The Racialicious Review Of New York Comic-Con

• “We’re starting on time,” said Patrick Reed, moderating the Hip-Hop and Comics panel, “which might be a first for a hip-hop event in NYC.” The panel featured Darryl ‘DMC’ McDaniels, Pete Rock, Johnny ‘Juice’ Rosado, and Adam Wallenta who were seated for the beginning of the panel. They were joined later by Ron Wilson, Ron Wimberly, and Jean Grae–but the panel did start on time.
  

  Rapper Darryl “DMC” McDaniels

• Darryl McDaniels started, proving to be a master storyteller as he related his personal evolution from a nerdy kid who identified with Peter Parker to a member of RUN DMC who ended up selling his comic-book collection for DJing equipment. The audience receieved quite a few long and hilarious stories from McDaniels, who unfortunately had to leave about twenty minutes early.
• “We were like the X-Men of hip-hop, being from Long Island,” Rosado explained at one point. “We were outcasts.” Yet, Rosado insisted, the borough of Long Island changed the way people looked at hip-hop the way the X-Men changed the way people looked at comics.
• McDaniels tied into the point well later, pointing out that one of the reasons that Marvel was so successful was its basis in the reality of New York City. Without fictional locales like Metropolis and Gotham to fall back on, Marvel heroes “repped” New York City in the same way rappers used to “rep” their hometowns (McDaniels was quick to emphasize the past tense of his point, also saying that one of the reasons hip-hop isn’t the same today as it was is because rappers don’t care about being positive representatives of where they’re from anymore).
• Thinking of the obvious connections, I was expecting someone to mention the Static Shock cartoon of my childhood right from the start. There was a comic turned into a fairly mainstream cartoon whose hero really did fight to a hip-hop beat. According to Johnny Rosado, that’s the way it was intended. After envisioning the Public Enemy crew as a sort of Avengers or X-Men of the rap world, he realized he needed to do his part by “kicking [the listener's] ass with scratching.” He thought of himself as an comic artist, except his ‘panels’ were Public Enemy’s verses and hooks.
• Jean Grae reveals that she literally grew up above a comic book store, which was the cause of so much of her geekiness as a kid (she read Love and Rockets at a “too early” age). Like Rosado, she allowed comic panels to influence her rapping. Lacking the money for videos when started putting out albums, she knew that her writing had to be visual enough to hold a new listener’s attention. In other words, her lyrics needed to illustrate the panels because they didn’t have a video camera to do so.
• It became easier to visually notice the connection between rap and comics when new styles of art started to seep into the books in the 1990s. The change was obvious when the Kirby- and Romita-like style that had dominated books since the early golden era became peppered with panels from other artists that had clear graffiti and other non-white (manga mentioned specifically) influences.
• As graffiti artists tagged walls around New York City, the heroes of comics always had a tag before their names. McDaniels talked about how hearing the names the Incredible Hulk and the Amazing Spider-Man influenced rappers who were trying to choose memorable names. As Batman and Robin became The Dark Knight and the Boy Wonder, Afrika Bambaataa became Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation, and Grandmaster Flash became Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Jam Master Jay’s name came only after McDaniels realized the connection and actually wrote Jay a theme song of sorts, based on the superhero cartoon themes of the 1970s. Pete Rock looked to different superheroes’ attributes to inspire his persona, telling us that he took the Hulk’s strength and applied it to his own drive.
• One of the best contributions came from Ron Wimberly, who admitted that he was “miffed when his book was labeled as a hip-hop book” because that’s not what he was setting out to do and, if anything, The Prince of Cats was more Shakespearean than anything else. However, after sitting on the panel he said he realized that it all just came back around to the art of sampling. Like Jay-Z sampling a hook from Annie, comic books often sample from other genres (whether they can admit to it or not) and mold those samples to fit in to a comic’s constraints. Wimberly goes into this in more detail than the panel’s constraints allowed over at Comics Alliance.
• The panel finished with brief mentions of two topics that I wish they’d had time to get into in more detail: Reed acknowledged the problematic aspects of only having one female on the panel and pointed out that both hip-hop and comics are industries where the female voice is downplayed and not taken as seriously. This was followed by the assertion that, like many hero-origin stories, hip-hop was born partially in violence (via street gangs) but that history is always conveniently forgotten when the stories are being cleaned up and presented to American audiences.

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