. What was it like getting Marvel on board with this idea?
Ed Piskor: It was kind of a victory, getting Marvel to kind of make a book that I want to make. That's sort of was the game changer. That brought me into the mix when they agreed to publish a book at that size, a size that I've become really comfortable with. To be honest, if it wasn't printed at that size, then Marvel would have been liars. But in a way, I was expecting to be enticed into signing to make the book with that promise and then, at the last minutes, have them say, "Oh, you know what, we crunched some numbers and we have to make it like another trade paperback like all the rest." And that would have broken my heart. But they listened. I think it's working out successfully. I think we're selling plenty of them. So mutual good business on both ends.
The Treasury Edition format really gives your art a lot of room to breath. When you’re working on X-Men: Grand Design, are you thinking about it primarily in terms of how it will look as a finished book? Is that, for you, the definitive edition of the story? Or are you more considering the monthly issues?
In some ways, kind of both because I want issues to be a completely satisfying reads. If you're going to plunk down five bucks, I've got to make sure you're getting your money's worth. I'm not such a fan of that decompressed thing where they stretch a story that can be read in 20 minutes across six issues or something. I'm not that guy. I want each issue to be a satisfying experience. But in a collected book, it's a different experience so I have to have that in mind, as well. The book, that's the potential perennial seller or whatever. That's the things that will be seen in the long haul. So that's just an extra superpower that I've developed over the past ten years in independent comics where we recognize you have to make beautiful books if you want people to buy the damn thing.
Slide 1/11 – Recoloring Kirby
For the Treasury Edition, you included a reprint of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men #1 that you recolored. Why did you decide to include that issue and what was your goal in recoloring it?
The goal was to make the greatest Kirby recoloring that's been done in modern times, man, because when I go to conventions, when I hang out with other cartoonists and we bitch and we moan about the comics industry and blah blah blah, one of the things that comes up routinely is just how the people who put together these collections don't understand the lightning in the bottle that they have in a lot of ways. So they just kind of slap on some computer coloring, have it printed on bright white paper, and that's what we get to consume if we want a Kirby reprint. Everybody's guilty of this. But it's something that we all bitch about. The people making these decisions are business people; they're not creative people. It was my way of doing something about it. Even when those comics were printed initially, the newsprint that they were printed on was at least a little bit grayish. It was never this bright white thing that makes your pupils pinhole when you look at it because of the bleach, the pure whiteness of it. That was the goal, to just make a really great Kirby color reprint for once. Also to just stop being a complainer and actually effect change in some way, in my own way.
But also, I wanted to include it to give people who've never seen that stuff. They need to take another look at X-Men #1. They need to be acquainted with Kirby. I wanted to really do my best to shine a good light on Kirby. So with each of these big books, we're going to have some sort of reprint material and I'm going to do the recolor just so it all works as a unit, too, when you look at the complete book. If you see a lot of these other collections where they'll have their modern day story up front and it's just this computer-colored thing with all kinds of bells and whistles and airbrushed and stuff and then you go to the reprint section in the back and it's a completely divorced experience. It competes. The book goes from becoming a single unit to becoming a kind of anthology or something because there's these completely divorced visions. And doing the recoloring is also a way to just kind of make the whole book a complete, single, solid unit.
Slide 2/11 – Giant-Size X-Men
What issues will you be including with the remaining collections? Or is it too early to say?
I can say for the second one. We did make that announcement, and I'm going to recolor Giant-Size X-Men #1.
Oh, wow.
Yeah. So it's like 36 pages of Dave Cockrum that I get to study at a molecular level, which was the added bonus of recoloring the Kirby thing, because I'm staring at each of those panels at an extremely giant size and I'm seeing everything that Jack did, and I'm seeing how the inker reacted to what Jack put down. So I'm absolutely looking forward to that opportunity with Giant-Size X-Men and staring at Dave Cockrum's at such a close proximity because I am a fanboy first. I'm also including some pinups in the next big book. So there's a classic Art Adams one that I'm going to recolor, a Todd McFarlane Wolverine, a Joe Madureira pinup from an old annual that was before he started drawing X-Men comics, so it's this image of Colossus fighting the Brood which is really great, and a lot of people haven't seen that. Then I'm doing another one, Jim Lee. Why not include Jim Lee in the mix? Remind the publisher of DC Comics where he came from.
Slide 3/11 – Looking Back on Jim Lee
Was recoloring Jim Lee particularly special for you? I know that you were a big fan of his X-Men work when you were first reading the series.
Yeah, sure. I'm in my studio right now and I'm looking over at my table full of drawing implements and I have this really haggard, well-read issue of X-Men sitting there right now. Issue #271, “X-Tinction Agenda.” I like to just keep it close to me because it's so flimsy and well-read that it has no structural integrity. If you hold it up with one hand, it's beyond floppy. I read and reread and reread this god damn comic hundreds of times. It came out... let's see when it came out. It came out November of 1990. So I was born in ‘82, so I was like eight years old and I remember going to the Rite Aid drug store to get my copy and I think the exact time this came out, one of probably the first issues of the trilogy of issues that Art Adams and Walt Simonson did for Fantastic Four was out at that time, too. I had no real friends to talk to about comics. I just grabbed what I thought looked cool.
What a time. What a time for comics, man. I get Jim Lee X-Men, I get that Art Adams/Walt Simonson Fantastic Four, I get Rob Liefeld New Mutants comics, I get Amazing Spider-Man from either Todd McFarlane or Erik Larsen. These guys were incredible influences to me at the time.
Slide 4/11 – Progress on X-Men: Grand Design
How far along into X-Men: Grand Design are you at this point?
It's a good question because I feel highly accomplished at this very moment because I finally finished Second Genesis, which is the second mini-series. I put pencil to paper on the last page and finished that up just a couple of days ago. What I'm doing now, I spend all my time building the trade paperbacks. I'll begin doing my re-coloring on Dave Cockrum probably early next week. If you take a look at that trade that you have, there's a lot of extra drawing that's in there. I like to make very elaborate credits pages. I like to design the endpapers. There's a lot. There's at least month's worth of work that goes into making the trade paperback. Generally probably a month and a half to two months worth of work. That's all kind of invisible because it's not just thick pages being generated, but it's all thought work, it's all design, and it's all trying things and saying no and trying more things.
So that's where I'm at now but also what that means by being finished with the drawing of the one issue is that I'm in the research phase for the last book of the trilogy and that simply just means I get to spend weeks and weeks re-reading my favorite X-Men comics. You can't beat that with a stick.
Slide 5/11 – The Claremont Era
The first volume of Grand Design covered the Silver Age X-Men stuff, which Marvel has revisited previously in works like X-Men: Season One and First Class. Second Genesis is going to get into the Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, John Byrne era that is kind of like X-Men sacred text.
Totally.
Did that affect how you approached remixing that material for Grand Design?
I would say that this original volume was way more work than the second volume, because, given the raw materials that I had at my disposal for that first volume, to me, it's a pretty dark period between Kirby/Lee X-Men and Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, et al X-Men. I don't hear anybody screaming from the mountaintops that they're Werner Roth X-Men fans or something like that. So I did the best that I could with that stuff when I was doing my adaptation remix. It was tough. A lot of suspension of disbelief. I had a lot of work to do, certainly on the second part of the first trade. With Second Genesis, it's like dessert or something. It's like eating dessert before dinner or something. It's just a tremendous ball. The first issue of Second Genesis, it covers the primo material, man. It introduces the X-Men and goes to Phoenix and all that stuff inside of 40 pages. It was just so much fun. I can't wait for people to see it, because it's actually more representative of how I've grown as a cartoonist, because the art in the first trade is pretty old to me, actually. I started drawing it at the beginning of 2016. When Second Genesis starts to come out in a couple of months, I just finished drawing it. So that's a fresher representation of what my art looks like.
But this Claremont material, it's the material that I know best. So just going in and, first off, having the opportunity to just re-read this stuff for work is just a pleasure because I re-read that run every couple of years anyhow just for pleasure. The idea of being able to play around with those toys myself is an added bonus as you could imagine. That's pretty much the difference. I had to really try hard with that in-between X-Men stuff. I dig the [Jim] Steranko art, I dig the Neal Adams art, the stories on almost all of that stuff is just completely lacking, though
Slide 6/11 – A Cohesive Style
Did you alter your art style at all for Second Genesis to represent the stylistic shift between the Kirby era and the Cockrum era, or is this all just your own personal style?
It's certainly the latter. When I jumped into this project, I kind of knew from the very beginning that it would be a mistake to punch above my own weight class and compete with Art Adams or one of these guys. My approach to comics is just completely different. Most of those artists were professional drawers. What they did for the bulk of their careers was just draw comics. I don't just draw comics, I make comics. I write my comics, I letter my comics, I color my comics. So I'm splitting my energy in many different places to create an Ed Piskor comic while those other guys, even if they "plot" this thing, they're really just drawing a bunch of stuff. I remember McFarlane talking about the way he approached comic-making was that he'd just draw a bunch of random pages and he would even play around with the order of them before he started writing in the words. I actually love those comics. I like basically any comics that are done by a single person for the most part, whether they succeed as Aristotelian three-act dramas or something or if they're just chaotic because you're getting a really good look into the perspective of a single person. That's the thing that's lacking with collaborative comics. I make comics and Art Adams draws comics and there is a difference.
Slide 7/11 – More Mutants
Have you reached the point yet where your having to juggle different narratives for different spinoff teams, like New Mutants and X-Factor and all of that stuff?
I'm getting there. There are little bits in Second Genesis. The introduction of the New Mutants happens in the era that I'm covering there. I think, with this last book, that's certainly going to be in there because "X-Tinction Agenda", "Mutant Massacre", all those crazy crossovers are going to take place. "Inferno". The storytelling approach is going to have to accommodate that and it's going to have to be even more macro than it already is, in a way, because there's not going to be an opportunity to have very much soap opera when you're juggling hundreds of characters. I imagine that these pages are just going to take me freaking forever, too. When you draw 50 mutants on a page or whatever. We'll see how that goes. All that extra stuff is kind of important to "X-Men" as a whole, so I'm going to have to at least touch on that stuff and it's going to be a real exercise in trying to figure out how to incorporate all of that to get it to work as a story. I kind of look forward to the challenge of it and it'll be interesting and fun to see if I stick the landing, as they say.
Slide 8/11 – X-Fans
I know that going into Grand Design you talked about how interacting with a fanbase as notoriously passionate as the X-Men’s would be a new experience for you. Now that the first book is how, how has that experience been so far?
Well, the cool thing is that it is possible, with social media, to be blissfully ignorant. So I don't get to see the bad stuff if there is any. I literally am fully ignorant. I follow zero people on Twitter and there's a way in the settings to only see the @ replies from people you follow. So if you follow no people, you see no @ replies. By making this comic, I have to have confidence that I'm worthy to make the damn comic. I just don't need any negative energy in my vibration to make me second guess myself. I don't want that. Now that's the Internet and the Internet's anonymous and people get to hide behind their keyboard and all of that, so people feel more comfortable talking smack or whatever. I've done signings for the book releases and convention appearances after the thing has been on the shelf for a while. I get big lines and people are enthusiastic so there's nobody who's come up to talk smack in person. As far as I know, there hasn't been much bad at all.
Slide 9/11 – Marvel's Grand Design
A lot of fans were pleasantly surprised that Marvel Comics would publish a book like X-Men: Grand Design. Based on your experience working with Marvel, do you think they’d be open to publishing more comics like Grand Design from creators like yourself who, as you describe it, “make comics” if those creators approached them about it? Do you feel like they’d be receptive to that?
If Marvel was receptive to that, then I would read more Marvel comics. I would like for them to be receptive to that, and I'm taking this opportunity completely seriously. I'm not trying to do a version of Bizarro Comics or like that Strange Tales thing that they did before where it's like they have this amazing opportunity to get actual cartoonists to make some things for them and then the cartoonists just kind of jerk it off and are trying to be hipsters about it or something. I'm trying to be completely serious, completely. I'm leaning in all the way to try and make a fun superhero comic that I hope fans respond to.
Listen, the big two, they're just corporations that are interested in making money. If this comic makes money, then I'm sure they're going to be open to more of this kind of thing, because why would they leave a dollar on the table? I certainly encourage people, if they have an idea in mind, why not send it off to them? If the deal is good, you're well rewarded if you make a good comic that people like. My suggestion would be, if my comic is proving successful and is a good seller and has popularity, I would hope that a cartoonist that's submitting ideas won't shit on what I'm building. What I mean by that is that this X-Men comic is something I was compelled to do. It's a dream project of sorts. I would hope that that would be the spirit that the cartoonists would submit their ideas in. I really just thought that Strange Tales thing was just the biggest missed opportunity where it's like everybody is just trying to draw the most obscure characters they can and get away with all the stuff that they can when they absolutely could have made the greatest Spider-Man comic ever or the greatest Fantastic Four comic ever. But they were just kind of screwing around, you know?
So that would be my hope. It's a blessing and a curse. I hope to see more of it, but I also hope that they can be trusted.
Slide 10/11 – Future Projects
For yourself, are there any other Marvel characters, or even characters outside of Marvel, that you think you’re interested enough in that you could be compelled to do another project like Grand Design?
Yeah, there definitely is. Most Kiby or [Steve] Ditko characters have resonance for me. As far as DC goes, there's definitely stuff over there that interests me. It would be a lot of fun to do a Batman. I know exactly what I would do with that character. But I also like the idea, too, of bouncing back and forth. Using that [Martin] Scorsese philosophy of "one for you, one for me" when he would talk about doing a studio picture and then an independent film. These are my studio pictures, then I'll go back and I'll make more personal work and then, if they'll have me, I'll do another studio picture.
But the great thing about being a cartoonist is that I make my own comics, I have my own ideas so I don't need a job but the other bonus is that if I have a Batman idea, whether DC hires me or not to put it together, I'll just do it. I'll just make it, I'll put it online for free, and if it ends up being the greatest Batman comic ever, they'll feel pretty dumb for not making money off of it. As far as I know, that would just be considered fanart or fan fiction. I don't think it's illegal. I don't think that my pencils can be taken away from me. If the whimsy compels me, I'm going to make comics about all the stuff that I want to.
Slide 11/11 – For the Love of the X-Men
Going into X-Men: Grand Design, you had said that you weren’t really sure what it was about the X-Men that you loved, but that you thought maybe you’d discover it while creating this series. Now that you’re two-thirds of the way through, have you discovered what it is you love about the X-Men?
The answer is still kind of the same. I just don't know. I wonder if a part of myself is just trying to figure out who the heck I am or something. Here's the thing, I hate to use any words like "nostalgia" when it comes to this project because I don't know the dictionary definition of "nostalgia" off the top of my head, but what I imagine "nostalgia" is is like Rosebud the sled where you put something down for many, many years, you live your life and then you come back to this thing that brings about all this emotion and causes the synapses to fire in ways that they haven't in a long time. I've never put this stuff down. I re-read that X-Men run every couple of years. In some ways, all of my favorite cartoonists, they end up doing their superhero comic at some point. Dan Clowes did Death Ray, Chris Ware would do his little Superman things, the Hernandez brothers will do their versions, they'll do their superhero comics. Those are the best superhero comics that have ever been done, certainly in the past 20 years. I don't have a superhero of my own that I'm interested in tackling so it's like, "OK, my superhero comic will be X-Men, and that'll be my contribution to the genre". Then I'll continue doing the kind of comics that I want to using other subject matters later.
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The first X-Men: Grand Design Marvel Treasury Edition is available now. X-Men: Grand Design - Second Genesis #1 goes on sale in July.
The Ed Piskor Interview
BY Marc Sobel Jan 28, 2013
Introduction
Ed Piskor is one of the most fascinating young cartoonists in America. Self-taught as a child, Piskor broke into the industry when he was invited by Harvey Pekar to illustrate an American Splendor story. Impressed with the young artist’s chops on that strip, Pekar hand-picked Piskor to collaborate on several graphic novels, including Macedonia and The Beats: A Graphic History. However, although grateful for the opportunity to work with one of the most celebrated writers in comics’ history, Piskor’s fascination with ‘80s popular culture compelled him to branch out on his own and explore the fascinating world of early computer hackers. Initially self-published, Wizzywig was eventually released in 2012 by Top Shelf Comix and the fictionalized historical graphic novel earned a spot on many critics’ year end lists.
But Piskor’s dream project, which he began serializing as a web-comic on the eclectic pop culture site, boing boing, is an exhaustive history of the hip hop music scene. Partially inspired by his work with Pekar and also his own obsessive passion for the subject matter, The Hip Hop Family Tree quickly mushroomed into a monumental project, chronicling, in retro-comic vivacity, all sorts of intriguing minutiae related to the “viral propagation” of the subculture. Meticulously researched, and drawn with a keen eye toward historical accuracy, Piskor’s exploration of hip hop immediately earned him the respect of cartoonists and musicians alike, as well as a book deal with Fantagraphics (due in 2013).
Having watched Piskor develop over the years, since discovering his first self-published mini-comic, Deviant Funnies #1, all the way back in 2004, I was excited to interview him about the trajectory of his career and his plans for the future. We spoke by phone for several hours on November 29, 2012, the same night the world lost the great underground cartoonist, Spain Rodriguez.
Marc Sobel
January 21, 2013
“Drawing and Withdrawing”
MARC SOBEL: To start off, can you give me a quick background on yourself, like where you’re from, your family background and so forth?
ED PISKOR: Sure. I’m the first born of four siblings. The youngest one is eighteen years younger than me. She’s twelve now. We’re from this area of Pittsburgh called Homestead. It’s one of those areas where the only source of economic income for the town was the steel industry and that went away like two years after I was born. So we were pretty poor and there wasn’t much money to do anything but luckily pencils and paper were cheap so I was able to hang out and draw.
Also, I was one of the only white kids in my neighborhood, which was no big deal until I started getting a little bit older, like middle school age, and then it was weird. After one summer, coming back to school, suddenly race was an issue. It was confusing to me because we were all friends the previous year and then when we came back, some epic thing must have happened that I was just completely ignorant of because suddenly race was a factor. So after that I just became withdrawn and hung out by myself and drew.
I was also one of the only kids whose parents were still together, and, as weird as this sounds, that was an embarrassment to me because people would make fun of me. It’s so weird but I was really susceptible to that kind of stuff. Dudes were like ‘aw man, you live like Leave It to Beaver,’ and shit like that. Now it’s completely obvious that dudes were just jealous that I had a mom and dad who got along, but at the time I was just like, ‘oh man.’ I didn’t fantasize about them getting divorced or anything but I was like ‘why can’t I just be like everybody else?’ That sounds so pathetic, though, right?
MARC SOBEL:
ED PISKOR: Yeah. I guess that’s really it. Well… I could take it to a dark place. In high school, when I was 15 years old, I got really, really sick. That’s not something I like to get into but it informed where I’m moving in terms of an art career and stuff, because… I got very sick to the point where, in tenth grade I was home-schooled for the last two and a half years of high school. That provided me with copious amounts of time to hang out, draw and read comics.
The way the schooling was structured, two teachers from the school would come once a week each, after school to my house from 3:00 to 5:00pm and that’s all I had to worry about per week. So I only really had four hours of school a week.
MARC SOBEL: Wow!
ED PISKOR: The rest of the time I spent drawing. And because all my friends were in school all day, they had to go to bed early, so I started hanging out with older kids and even people in their twenties. Those guys introduced me to graffiti and things like that. I wasn’t good enough at drawing comics yet back then, but still I had this urge to put work out there and have it seen, so at that time, graffiti was my outlet to express myself publicly. Once I got better, I would stay out all night and do graffiti, then come home, crash, wake up at like 3:00pm, have my teachers come over, do that school shit, and then just do it all over again. This went on for a couple years.
MARC SOBEL: So you were sick for two years?
ED PISKOR: Yeah, but honestly, I was sick for like a year, but the recovery process took forever. What’s weird is that since getting into comics, I’ve met a bunch of guys who had that same problem. It just has to do with being so anal retentive and obsessive. It seems to be a common thing amongst a lot of creative people, which is something that the doctors told me as a kid.
MARC SOBEL: There’s definitely something about creativity and control. Comics gives you almost complete control over the world that you’re creating.
ED PISKOR: Yeah, for sure. And especially as a kid, you have zero power over anything else so you try to control that little world. Plus, you spend a lot of time in your head and it just bleeds over. But, like with everything that I do in general, during school I wanted to be the best student, but my mind isn’t a sponge for information. I know some people who learning comes easy for them, but that’s not me. I always got great grades, but I had to work my balls off for that. So that shit just caught up to me after a while. After I got sick and I was recovering, I sort of made a change, but it still creeps back now and then and when I find myself getting really obsessive, I have to take a break.
To be honest, when you first called me up, I was going through a big-time depression. It just happens every now and again because I spend so much time drawing and withdrawing. This time it was because the guys at Fantagraphics had just sent me my advance for the book and so now… I’ve never borrowed a dollar from a person in my life so now I feel like I’m in their debt, you know? I feel a big responsibility to make it as good as possible, so I just put this weird pressure on myself. I’ve always done that.
“I Can Do This Stuff…”
MARC SOBEL: Obviously, I’m guessing that you were a huge comics fan growing up?
ED PISKOR: Yeah I was. I was a huge X-Men fan as a kid, but what really opened my eyes was… One day, I think it was on the A&E television channel, that documentary from the ‘80s called Comic Book Confidential.
MARC SOBEL: Sure.
ED PISKOR: That was one of the most important things that ever happened to me, coming across that documentary when I was eight or nine years old. I remember flipping through the channels and seeing Spider-Man on the screen, so it was during the Stan Lee portion of it, and that took me aback because it was like, ‘whoa, Spider-Man’s on TV. Cool. I’m going to check this out.’ Then what follows right after the Marvel Comics stuff is the undergrounds. So they get into Crumb and Harvey Pekar and there was one scene when Crumb was talking about the transformation of Fritz the Cat and he said something like, ‘Fritz the Cat was just this character that I drew in comics as a kid,’ and they showed this image of a comic that was drawn on notebook paper. That was incredibly important to me, because, even at a very young age, I immediately made this connection, like ‘ok, I can do this stuff.’
That documentary includes all of my major influences, both at that time and forward. Everybody in that film is the jumping off point for where I would go in terms of finding other comics. Kurtzman, Eisner, Kirby, Charles Burns, Jaime Hernandez, all those dudes were super important to me.
So I watched that movie on a Friday on regular television and literally the next day I made my mom take me to the library and there was this book, it was the only book on comics in the entire library, called Comix, with an ‘x’ by Les Daniels from the ‘70s. It was great because I watched that documentary, got schooled a little bit, and then I got that book and almost everybody that was discussed in the movie is talked about in that book. Plus, there were actual, full excerpts of stories by people like Robert Crumb and – rest in peace – Spain Rodriguez.
MARC SOBEL: Yeah!
ED PISKOR: So, I feel extremely lucky because I was exposed to underground comix before I hit the double digits of age.
“We’re Gonna Be Fucking Billionaires”
MARC SOBEL: I know you went to the Kubert School for a year, but are you mostly self-taught?
ED PISKOR: Yeah.
MARC SOBEL: Talk to me about how you learned to draw. You started to touch on it when you mentioned all the free time you had, but can you give me a little more detail?
ED PISKOR: Yeah. I relate hip hop culture a lot with my learning to draw because… There’s this certain mind frame. All through school I was definitely one of the worst people at most things, but with drawing I could at least hold my own. There was no way I was going to be able to beat anybody in any kind of organized sport or anything like that but I was at least a contender in the drawing thing. And the hip hop mind frame helped because people would snap on my work. They’d say something like ‘That sucks, man. I can’t believe you drew that,’ or, ‘do you need glasses?’ Shit like that. We would just bust on each other for being able to draw. So that provided a natural incentive to do better work because I thought, ‘oh man, I have to blow these dudes’ minds next time.’ Of course that never happened. Even when I got to a point where I was reasonably sure that I was better than them, they could still cut me down, which was cool. It was character building.
MARC SOBEL: So you were putting drawings in front of all your friends on a regular basis?
ED PISKOR: Yeah, we all were. When I was in sixth grade, there was this weird period where comics were really popular with everybody. Even a lot of the jocks were into them. This was after the “Death of Superman” and the first coming of Image Comics.
Everyone was buying these things, even football players, but most people were never looking at them. A lot of dudes would have Comic Buyer’s Guides, the new ones, or their Wizard Magazines in class all the time and they would be calculating their wealth.
And a lot of people were drawing too. Recently I sent a bunch of my friends this clipping from an old Entertainment Weekly from around that time where, there was this guy named Chap Yaep, who drew Team Youngblood.
MARC SOBEL: I remember that guy.
ED PISKOR: Yeah. He was 19, so he was only a couple years older than us, and the article was like, ‘Cartoonist rookie stands a chance at making $250,000 this year.’
MARC SOBEL: Wow.
ED PISKOR: It was pretty cool. So a bunch of us were always drawing and we would show each other stuff, but… We were encouraging in as much as we’d bust on each other. Like, ‘dude, you suck, man. It looks like you drew an arm where his leg’s supposed to be.’
Another big school of cartooning for me as a kid was I would copy full comic pages off of existing books. So for a period of a few years there… and I still have some of this stuff… I was drawing whole pages from Spawn comics and Youngblood, or Rob Liefeld’s X-Force. Then my tastes gradually got more sophisticated and it got to the point where I was drawing pages from Dark Knight Returns and John Romita, Jr. Daredevil comics, and then it was EC Comics. Finally it was like, ‘ok, time to start drawing my own stuff.’
There was also an art school in town for kids. It was just one of these extracurricular things where every four quarters you could sign up to take a cartooning class. So I participated in those and I absolutely adored those classes because it was a little bit healthier of an environment in terms of learning. It wasn’t just about making fun of each other.
The best part was that eventually they put together these comic book production classes at that school. So what we would do is for eight weeks, we would work on a four or five page strip and then, at the end of the course, the teacher would go and print them up into this little anthology book. I mean, this thing was bound and saddle-stitched and it was a real comic. Everybody would get 10 copies of the book and that really started my addiction with the print medium. There were 10 or 15 people in this class so that meant there were 150 copies of my story out there. I think I did like five issues of that stuff, and it was just so great because I could pour all of my creative energy into that for those eight weeks and then I’d have a real comic book. It felt magical, like I stacked up against anybody else, even though it’s so apparent when you look through those things, that I’m literally the only person that took that stuff seriously at all. Every other kid was just there to be babysat. Like, it would give their parents three hours with the kid out of their hair.
“My Version of Art School”
MARC SOBEL: So was Deviant Funnies #1 your first real mini-comic?
ED PISKOR: Yeah, and the material that’s in that mini, those are the same strips I sent Harvey Pekar that put me on his radar. He gave me a call after checking out some of that stuff, although I actually hooked up with him before I printed that book up.
What I would do is draw a four or five page strip and submit that to Fantagraphics and Top Shelf with a proposal for what I would want my Eightball-analogue comic to be. My idea was to do a personal anthology, but all those stories were pretty crappy. My proposals had such naiveté attached to them, but, to an extent, I feel like that was an important component to getting published, at least for a guy like me where everything’s pretty gradual. I’m not James Stokoe, or whoever, with all this great natural ability. I have to really break my balls
So, I put myself out there and I think that was an important part of being able to get started. Nowadays, I could never see myself sending stuff to a cartoonist who I love, like ‘oh man, it would be great to work with you, Harvey Pekar.’ That’s a crazy thought to me now.
MARC SOBEL: You had that one-page strip in Deviant Funnies about Harvey calling you up, but can you elaborate about how you guys first started working together. You started out doing American Splendor strips, right?
ED PISKOR: Sure, yeah. So, like I said, I would send stuff to Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, Alternative Comics, all those places but I always would get rejected. So it was like, ‘what am I going to do? I’m just going to do these strips only to get rejected by these five people?’ That seemed kind of whack, so I started sending stuff to cartoonists that I dug. Basically I would do a strip and send it out to maybe 50 or 60 guys. So I found Harvey’s address on… I had lots of old American Splendor comics, but there was one recent one that I had and on the cover it had a photograph of his face. And it was mocked up to look like Time, or some other subscription-based magazine, where they laser print your address on the cover whenever they ship it. So it had an address and I was like ‘I’m going to send my strips to this address and just see if it gets rejected, or if it’s even a real address.’ I didn’t hear anything, but since the packages never came back, I just assumed they got to the guy.
So, the American Splendor flick comes out (in September 2003) and I dragged a bunch of friends to go check it out and just a few weeks later, Harvey Pekar calls the house. That was what that strip’s about. I just couldn’t believe it. It seemed insane. So he’s like, ‘yeah, I dig your stuff.’ Also, I think there was a part of me being from a sister city to Cleveland that was interesting to him. The fact that I was young also helped because he felt weird asking a lot of the old-timers to work for $100 per page. That’s not a lot of money.
So from when I first spoke with Harvey, it was about one year later before we actually started working together. It was this crazy waiting game. I would be in touch with him fairly regularly, maybe every couple of months or so. I would call to check in and see if it was still real. Like, ‘Hey, Harv, do you still remember me?’ He’d be like, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, what are you talking about? Yeah, I remember you, man.’ He was like, ‘I’m still working on this thing, and as soon as it’s ready to go I’ll get these strips to you.’
So it was this long build-up and then I did a four-page strip for American Splendor: Our Movie Year. And that was it. I was like, ‘ok, well, I did that. Cool.’ And that was going to be it until the book was wrapping up. Apparently he was contractually obligated to make it a certain number of pages and they were like 25 pages shy. So, it’s like a week before my birthday and Harv calls me up and he’s like, ‘hey, do you want to do a bunch of pages in a really short amount of time?’ I’m like, ‘alright, yeah. Sure, man.’ He needed this 24 or 25 page story in like that many days, maybe even fewer, like 20 days. So I’m like, ‘OK. Cool,’ and I put my birthday on hiatus. I was just like, ‘I’ll celebrate after I’m finished with the strip.’
That turned out to be a real cartooning boot camp for me because of the tight deadline. I really didn’t want to disappoint him, so I worked my ass off to get the work done. But after some time, it became apparent that he was testing me a little bit. I mean, I’m sure we did have a tight deadline, but right after delivering, he was like, ‘Ok, man. Do you want to work on this 150 page book with me?’ Obviously I was delighted.
MARC SOBEL: This was Macedonia?
ED PISKOR: Right. And when he called it “Macedonia,” I was like, ‘this is fucking awesome. Harvey is turning a new leaf. We’re going to do a comic about Alexander of Macedon, and shit like that. We’re going to do a story about this guy taking over the world.’ I was already thinking about referencing Pythagoras and Diogenes and all these old philosophers. But then he was like ‘no man, it’s about the geopolitical de-stabilization of the Balkan region through the story of this young college girl.’
MARC SOBEL: There’s very little visual narrative there. Was it tough to work on a story like that?
ED PISKOR: It was SO tough, and I absolutely wasn’t ready. I wasn’t good enough to translate that in any way. Also, it should have been maybe a 300 page comic, so there are pages that have maybe fifteen panels on them, and each one is just loaded down with copious amounts of dialogue. It’s like an EC Comics amount of dialogue hanging above all the characters’ heads.
That is the reason I describe Wizzywig as ‘my first book.’ All the Harvey Pekar stuff really was my version of art school. I’m embarrassed by those books because they’re some of Harvey’s last work and I didn’t show up properly. I’m not saying that I hacked that stuff out. I did my absolute best for my skill level at the time, but my skill level was just not there, you know? It just absolutely was not there and the result is that that’s some of Harvey’s last work and it’s seen through the lens of a fucking 23-year-old jerk-off.
MARC SOBEL: What would you do differently with those books if given the opportunity now?
ED PISKOR: Well, it’s been a while since I really looked at that stuff, but I would definitely try to just gussy it up with some visuals. I would try to give it room to breathe, and the overall aesthetic of the art would obviously be way better. But, to be honest, Macedonia was a hard book. I still really have never read it. I sort of read it as I went along. I read it initially in script form and was just like, ‘Fuck!’ I can’t say no, but I don’t think I’m the guy for this job.’ But I just had to do it. I wanted to draw comics so bad. I don’t know. It was so long ago. It honestly caused me a lot of pain because we don’t have Harvey around anymore and I look at some of that work I did with him as a blemish on his career. I was just so inexperienced and stupid.
MARC SOBEL: What about The Beats? How do you feel about that work? It looks to me like your art came a long way in terms of improving and tightening and developing into the style you’re working in now from where you were on Macedonia. Would you agree with that?
ED PISKOR: I would, but I still hate that artwork a lot, too. It definitely got better from Macedonia but it’s still pretty hard for me to look at. I can see all this Dan Clowes wannabe stuff, and I was using rulers on every line so it looks kind of dead or maybe constipated or something like that. That shit is tough for me to talk about. I don’t know what I was trying to do.
MARC SOBEL: Beyond just checking in periodically, did you have much of a personal relationship with Harvey? Did you guys ever meet in person or anything like that?
ED PISKOR: Yeah. In that first year waiting period, I travelled out to Cleveland and we hung out. And then he was a guest of honor at SPX one year, so we hung out there, and we gave a talk at a few colleges, too. So maybe like five times we hung out physically, but for two and a half years, I spoke to him almost every day on the phone. And that was really cool. That guy was really, really funny.
MARC SOBEL: Yeah?
ED PISKOR: Oh yeah. Every now and again, you would catch him when he was in the doldrums or whatever, but I never once got that sense of… You know how people use that word ‘curmudgeon’ whenever you bring up Harvey? I really think that’s the power of television because that’s the character he portrayed on Letterman, and therefore that’s what people remember, but he absolutely was not that guy. He was super magnanimous and cool. I never once got that ‘bah humbug’ vibe from him. If anything, there would be times when he was just kind of sad or something, but never a big grump.
MARC SOBEL: Can you describe Off the Hook, the radio show you listened to while working on the books with Harvey, in terms of what it was, the format of the show and how it inspired the story of Kevin Phenacle?
ED PISKOR: Yeah. It’s an hour long show on WBAI out there in Manhattan and I started listening to it while I was working on Macedonia. The show is hosted by this guy whose nom-de-plume is ‘Emmanuel Goldstein’ and he is the publisher of 2600 magazine, a hacker quarterly. He’s been publishing it since, I believe 1984, which might be why that’s his name.
MARC SOBEL: From the George Orwell book?
ED PISKOR: Yeah. So, by being this publisher, he was on the forefront of a lot of the political issues regarding computers and the general public. It was incredibly fascinating stuff to me.
The reason I started listening to this show with such prurient interest was that deep down I think we all fantasize a little bit about being a master super villain, or having that kind of knowledge. So I was like, ‘I’m going to listen to this show and develop this hacker skill set that could make me dangerous as fuck if I wanted to be.’ I’m real interested in knowing about stuff you’re not supposed to know about, for trivial reasons mostly, because all I really want to do in life is just sit around and draw comics, but it’s interesting to know subversive shit.
So, that was the initial interest, but when I started checking it out, very quickly I discovered that what I thought a hacker was is not what hackers think they are. I had been misled by mainstream media to develop this correlation between a hacker and a criminal, like it’s some sort of evil thing to know about computers, when it was actually a term of endearment for years.
So with the position that Goldstein has as publisher of 2600, he got to speak to all of the biggest names, the most interesting and skilled people within that culture.
MARC SOBEL: You just went through it chronologically from the beginning?
ED PISKOR: I did, which took a while because I think there might be over a thousand hours worth of that stuff. It was a twenty-plus year archive, maybe twenty-five years. And it’s great because there are several really big stories that play out over time, and it seems dramatic, like it was written and preconceived. For example, he might have some guests on the show one week, and the next week, those same guys might very well be fugitives from the law, hiding out or on the run. Then whenever one major piece of drama would wrap up, something else would happen. These guys just fucking got in trouble all the time and you were able to follow along as it’s happening.
There was one co-host who you kind of grow to adore. His name is ‘Phiber Optik,’ and he’s the co-host for probably a year’s worth of the show. He’s so smart and so young, and he sounds like a little boy, but he has such knowledge about all these different systems and things. Then suddenly one week, the kid can barely speak on the show, even though he’s there in studio, because of gag orders. I guess his lawyer advised him not to say anything. Then a few weeks go by and you don’t know what’s going on, then suddenly you find out that he’s in jail. So then a whole year of shows goes by and then they do this special broadcast where they go down to get him out of prison and drive him from the jail to the radio station to be a co-host again.
Then there was this one guy who was on the show all the time, his name is ‘Bernie S,’ who I actually became great friends with. He also got sent to jail, but he still managed to co-host the show from fricking jail because they figured out a legal loophole. See, if you’re in prison, you can’t call a radio show and broadcast, but they discovered that it’s perfectly legal to call a civilian’s house and if the civilian just so happens to forward the call to a radio station, that’s legal. So the dude was co-hosting the show from prison, and you would hear the little intermittent beep that meant the call was being recorded. These guys were some brash, fucking bad ass motherfuckers! So I fell in love with all that stuff.
MARC SOBEL: Somebody I was talking to at the Brooklyn Comics Festival who had read Wizzywig described Kevin as “a modern day Robin Hood.” Is that how you meant to portray him and do you see him as a kind of mythical character?
ED PISKOR: The Robin Hood thing is a little strong. I just see him, and the hackers who the character is based on, as being people who are way too curious for their own good. But I don’t see harm in that, you know? It’s almost like saying, ‘oh, you’re too smart,’ or something like that. It’s ridiculous. With Kevin, what I wanted to get across is that these guys were doing this stuff way before the government had a clue. The legislation had to catch up with what they were doing and some of these guys were doing this silly shit on computers for ten years by the time the first laws were on the books, so it was a part of their life and they just couldn’t stop because they loved it so much. So if I have to distill the character down, I just consider him to be this pranksterish, extremely curious little nerd who didn’t know when to say when.
MARC SOBEL: You had a character all the way back in Deviant Funnies #1 called ‘Boingthump.’ Has that character been with you all that time, or was it just the same name?
ED PISKOR: So a big part of my interest in hacking comes from a friend of mine whose name is very similar to Kevin Phenacle’s, and his hacker name is Boingthump. If you search online for Boingthump and you see something that doesn’t have to do with comics, that’s my homeboy.
That dude is definitely pretty nuts. He’s pulled off some hacking capers in his day and he told me those stories which sparked my initial interest in learning more about the culture. So my character’s kind of a nod to him for giving me that germ of an idea to go down this route.
MARC SOBEL: Have you ever done any hacking yourself?
ED PISKOR: You know what’s crazy is listening to the entire 25-year archive of the radio show, you fricking learn some shit. It’s such a piecemeal operation but if you’re paying enough attention and you listen to enough of this stuff, you can start to put these little pieces together. There were times where I would lay in bed and think, ‘oh my goodness. I think I can get a free long distance phone call using a pay phone.’
So, the last real job I had was working at a call center when I was twenty years old and I sort of knew how their internal system worked, so I decided to see if I could use a pay phone to get into their system and make long distance phone calls. And I was able to do it. It’s highly inefficient, but I accomplished it. Of course, it makes zero sense now, especially in a day when cell phones are so cheap. But I did it, and it was free and it was probably illegal. So that’s one example, but mostly my interest is purely informational.
“Alternative Cartoonists Today Are a Bunch of Pussies.”
MARC SOBEL: Was it while you were working on Wizzywig or after that you started contributing to Mineshaft?
ED PISKOR: That’s a good question. I was definitely still working on Wizzywig, but some of the stuff, like the stuff I did with Jay Lynch, I did that in that interim period before I really started working with Harvey. So, thinking about it… Harvey was the first call I got and Jay Lynch was the second. Jay’s work is in that Comix book by Les Daniels, too, so I was aware of him, but his work was always so elusive because you would have to pay like seven dollars to get an old Bijou Funnies comic, or something that would have some ‘Nard and Pat strips. But I always loved his work. It’s so meticulous and detailed and perfect-looking.
MARC SOBEL: Did he invite you to contribute to Mineshaft? Is that how you got hooked up with them?
ED PISKOR: That came up after. First, we were just working on these strips and it was going to be a 32-page comic. His whole thesis was that ‘these alternative cartoonists today are a bunch of pussies. They’re all crybabies,’ like all the kids in the generation after him, or maybe two generations after. ‘They’re all a bunch of wusses. Back in our day we used to have sex, do drugs, fight, and live in hardcore neighborhoods, shit like that.’
So we were working on this thing and it was going to be like ‘Two-Fisted Cartoonist Tales,’ just short strips about some crazy stories that those guys were involved in. So we did maybe 17 pages worth of material, five stories, and we submitted that and the guys at Top Shelf were like, ‘absolutely, we will publish a book of this.’ But the times were different back then, and… I mean, I was fully aware that we weren’t going to make a lot of money on this, but I guess those older cartoonists, the underground guys, they had a sort of a union in a way back then. They got a page rate for everything even though the rate was kind of nominal. But that certainly doesn’t exist now, and I think Jay was just a little put-off by the royalties aspect of it, which I understand. It is kind of crazy and you have to hope that the publishers are doing the right thing. I don’t think they would continue to be in the game if they weren’t, but it is possible that some scummy guy could fudge numbers and say that he sold a thousand less books. Who’s to say? I’m sure they don’t, but you just have to put a lot of faith in people.
So we didn’t pursue the full 32-page comic. Then over time, Mineshaft, which is one of the few ‘zines that comes out on a consistent basis, they would get a lot of material from some of the old underground guys. That’s sort of the wheelhouse of what they publish, so we ended up submitting to those guys so at least those strips could see the light of day.
(Continued)
MARC SOBEL: Just to clarify your chronology, after you finished Wizzywig, is that when you got involved with Adult Swim and the Mongo Wrestling Alliance?
ED PISKOR: Yeah. I was self-publishing those Wizzywigs for a couple of years. In between Macedonia and The Beats, I did the first volume of the self-published Wizzywig Comics. Then I did The Beats and then volumes two and three came out. After volume two, I almost had enough of volume three done to publish it but the Adult Swim guys got in touch and I had to put it on hiatus for months. I literally just needed to finish like fifteen pages, but I was putting all my time into the Adult Swim stuff.
MARC SOBEL: How did that opportunity arise?
ED PISKOR: They got in touch with me during the summer, after a San Diego Comic-Con. The show’s producer, Eric Kaplan, just sent me this very short email, and was like, ‘do you want to design characters for an Adult Swim cartoon?’ Or a ‘possible cartoon,’ he said. I was pretty skeptical at first because you get these kinds of offers from time to time and it’s always bullshit. It’s usually some kid fresh out of art school, or college who has an idea that he thinks is going to make a million dollars.
So, since I’d never heard of Eric Kaplan or anything, after I got that email I did some Google searching and I realized, ‘this guy actually has stripes. This dude exists. It’s not just some silly bullshit.’ But then I got worried that maybe these guys didn’t know what it takes and they wanted me to do a bunch of free work ‘for a percentage of the back end,’ or something.
So I started emailing with him and it turns out that he was talking with Peter Bagge, who hipped him to my name. Pete is another guy I corresponded with early on when I was sending huge packets of shit out. I thought it was so cool that Pete still remembered me after so much time because I didn’t really keep up correspondence or anything.
So after a few weeks, Kaplan was like, ‘alright man, are you ready to do this?’ Then a bunch of phone calls happened and contracts were sent, which was another thing I got very nervous about because you hear a million stories about Hollywood. I was like, ‘are these guys going to rape and pillage me?’
So, in addition to Peter Bagge, I saw that Kaplan was working with Tony Millionaire, and several other cartoonists. So I consulted with all those guys with questions like, ‘is this Kaplan dude legit?’ And then, ‘can you look at this contract for me and tell me if it looks weird?’ But everybody was like, ‘it seems cool, man, if you want to create some characters. There probably won’t be anything that comes from this other than you’ll make some money and that’ll be it.’
The initial job was to design four characters, and then after that I got another contract to design four more, and then four more. After that I didn’t hear anything for months, until I was carbon copied on this email that showed the production schedule. I was like, ‘oh shit, this show actually got picked up. That’s fucking cool!’
So I sent the guys I worked with a short email like, ‘that’s so cool that you guys sold this show with those characters and everything. I can’t wait to see what that looks like,’ and they were like, ‘you didn’t get our other emails?’ I was like, ‘what other emails?’ They’re like, ‘dude, we need you to do all this other production work. We need these key frames, and you need to come up with all these little assets, which are these little objects that would be in the show. I’m like, ‘are you kidding me? This sounds like a big job.’ And it was, but it paid well, and it was very fun to work on for a year and a half.
MARC SOBEL: What was the experience of working on a cartoon like as opposed to doing your own comics? What were some of the things you did and didn’t like working in animation?
ED PISKOR: It was a lot of fun in a million different ways. I felt really respected by everybody I worked with. At first I had an inferiority complex because I would Google stalk these guys to see who I was dealing with and they all have Emmy Awards and went to Ivy League schools, and I have nothing like that. But any ideas that I had they were real respectful of and I felt like they were really fair with the ideas that I came up with.
Initially, all the scripts were really top notch and I really dug it, but the final shows that came out were nothing like any of the scripts that I read, and… See, this is the part where I’m literally contractually precluded from saying anything bad about the show. But ultimately it just wasn’t what I initially read. I should have known, too, because after a certain point, I was locked out of the little system where we would upload the assets and new materials. Once I was locked out, I was like, ‘alright, cool. I guess my bit is done. I’m just going to go ahead and work on my comics.’
At that point, I had sold Wizzywig to Top Shelf and I was just fine-tuning the book, getting it all together, and coincidentally just when I sent it off, that’s when the first show aired. And with the combination of those two things, I just got so depressed, because a lot of people in my life were very excited about it.
See, I never talk about this stuff while it’s still in a production stage, or anything like that. There are just too many factors that could make you a liar or a bullshit artist if it doesn’t see the light of day. So I never talked about the show until the commercials were out. Then I was like, ‘dudes, look, the reason I haven’t been able to hang out is because I’ve been working on this cartoon and it’s coming out soon, and I’m stoked and it’s awesome.’ So I had everybody in my life rooting for me, and then after everybody checked it out, which was also the first time I’d seen it myself, I couldn’t get out of bed for like a month. It was just so different from what we initially put together.
MARC SOBEL: It’s so hard to maintain real personal vision in a product that has so many people’s imprint on it. That’s why comics are such a pure art form.
ED PISKOR: Absolutely. I would say that it’s impossible to get across a solitary vision. I mean, there are certain auteurs in film and things like that, but I bet you if you sit down and speak with them, they just take what they can get in certain instances. I felt really lucky to have Wizzywig at that time, where I could just have my own world and do my own thing without any sort of committee.
But some people are really into collaborating. At last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, I spoke with the producer. We had lunch and I asked him, ‘do you have some creative thing that’s all your own apart from all this team effort shit, because I don’t know.’ He’s like, ‘No, man. I love working with people. It’s really fun. I love the communal aspect of a lot of mental energy coming together to create a big project.’ So, it’s not quite where I would envision myself being throughout my career, but some people are into it.
“I’m Like Rain Man When It Comes to This Shit”
MARC SOBEL: Can you talk about what initially sparked your interest in doing such a comprehensive history of hip hop?
ED PISKOR: For years, since high school, I wanted to tell a story within an old school ecosystem where I could indulge in drawing graffiti on the walls, track suits and all the fashion of the time, but I just couldn’t think of a MacGuffin to make it happen. I was like, ‘should it be a crime story, or…’ And then, doing Wizzywig, I wanted… Like, Wizzywig would have been just a biography of Kevin Mitnick if Kevin would have taken me seriously when I started it, but I was nobody at the time, so I had to do this fictional thing. Also there’s just limited material out there about those initial hackers, but with hip hop, there’s tons of stuff out there. You just have to dig into it and find everything, but it already exists. So ultimately, I just said, ‘I’m going to do a hip hop history book, that’s perfect.’
You see, I’m like “Rain Man” when it comes to this hip hop shit.
So I put that first strip up on boing boing and at first it was going to be very intermittent, just whenever I felt like doing one, because I’m not obligated to do a two or three-page story every week. I could do a strip that’s one drawing and still get the same pay. But I just started digging it too much. I did that first one, and then that led me right into another strip that I wanted to do, and then it just kept growing.
To be honest, I wasn’t initially thinking about this as a book. I had some vague idea that maybe there would be a 32-page comic or something, but over time it became apparent that there’s way too much story to be told and it is too much fun to draw.
MARC SOBEL: Was there a particular moment or song that really crystallized your connection to hip hop?
ED PISKOR: I don’t know. I was born in 1982, so the fad of hip hop was at its apex with shit like that Fruity Pebbles commercial
Also, that was the music that everybody listened to in town so I heard a ton of it. But even then, I still fucked up because if you would listen to the shit that was even six months old, you were considered played out, or kind of whack, but I just couldn’t help it because I would get obsessed with trying to find every rappers’ first songs. I would hear songs with little bits of other songs sampled, and I would have to find out where that sample came from. And then I would listen to that song and it would have samples of older things, so I felt like this detective, or something. I would just fall down this rabbit hole where I was digging into deeper and deeper old hip hop tracks that had nothing to do with the original song. And everybody would be like, ‘you listen to some tired ass bullshit that my dad listens to,’
MARC SOBEL: Is there a particular era of hip hop that you favor?
ED PISKOR: The earliest stuff is the stuff that I most love and adore. I kind of equate those old records with standup comedy. A lot of the first hip hop records are the result of so much test marketing, I guess is the best way to put it, where these people created routines and they put them out there in front of a very hardcore audience of people who might only have ten extra dollars to spend a week for entertainment. So you’re putting on a performance to a hostile crowd. You fine tune it, and you figure out every little piece that works, and every little thing that people respond to positively, and you keep building and adding and making it better.
Then the first rap records happened, so you got these fifteen minute records of all their best material put on wax right there, and it’s all this perfectly tried and true stuff. So it’s great; it has all this heart and soul and a lot of feeling. I listen to those old rap records and literally get tears in my eyes just thinking about the situation that these people were in. You’ve got to understand what the climate was like in New York back in the ‘70s, and how all this funding was being cut from schools and there were no music departments, yet music was such a part of everybody’s lives. So what did they do? They just got together whatever they could, whatever could make some noise, and they figured out how to use that to be creative in their own ways. It’s remarkable.
And if you listen closely to those old records, you can tell that they’re absolutely taking their best shot, like they may never have this opportunity again, so they’re busting their asses. And that’s like a standup comic who goes around to the Chuckle Hut or the Funny Bone and they’re testing material out for their HBO show, or their record, or their appearance on David Letterman.
I identify with a lot of those folks because I also come from very humble means and was able to do some creative stuff. I see doing comics as similar in that it’s taking paper and pencil and making something new. At the end of the day, a page of comics develops that wasn’t there before, and that’s not that different from taking a drum beat from a James Brown record and then rapping over the top of it to create a completely new piece of material.
Then, my other interest is… I’m really fascinated with the viral aspects of how hip hop grew so huge in such a short amount of time, without any internet.
MARC SOBEL: I know in the most recent strips over the last couple of weeks you were talking about how the rise of MTV played a role.
ED PISKOR: Right. Yeah, and the strip I’m working on now, what it’s about is in 1981, there was this segment on 20/20, you know that show with Hugh Downs?
MARC SOBEL: Sure.
ED PISKOR: It talked about how ‘you hear this music all around, but what is it?’ They did this really fair, really insightful ten minute piece about hip hop and its origins, and they did such a good job for like 98% of the thing, but it’s hysterical because at the very end, when Steve Fox, the 20/20 correspondent, is summarizing everything, he makes some statement about the beauty of rap and how quaint it is. He’s like ‘not everybody can sing, but anybody can rap.’
MARC SOBEL: Would you describe your book as your personal version of the history of hip hop, or are you working from some generally accepted history of the music and the scene?
ED PISKOR: I guess that it’s a generally accepted view because I put this material out there on Boing Boing and it’s seen by the people who matter and nobody is calling shenanigans on any of it. I’m certainly not taking any controversial stances or anything like that. I’ve done very few interviews personally; I’m pulling from existing material, so I guess it is a generally accepted thing.
MARC SOBEL: So then what sets your book apart from the others?
ED PISKOR: I think the value that my book has and will have over time as I keep moving forward is that it really does stand a chance of being one of the most comprehensive histories of hip hop culture. There really isn’t one resource that includes all of this minutiae and stuff that I’m focusing on.
One of my favorite strips… There are maybe two that took literally days worth of research to yield the strip, but they’re all the better for it. First is the sequence where Kurtis Blow is on a world tour and, in the strip I have four different locations around the world, which I pulled from four different resources. For example, I found this interview where he was talking about being in France, and a different one where Russell Simmons is talking about when they were in Amsterdam, etc. So it’s pretty detailed, and I had to dig up that material in a bunch of different places to be able to put that strip together, but there’s a lot of pleasure in that for me.
Then there was another strip where there was a pretty important event in hip hop culture, but also in the fine art world, called the “Times Square show” that happened on the infamous “Forty Deuce,” and this is where Fab Five Freddy first hooked up with the director Charlie Ahern to start the ball rolling on making the Wild Style movie. It’s also before Keith Haring ever did a major public show so he’s still in SVA, but he’s there getting juiced with everybody, and that show also happened to be Jean Michel Basquiat’s first public exhibition of his artwork. So I pulled all that material from a bunch of different resources and was able to marry it together in the comic strip. All of those connections aren’t made anywhere else, as far as I know.
MARC SOBEL: How do you keep from getting lost in the details?
ED PISKOR: That’s where this weekly deadline comes in. That’s what’s keeping me on track. I realize that these pages take a certain amount of time to do and I have a certain allotment of research that I can do, and then I have to start putting pencil to paper. So that’s my mechanism for keeping me from literally falling in too deep.
MARC SOBEL: How deep into hip hop history do you plan to go?
ED PISKOR: I really want to go for a while. I hope my health holds up because my interest goes up to when Tupac and Biggie Smalls died. I’d love to take it up to their deaths because a lot of people who I respect, writers and journalists, they all pretty much agree that those two guys were the last of the MCs, so it would be cool to try to encapsulate everything up until then.
Hopefully I’m able to keep on this track with Fantagraphics and do these regular 112 page books. This first book covers ’75 to a nice portion of 1981, but there might be one whole book that only covers 1987, depending on how much stuff I uncover. So who knows? I’m just going to keep it going for as long as it’s fun, but ideally I would love to go up through a decade and a half or so. But each book is formatted so it can be its own thing, in case a fucking anvil falls on my head or something. Each book should be a full experience and if that’s a period of time that resonated with you, that’s all you’ll need.
MARC SOBEL: What inspired the family tree structure?
ED PISKOR: Have you watched The Wire?
MARC SOBEL: I finished the first season, but haven’t gone onto season two yet.
ED PISKOR: OK. Still in the first season, in the police office, they have that huge flowchart that connects all… like Wee-Bey’s connected to Stinkum?
MARC SOBEL: Right.
ED PISKOR: That was the inspiration. Because of my interest in hip hop and digging deeper to see how everybody was connected, I had this mental flowchart in my brain of how hip hop worked. If you take a look at the strips on boing boing, at the end there is this ever growing flowchart that connects each new hip hop dude who’s introduced in the book with the guys who are already established. So that was inspired by The Wire, after looking at that flowchart of organized crime in the Avon Barksdale family. I was like, ‘I’m going to put this flowchart together and let it grow to Chris Ware-ian proportions.’
MARC SOBEL: Is Fantagraphics going to do a big foldout of that?
ED PISKOR: I don’t know. We have to figure something out. I don’t know if they would be interested in doing something like that. Design-wise, I need to speak with somebody because right now that’s a conundrum. I need to figure out how to get the flowchart to work with the book somehow. I’m not sure how to do it. Maybe we can do a dust jacket or something and have it printed on the inside of that. I don’t want to do it on the endpapers because I have an idea of what I want those to look like. So I don’t know, but that’s definitely the latest creative challenge that I’ve got in the back of my mind.
MARC SOBEL: How did working with Harvey help you in terms of writing this book?
ED PISKOR: The Beats book was a great template for this project. I paid a lot of attention to the way he formatted the stories in that book. There’s very little linear, panel-to-panel, second-to-second storytelling. It’s a lot of captured moments, using captions and things like that, where a year’s worth of time can take place within the gutters between one panel and the next. So, I really paid a lot of attention to the specifics of the moments that he was capturing with the little bit of knowledge that I had about the beat generation, to see what he omitted and what he kept in to keep the reader’s interest. So that book in particular was a real big inspiration to help me format each page with the panel-to-panel transitions and stuff like that.
MARC SOBEL: Has the fact that you’re a white cartoonist drawing the history of a predominately black art form ever come up as an issue?
ED PISKOR: There have been times where guys fricking test me, at conventions and stuff, but I always rise to the occasion. I’ve done six or seven shows this year and at every one, people will come up and discover that I’m just a little white dude, and they’ll test me, but they can’t step to it. I invite challenge because I really do feel like my trivial knowledge is a little bit ridiculous when it comes to this stuff. So I’ve been proving myself with whoever’s come up and they seem satisfied with it.
MARC SOBEL: People just come up with obscure questions, or how exactly are they testing you?
ED PISKOR: It’s always older guys, mostly black dudes, and they’re like, ‘man, what do you know about the Cold Crush Brothers?’ So I’ll let them know what I know and then we start talking about, ‘well, who’s your favorite group?’ and it just develops naturally. I feel like, because it’s a conversation, you can’t fake that kind of shit. You have to have some knowledge. So I think that everybody I’ve talked to that’s come up to me has been satisfied that this comic is in good hands.
Also, everybody who has read it online… There’s been very little criticism, and there’s been absolutely zero criticism from anybody who counts in my opinion, like anybody in the hip hop world. Everybody digs it, and it’s people with stripes, like the Furious Five. Fab Five Freddy is down with it. I’m going to have this pull quote on the back cover… He shared one of my strips on his Facebook page, and he said, ‘being in an Ed Piskor comic is cool enough to freeze hot water,’ or something like that.
MARC SOBEL: Did you happen to go to the New York Comic-Con this year (2012)?
ED PISKOR: I didn’t, but I was invited to participate on that panel.
MARC SOBEL: Right, I was going to ask you about that. They had a panel called “Hip Hop and Comics: Cultures Combining.” What do you think of that? Do you feel like there’s this broad convergence between comics and hip hop?
ED PISKOR: I don’t know so much about a convergence, but… I don’t know if you ever saw that strip I did on boing boing that drew comparisons between rap music and comic books, but they have always felt synonymous to me. Comics, hip hop, and pro wrestling, for some reason, all seem like sister pieces of trash pop culture. You’re dealing with a lot of the same elements. Maybe it’s the ephemeral cheapness of the way it used to be back in the day. You know, comics were cheap, and ‘anybody can rap.’ That kind of lo-fi aspect. I’m not sure, but it seems like a no-brainer to have a panel like that. Also, in South Carolina they had Cola-Con last year, which married rap music and comics. Phife Dog was the guest of honor and they had a bunch of cool cartoonists come down, too.
They also both lend themselves well to obsessive trivia and collecting. Like, looking for all those old records and stuff, it was no different than rifling through comic book long boxes. Spending all this time in record stores digging through all this old crap for such and such’s first appearance is really no different than trying to find New Mutants #87 to see what it was like when Cable first popped on the scene.
MARC SOBEL: Do you see the concepts of sampling and mixing flowing into comic books at all?
ED PISKOR: I do in a lot of ways, and definitely within my own work. I was listening to Sammy Harkham’s panel at SPX where he was talking about, ‘in comics, if a certain scene comes up, let’s say you’re drawing a comic one way and then a car crash happens and you just have it in you to draw the most Geoff Darrow car crash, but that’s totally different from the rest of the story, even if you have that urge, you can’t do that.’ That’s a good description of what I have and what I need to get over because, I’ll read Akira, for example, and then the very next time there’s a part in the comic where I have to draw a speeding car, I’m going to reference some Akira stuff, like the way Otomo would draw a chase sequence or something like that.
So I definitely do see a lot of sampling in comics, and a lot of swiping, too. Like Bernie Wrightson who’s the child of Frank Frazetta and “Ghastly” Graham Ingels, or Kelly Jones who samples Wrightson, and, I mean this is something we could talk about forever.
MARC SOBEL: I guess there’s a fine line between being inspired by somebody and sampling their work, if you know what I mean. Like, take Dave Stevens, for example. I think everybody would agree that he was inspired by Frazetta, but did he actually swipe his work? That’s debatable.
ED PISKOR: Right, yeah. But then even Frazetta swiped Hal Foster multiple times. But I don’t see a problem with it so much. I do when its wholesale tracing, but there is room for homage and things like that.
MARC SOBEL: I guess what I’m driving at, though, is in hip hop, it’s common to literally take a segment of music from another song and merge it into your own song to create something new.
ED PISKOR: Right.
MARC SOBEL: But in comics, that would be a little less… or would it be less acceptable?
ED PISKOR: Well, it’s a weird fine line, and even in hip hop, there are guys who do it wrong and. I think purity of intent is the important factor. You can find any number of b-list Marvel guys who, in the ‘80s, were drawing like John Buscema and then in the ‘90s were trying to be like Jim Lee. And those guys are just fucking hack dorks. They were just trying to cash in on someone else’s style. But then there are guys who, like Art Adams, coming after Michael Golden, where he takes this initial thing and builds upon it, and that’s a cool thing.
In hip hop, there are dudes who basically did the same thing. Like Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh put out this record called “The Show and La Di Da Di,” and suddenly afterward all these records came out - and even Will Smith is guilty of doing a La Di Da Di-wannabe record - where it was like all you need to be successful is to have a guy beat boxing and then rhyme a story over the top of it and you’ll make a million dollars. There are a million examples, but you never hear of any of those records now because of that purity of intent. It was just people copying what was successful in pursuit of the almighty dollar and everyone saw through it. It didn’t have that spark, or whatever that x-factor is that gets people initially interested.
MARC SOBEL: That an interesting way to frame it.
ED PISKOR: You go to these comic conventions and you can just tell in two seconds… I just size people up and I feel like my gut instinct bats a very high average. You can see what people are about in how they carry themselves, or just by looking at their tables. There’s always a section of people who, they have maybe $100 worth of vinyl banners and signage and they have one hack comic on their table, and it’s like you will never see those people again. They won’t be there next year. They don’t have a clue and they’re going to be very disappointed that they’re not making a million dollars. There’s a scuzziness to it that’s just kind of gross.
“I Never Thought About That”
MARC SOBEL: One of the things I love about The Hip Hop Family Tree is the old school texture of the pages, and the overall feel of the art, with the yellowed newsprint effect, and that whole ‘70s aesthetic. I wondered how you create that?
ED PISKOR: I don’t know if he would be uncomfortable with me saying it, but a big mentor to me was my friend, Jim Rugg. He mastered that aesthetic of antiquing old comic pages and creating those visuals. In fact, ideally I would want Jim to draw this thing, but he’s not going to do it so I have to.
The other thing is the aesthetic of the coloring. I feel like my artwork is kind of rough. It doesn’t work with regular computer coloring, like the perfect paint bucket fill look; it’s incongruent with my artwork. My art is rough and not academically sound, so that style of coloring is too perfect for the wobbliness, or whatever it is that my art has. But the texture and grit of the old four color stuff lends well to my line. So …was your question how or why?
MARC SOBEL: How.
ED PISKOR: OK. So, what I do is, a while back I found this color chart that was indicative of the 64 colors that were used in old print comics for the four-color process, and I made a digital PSD file that people can use. And people did use it in good health to approximate digitally all the old colors of comics printing. Then I decided to take that a step further and create a 64 color swatch using these dot patterns, and what I would do was I’d grab a big swatch of yellow, grab a big swatch of cyan or blue, grab a big swatch of red or magenta, and mixing the different values, I created 64 swatches. It’s like eight Gigs worth of these color samples that you can just copy and paste underneath the line art. The way I got there was I just grabbed the Spider-Man vs. Superman Treasury comic and found a big swatch of yellow and scanned that in, and then made a big file of that. The red is Superman’s cape and the paper texture is from Hawkman #9.
Also, if you remember those old DC books, they would have huge margins where you’d just see a lot of newsprint, so I scanned in a couple chunks of that, hit it with the clone tool, and made a big file of newsprint page. But now that I’m putting the book together, I’m going to have to make maybe twenty or thirty different newsprint pages because the illusion gets ruined when you see the same little imperfections on every single page.
MARC SOBEL: What you’re describing to me, that’s sampling. That’s a straight-up example of the concept.
ED PISKOR: Yeah, you know, I never thought about that, but I like that a lot. I’m going to use that in interviews.
MARC SOBEL:
ED PISKOR: Yeah. For sure.
MARC SOBEL: So, you’re going to create twenty or thirty more templates for the background?
ED PISKOR: Yeah. It’s going to have to be twenty or thirty, and then I can flip them, so I can probably get four pages out of each file, or at least two. So there’s still a lot of work to do.
MARC SOBEL: How much do you rely on photos and visual reference for the art?
ED PISKOR: I’m going to start getting into that more because now I’m getting into the music video era. But for the early days it sucked because for some guys, there just weren’t a lot of photos so I had to fake it. For a couple of guys, there’s no published photos that I could find so I literally had to check the Facebook accounts of associated rappers and look through all their shit and just be like, ‘oh, so that’s what Rocky Ford looks like.’ But that photo that I might have pulled from could be very hazy so I’m not sure if I got it 100% right. So for this first book, I used very little photo reference because there isn’t that much material but in the subsequent volumes, everybody’s going to look more like who they’re supposed to be.
MARC SOBEL: What about in terms of the fashion and the clothing?
ED PISKOR: Oh yeah, sure. I definitely use a lot of reference for that stuff. And that’s pleasurable, too, because I just love that old hip hop fashion.
MARC SOBEL: Last question, and this is kind of a silly one, but when I Google your name, the first result I get is this picture of you sitting there naked at your drawing table. What is that all about?
ED PISKOR:
But, you know what that is from? Do you ever listen to Inkstuds, the Robin McConnell podcasts?
MARC SOBEL: Oh yeah. Of course.
ED PISKOR: That’s what that was from. The title “Inkstuds” cracks me up, and at the time, they were putting up examples of each artist’s work to go along with their interview, and, although I’m the only frigging douche bag who would do what I did, I was just like, ‘you know what? Fuck this, man. It’s called ‘Inkstuds’ so I’m just going to put this naked picture of me up there.’ It’s not like you can see anything. It was just funny to me.
See, the only thing I really take seriously in life is comics. Comics are so intensely important to me, but everything that goes along with comics, and pretty much life in general, it’s just silly. So doing a show called “Inkstuds,” I figured he should have a ridiculous photo to go along with it. Honestly I didn’t think the guy would even put it up, but he did and I couldn’t be happier.
X-Men: Grand Design
Publishers Weekly. 265.5 (Jan. 29, 2018): p177.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* X-Men: Grand Design
Ed Piskor. Marvel Entertainment, $29.99 trade paper (120p) ISBN 978-1-302-90489-0
This labor of love is a cohesive chronicle of the X-Men universe from genesis forward. "I'll now disclose everything I've observed about a very extraordinary pantheon of mutants," declares a godlike "watcher" in the opening. These world-saving heroes are hated by humanity for their differences (such as Wolverine's razor claws), which are also the source of their extraordinary powers. In a superhero parable on prejudice and bigotry, the X-Men, led by telepathic mentor Professor X, battles villains, aliens, and their own kind--mutants like Magneto who believe regular humans should be destroyed. Marvel's popular series encompasses 55 years of intricate narrative, myriad characters, and countless flashback plotlines that resist an easy historical overview. Much as Piskor masterfully took on the scope of rap music in his acclaimed Hip Hop Family Tree series, he synthesizes hundreds of (sometimes contradictory) tales and specific details generated by their hundreds of past creators, faithfully integrating it all into one entertaining story line. For example, he weaves together seamless varied plotlines involving longtime foe Dark Phoenix (subject of the next X-Men movie), a seductively destructive alien life form that threatens to tear the team and the Earth apart. The austere composition is refreshing, given a tendency towards overcomplicated layouts in the contemporary superhero genre. Each page mimics the look of an old issue, with brown-edged pages and Ben-Day color dots to reproduce the simple four-color printing process of comics' silver age, but Piskor takes only a few stylistic cues from the likes of Jack Kirby, Bill Everett, and Winsor McKay. The oversized treasury format presents the material in gloriously larger-than-life size. Back matter includes Piskor's childhood fan art and a reprint of 1963s first X-Men release, by Stan Lee and Kirby. Fans who have been following the X-Men since childhood will delight in Piskor's dedicated "grand design," and it's a luminous beacon for newcomers to join in the fun. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"X-Men: Grand Design." Publishers Weekly, 29 Jan. 2018, p. 177. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526116554/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5101c65b. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526116554
Piskor, Ed. X-Men: Grand Design
Jason L. Steagall
Xpress Reviews. (Apr. 27, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
[STAR]Piskor, Ed. X-Men: Grand Design. Marvel. Apr. 2018. 120p. ISBN 9781302904890. pap. $29.99; ebk. ISBN 9781302503680. COMICS
Alternative comics writer and illustrator Piskor (Hip Hop Family Tree) brings his unique artistry to the X-Men universe, here taking previously published story lines written by giants such as Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Chris Claremont that involve the X-Men and putting them together into one coherent narrative. Characters Watcher and Recorder narrate the entire story from afar as they orbit the earth. The origins of Professor X and Magneto are examined as are the beginnings of several X-Men favorites. Heroes include Cyclops, Jean Grey, the Angel, Iceman, and the Beast, as they battle many foes, including Toad, the Blob, and the Juggernaut. The overarching story includes the powerful Phoenix Force as it travels to Earth seeking its new physical host. Piskor's illustrations reflect his retro-pop art style, which makes the panels visually enthralling. Volume 1 collects XMen Grand Design issues 1-2 as well as the 1963 first issue of X-Men, newly colored by Piskor.
Verdict Fans of Piskor's previous work, X-Men enthusiasts, and especially new readers trying to understand the provenance of the characters and series will thoroughly enjoy this well-designed volume.--Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Steagall, Jason L. "Piskor, Ed. X-Men: Grand Design." Xpress Reviews, 27 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537404955/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e83fffa3. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537404955
Ed Piskor breaks down X-Men history with style in this Grand Design exclusive
Oliver Sava
12/22/17 10:00amFiled to: comics
17
1
Image: Marvel Comics
Two years ago, cartoonist Ed Piskor posted a tweet stating that he had an idea to condense 300 issues of X-Men comics into a 300-page story, and Marvel took notice. Piskor has earned a lot of acclaim for his Hip-Hop Family Tree series chronicling the history of hip-hop music with meticulous detail and bold style, and he gets to apply his skills to one of superhero comics’ most convoluted properties with X-Men: Grand Design, a five-issue miniseries that gives him complete creative control. Written, drawn, colored, and lettered by Piskor, this title is a showcase for his multifaceted talent, and it’s one of the most personal, intriguing projects Marvel has put out in recent memory.
The first issue of Grand Design hit stands earlier this week, establishing the early days of the Marvel Universe and its team of mutants while also incorporating the multitude of retcons made by later X-Men creators. No one has tried to create a definitive timeline of the X-Men that streamlines all of this history into a single accessible story, and Piskor highlights the complex narrative that developed over the course of 300 issues of superhero plots.
This exclusive preview of X-Men: Grand Design #2, on sale January 3, explores a lesser known era of the team as it chronicles their battle against Mutant Master, a storyline that unfolded when the X-Men were at one of their lowest points of popularity in the late ’60s. It would be years before Uncanny X-Men would become a hit with the introduction of a new group of mutants in the classic Giant-Size X-Men #1, but there are some fascinating concepts introduced in these earlier issues. The joy of Grand Design is seeing these concepts explored through Piskor’s unique point of view, and these pages give him the opportunity to embrace the explosive energy of Silver Age superhero storytelling. The series is a rollicking action-adventure but also a tribute to the work done by past X-Men creators, and Piskor’s appreciation and passion for these characters and their world comes through in every page.