Knowledge reigns supreme over nearly everybody (except fanboys, of course)

How the hell did I miss this?

And You Don't Stop: VH1's new documentary on the history and evolution of hip hop. As soon as I leave work today (I'm headed to the Poconos to help my father and grandmother move), I'm setting up my VCR to record all five hours that air tomorrow.

Anyone who knows me knows I love hip hop. In fact, if it wasn't for hip hop, jazz, and standards, I probably wouldn't listen to much music at all. While I enjoy just about every musical style (except contemporary country, which I just can't wrap my head around), nothing really hits me like the aforementioned genres.

This spotlight on hip hop pleases me; if anything, I hope it at least leads to Grandmaster Flash getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (he's eligible this year, I read recently). However, it does make me curious:

Where are all the comics fans that dig hip hop? Where are all the hip hop comics?

A few months ago, I had planned a column on the parallels between development in hip hop and comics (and there are tons of specious connections similar in tone to the Lincoln/Kennedy comparrison, which are just fun - for example, DeWitt Clinton High School, the alma mater of Stan Lee, Will Eisner and other golden age era creators is located in the neighborhood often credited with the modern graffiti tradition), but it never materialized. Hopefully, I'll get around to it at some point.

This train of thought came back to me through a conversation I had with a few people regarding Blokhedz, a comic from Street Legends Ink. Now, looking at their website, these guys are marketing directly to the hip hop audience, which is great - hip hop has embraced comic book iconography (and by that I mean superheroes, of course) more than any other form of popular music. It's a good thing that they sell through their website, though, because there aren't a lot of direct market stores carrying it. Like KRS-One would say, "Why is that?"

Forget, for a minute, that Blokhedz is a comic with hip hop influence. It's more than that. It makes better use of magic realism than most other comics using that technique. The art is a great blend of anime, graffiti and contemporary comic book influences. For the cats that don't buy independent comics because they aren't "slick" enough, Blokhedz is as quality a print job as one finds in the super-slick mainstream production, even if it's only in black-and-white. While typing this and talking to Matt Maxwell, he pointed out something I'd like to see: Blokhedz collected in a manga/digest format, which is demonstrating crossover appeal outside the direct market, who don't seem ready to embrace books outside their normal purview.

Let's talk about the elephant in the room: the comics audience often appears reticent to pick up what is perceived as a "black" book, and, even more so, a "hip hop" book (to be fair to the more fanboyish, though, they really don't seem to embrace most things not involving guys in tights beating one another up). I still have trouble believing that the outcry over Morales and Baker's The Truth was over continuity issues, and not over making a black man a pre-Rogers Captain America. I mean, continuity? Come on - what makes that retcon not OK? People can't even agree on that - there are some that think it's OK to change the tone of every JLA comic because of Identity Crisis, but the same people are outraged over Gwen Stacy getting some Goblin-nookie in Amazing Spider-Man #512? Personally, I don't care either way on either retcon - I've no attachment to these characters. But, if the desired direction of continuity is something that isn't completely fixed to one application, then I have trouble accepting that the controversy surrounding Truth is based solely on issues with continuity.

Let's face it - comic book fans, by and large, are a cowardly, superstitious lot. The first interview with the creators of Blokhedz I came across was at Newsarama, where the reaction was, sadly, unsurprising. Let's just quote the first response:

Nice. Nothing we need more than the contiued glorification of gangland violence and crappy grammar. Not to mention the fact that here is one more art team that doesen't feel the need to actually be able to draw to put out a book. There is a difference between exaggeratted and lazy as far as styles go, and while I think that there are some decent things in this preview, for the most part I think it's just gonna be one more style that other novice artists are going to use to cop out of actually learning how to draw or tell a story. The font is great too, and by great I mean almost completely illegible. Maybe they're trying to cash in on the untouched rap/urban audience as far as comics go, but good luck going up against the full color, moving images of thugs and ho's booty shakin' on MTV or BET with your black & white comic book. No, I'm not "playa hatin ' ", I just think if your trying to reach a crossover audience, you should present a better product. Good luck, you're gonna need it. I'm not trying to start some infantile flame war either, I've said pretty much all I need to I think.

Aside from the crappy grammar of said post, there are a lot of troubling aspects to the reaction. For one, there was no "contiued glorification of gangland violence" in the interview, or in the book itself. As far as the grammar goes, I'm not going to go off on one of my tirades in defense of cultural or regional dialect because that would be boring. Not to mention my favorite: "Maybe they're trying to cash in on the untouched rap/urban audience as far as comics go, but good luck going up against the full color, moving images of thugs and ho's booty shakin' on MTV or BET with your black & white comic book." Because, you know, god forbid anyone outside the current denizens of the fanboy lanscape started picking up comics... not to mention entirely dismissing hip hop on the basis of a few artists.

Not just for my sake, but for the diversity of the industry, I'd like to see more comics like this on the stands. @Large, a hip hop manga, is a start, but that work fails on so many levels. Jim Mahfood's hip hop influenced bits are golden, but that isn't enough for me. If anyone knows of any comics geared primarily towards a hip hop audience, I'd be all ears.