Have you read “Grand Design”, Ed Piskor’s remix of the X-Men’s epic history? You must, even if you’re not into Marvel’s legendarium, because it’s amazing work. Not just a more engaging distillation of the characters and their history than the movies, either. With Ed’s style and wit, it’s like something from a parallel world where the X-Men were alt comics. Truly uncanny!
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…
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.
It’s in comic stores right now, with a second issue imminent.