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When Ed Piskor Applied To The Extreme Studios Talent Competition Wanting To Be The Next Chap Yaep

Published Sun, 07 May 2017 12:00:27 -0500

Ed Piskor has created quite the cottage industry at Fantagraphics, with the Hip-Hop Comics history titles combining the visual imagery of nineteen eighties Marvel comics with the history of that musical form.

But in December, he is turning that spotlight on himself, looking at his own life in an autobiographical volume, Mudfish, that mirrors his two greatest comic book influences, Robert Crumb and Rob Liefeld.

A preview of the upcoming volume appeared in yesterday's World Greatest Cartoonists volume from Fantagraphics, already picking up heat for featuring the death of the character Pepe The Frog at the hands of creator Matt Furie, in the light of his being co-opted by the alt-right movement.

And in it, we discover that Piskor applied to the Extreme Talent Search competition, Rob Liefeld's company, who at the time was looking for new artists…

What happened next? Wait till December to find out!

Or read this Comics Journal interview…

Recently I sent a bunch of my friends this clipping from an old Entertainment Weekly from around that time where, there was this guy named Chap Yaep, who drew Team Youngblood.

MARC SOBEL: I remember that guy.

ED PISKOR: Yeah. He was 19, so he was only a couple years older than us, and the article was like, 'Cartoonist rookie stands a chance at making $250,000 this year.' <laughter> That's f-cking crazy, man, but we were all like 'yo, we're gonna be f-cking billionaires drawing this stuff.' So me and all these dudes, we were submitting work to the Extreme Studios talent search to try to get an opportunity to draw Brigade comics, or Bloodstrike, or whatever.

MARC SOBEL: Wow.

ED PISKOR: It was pretty cool. So a bunch of us were always drawing and we would show each other stuff, but… We were encouraging in as much as we'd bust on each other. Like, 'dude, you suck, man. It looks like you drew an arm where his leg's supposed to be.' <laughter> Then another dude would be like, 'Ah, you're a f-cking dick,' and then everybody'd just keep drawing. But eventually those dudes discovered chicks or something like that whereas I was just stubborn enough to keep going. I think I recognized that with each little piece I was drawing, my stuff was getting a little better. So that was incentive enough to keep going.