Hip Hop Family Tree: The Omnibus

Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree has been a global phenomenon and perennial bestseller since the first (of four) volumes was published in 2013, spawning multiple printings, fourteen comic books, and the author’s wildly popular YouTube comics channel, Cartoonist Kayfabe (with fellow cartoonist Jim Rugg). Yet the series has never been collected under one cover. Until now.

This omnibus collection includes the original 360-page series with over 140 pages of extra material: a cover gallery of every HHFT book and comic book cover and back cover Piskor ever created, pages from the HHFT comic book series that have never been collected, new annotations of the entire series by Piskor, and much more. Plus, it features a foreword by Charlie Ahearn and an afterword by Bill Adler.

Hip Hop Family Tree is the entertaining, encyclopedic history of the formative years of the music genre that changed global culture. Piskor’s cartooning crackles like Kirby and takes you from the parks and rec rooms of the South Bronx to the night clubs, recording studios, and radio stations where the scene started to boom, capturing the flavor of late 1970s New York City in panels bursting with obsessively authentic detail. With a vigorous and engaging Ken Burns-meets-Stan Lee approach, the battles and rivalries, the technical innovations, the triumphs and failures are all thoroughly researched and lovingly depicted. Like the acclaimed hip hop documentaries Style Wars and Scratch, Hip Hop Family Tree is an essential cultural chronicle and a must for hip hop fans, pop-culture addicts, and anyone who wants to know how it went down back in the day.