James Reitano grew up in Santa Cruz, California, and Nineteen Eighty-Five is his semi-autobiographical tale of a teenager attempting to experience and participate in graffiti culture while living in a small seaside town. It’s a unique kind of historical Hip-Hop fiction, a not-quite-first-person account of searching for a place in the world, seeking out the unfamiliar and exciting, and finding yourself in the first stirrings of a growing subculture.
Reitano’s stand-in spends his days in school and his evenings spray-painting walls, striving to improve his craft, impress his peers, and find new and better spots to throw up murals. In this pre-internet era, information about artists and techniques is passed along like state secrets and treated like gold – the Hip-Hop mecca of New York City might as well be another planet.
He and his crew make the best of it, though. They hang out at the video arcade, go record shopping, dance at the only club in town, watch a grainy multi-generational VHS of Style Wars, and paint every chance they get – partly for kicks, but mostly just to be creating, doing art for the sake of art. And the entire proceedings have an authentic feel of being young, waiting around, and looking for excitement wherever you can find it. The stories meander and wander through a sequence of disconnected anecdotes and scenes, the leisurely pace of day-to-day beachfront life interrupted only by the occasional frantic escape from night watchmen and police officers (who never quite understand the artistic merit of illegal graffiti). It’s a blend of personal history and historical context; more than simply snapshots of 80s life, it immerses you in a place and time. And that feel is enhanced even further by the CDs that come included with each volume: custom-made period soundtracks, compiled and mixed by top-flight DJs Peanut Butter Wolf, Kutmasta Kurt, DJ Imperial, and Bubba G. Scotch.
In these books, Reitano takes the power of memory and uses it to create a world of sound and color, creating a document of 1980s life that’s evocative without being romanticized. The art and story are wide-open enough to be universal: the thin black lines and simple, sparse writing flash us back to a time before Hip-Hop went global – when it was still just gangs of kids running around, trying to make something of their own.
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In addition to his ongoing work on Nineteen Eighty-Five, Reitano has collaborated with MF Doom and Madlib, directing and animating Madvillain’s “All Caps” video and illustrating the comic book insert in the Madvillainy 2 LP; he did the cover art and a pair of videos (“We All Over” and “Let Me Talk To You”) for Kutmasta Kurt’s Masters Of Illusion album; he masterminded clips for Cut Chemist, Peanut Butter Wolf, and Stones Throw Records; and he wrote and illustrated an official Gza graphic novel (that never ended up seeing the light of day). He has an obvious passion for (and deep understanding of) the comics and Hip-Hop forms, and he keeps finding new and astounding ways of mixing them together.
Nineteen Eighty-Five volumes 1-4 are available to order thru Retiano’s website; volume five is slated for release later in 2013.