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.