During San Diego Comic Con, I had the pleasure of sitting down with comic book and graphic novel creators Tim Fielder and Walter Greason to discuss their latest collaboration — The Graphic History of Hip Hop.
Tim Fielder is an Illustrator, concept designer, cartoonist, and animator born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and raised in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He has a lifelong love of visual Afrofuturism, pulp entertainment, and action films. Dr. Walter Greason is a DeWitt Wallace Professor in the Department of History at Macalester College and is the preeminent historian of Afrofuturism, the Black speculative arts, and digital economies in the world today.
I was thrilled to have the privilege of speaking with these two to discuss this incredible project.
Tell me about your book and why it’s so relevant to talk about hip hop now?
Walter: Hip hop is the voice of youth. But more than that; it’s the voice of change, it’s the voice of revolution. And that’s what we’re seeing come around cycle after cycle, generation after generation. What this book does is it gives a formal way for young people and older people to connect and tap into that spirit where they stand up for themselves, that defiance, that determination. When we teach that, we expand freedom for everybody.
What is it specifically in this book that we’re learning or untapping that’s different?
Tim: One of the things that’s really fabulous about the graphic history format, with books like March and Stamped [from the Beginning] by Joel Christian Gill and Andrew Aydin, is that this is the contribution in a large format to not just the history of hip hop in its form, but how it has a geopolitical effect over the entire planet. So once you see this book and others read into it, they’ll see how hip hop as a form is fantastic and how it intersected with very important incidents that happened throughout history.
Are there specific, notable figures in hip hop that you mention in your book?
Walter: All throughout the entire text. Every single page. So it’s not just the politics and the culture. The way I do social history certainly is a piece. But we built it around, even before hip hop, James Brown. First page is Gil Scott Heron, Last Poets. We’re framing how the entire movement took shape and built the lives that we live. So yes, every single page, Biggie’s got a central appearance. We’re talking about the evolution of the Black Godfathers on that page.
Tim: Also, I would add that when Walter picked me to work with this book, initially it started through the Civics for All group with the New York City Department of Education. We owned the IP, took that 24-page comic and expanded it into this 92-page graphic novel. So you know me from Infinitum and Matty’s Rocket. So my objective was basically taking that history. This guy’s been teaching hip hop since 1994. So it was to take his words and to make them blend between the words and the pictures. In this book, I must have painted 200 to 250 individual operators in the hip hop form. All the way from, of course, Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur, Salt-N-Pepa, and it goes on and on.
Where do we learn in your book that hip hop started?
Walter: So the educators who brought us in to feature the book and do the training and professional development for the teachers who would then offer lessons on this, the very first comment was, you don’t see Kool Herc until page 10. You’re going through an entire history lesson of the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, before you ever get to this moment when a lot of these social forces come together. And so when you come to starting with the Last Poets, how do you ignore the spoken word tradition and the emergence of the Black arts movement? We get requests to come and focus on particular cities. There’s just voices and talent nationwide that are building community, especially in the wake of civil rights legislation. And that’s what’s actually opening the door for people, even if they’re unemployed, even if they’re coming out of jail, that they start to see, “I’m going to find a way to rebuild my life and actually build something better that couldn’t exist before.” And that’s the heart of the book.
Who is this book for?
Tim: Well, from a technical point of view, it’s actually marketed and built for 11th graders. But because we kind of really stretched the boundaries of what was possible in terms of the graphic visual part, we have found that audiences from all over have been able to get into this book. I’ll explain. Imagine a person who is an executive for a Fortune 500 company, arguing with you about what needs to be in the book. I mean, it’s funny, but what it is is that everyone is so passionate about it. Meaning, it was about not trying to necessarily make the most pencil accuracy. It’s about trying to get the feel. Because hip hop means so many different things to everyone. So it’s about capturing the feel of everyone’s history and their feelings about hip hop.
Walter: Yeah, my target audience for this was families, period. It’s particularly about African American families, African diaspora families that come to the table and have lived through this and gone through generations of experience. And hip hop marks huge moments in their lives. Birth of a child, weddings, funerals. Hip hop encompasses all these things that make us human beings. But what I’ve been amazed to see is that people around the world really respond to it. So we have people calling me from Germany, from the UK. We have folks calling me from different parts of the African continent. The only folks I’m waiting on are the folks in Japan. Where are my anime people?
Tim: It’s coming.
You can order your copy of The Graphic History of Hip Hop here.
