One of Hip-Hop’s defining qualities is its very lack of easy definition. It’s a style, it’s a culture, it’s an attitude. Common usages of the term are applied to fashion, to dance, to visual art, to film, to people, to speech, to music. The criteria of what qualifies as Hip-Hop is purely subjective, and is the answer is determined equally by a work’s content and by the audience it reaches.
Sanford Greene and Chuck Brown’s Rotten Apple is undoubtedly a Hip-Hop comic book, though it doesn’t feature rapping, DJing, breakdancing, or most of the other details that are usually used to define and describe the culture. Sure, the lead character wears hoop earrings, a baseball cap, and sneakers, and the logo on the cover is a riff on graffiti lettering – but the core concept is sugar-buzzed near-future dystopian sci-fi, full of masks, monks, mercenaries, and martial arts battles.
So it’s not the content that makes Rotten Apple a Hip-Hop comic – it’s the feel. The style, the sensibility, and the spirit is as funky and freewheeling as can be. The story begins with our protagonist heroine San Gee in the midst of battling a horde of zombies, and the pace stays furious throughout, leaping from scene to scene and fight to fight. And there’s plenty of relatable notes built in, ensuring the reader never loses their way: a quest for an artifact of unimaginable power, samurai sword battles, mysterious strangers and giant monsters. These pieces of pulp culture are mixed, remixed, shuffled and stacked to create a supercharged fusion of images and ideas. Brown and Greene skillfully combine familiar elements to make something new and exciting – and that’s just about as Hip-Hop as it gets.
The first Rotten Apple story was originally published in Dark Horse Presents Vol. 2, issues 2-5, and has since been reprinted as a stand-alone comic. A new Rotten Apple one-shot is due later in 2014 – stay tuned to Sanford Greene’s Twitter for updates!
This baaaangin’! Could you imagine this story and its style in an animated form?