We’re starting a interview series, focusing on underground comic book creators. It’s our way of exposing my peoples to hot new artists they might not know about. These ILLYVIEWS will give you a different perspective on the comics game, exposing artists you’ve probably never heard of before and letting them give opinions you won’t read in mainstream press.

For our very first illyview, we wanted to talk to Jamar Nicholas, the creator of Detective Boogaloo. Jamar has always shown Type Illy a ton of love, and we felt like his incredible work deserved more shine. After you check out the article, go hit up his website and click on the Detective Boogalo series about a million times. Thanks!

• Before I ask ANYTHING, I gotta get the native Philly perspective: Who should the Eagles get rid of: Donovan? Reid? Both? Neither? And do you wish Reid would RUN THE BALL MORE as much as I do?

See, it’s tough to say that we should dump Reid (notice I didn’t say McNabb) - Looking at the stats - he’s one of the top level coaches, and the Iggles are (usually) feared in the league. You play them, you’re probably going to lose. It’s just that they can’t Close, and that’s the dealbreaker in Philly. I’d love to see Chucky, John Gruden run the birds, with McNabb retiring here. Reid ain’t my favorite coach, so there ya go.

• First, some old school hip hop questions: Keep it real with me, dawg: was the transform scratch REALLY created in Philly?

As far as I know and will repeat, Jazzy Jeff created the Transformer Scratch. Philly is known for the illest rappers, even DJ’s! Jeff, Tat Money, DJ Miz (FRESHCO and MIZ Don’t Play) DJ Too Tuff, etc. Where else would it have been created?

• Also, who was better in their prime - Jazzy Jeff or Cash Money?

I think Jazzy Jeff’s career is slept on. Most cats know Jeff as the dude that gets tossed out of Uncle Phil’s house. One of the greatest DJ’s to do it.

• Philly was very influential in the development of early hip hop…Who were your favorite Philly acts and why doesn’t Philly get as much love as New York and LA?

Easy - Three Times Dope, The Legendary ROOTS Crew, Hilltop Hustlaz (Cool C, Steady B) There’s MAD Philly rappers, even Charli Baltimore, EVE, etc. They’re not on my list, but they’re from here. I think P!NK is from Philly too, but it’s whatever. Black Thought is in my top 5 emcees of all time, which is funny, because he sat behind me in english class in high school.

Philly is the nexus of a LOT of stuff, but NY gets the authentic love. Hell, the Graffiti movement began here in Philly. Stand Up CORNBREAD! NY and Philly have a lot in common, but Philly is a tough town that has always lived in the shadow of other towns. We do our own thing though, We make and the world takes - just like Trenton. Philly is a hip hop cornerstone. People who don’t know better just think about Will Smith, but those people need to do their homework.

I think LA is on a whole other thing. They got a lot of credit just for being the opposite pole of what the East was about. Some of my favorite West Coast rappers sound like East Coast, like Hieroglyphics, the Alkoholics, etc. Del is another one of my favorite emcees.

• Nas said ‘Hip Hop is dead. Was he right? If he was, what Frankenstein’s it back to life?

When I was younger, I couldn’t imagine not listening to the radio. Now I listen to the ‘old head’ station, like Steve Harvey in the morning. I don’t listen to any of the Bangin’ Hip Hop channels - it’s straight trashmilk, as far as Im concerned. Hip Hop lives in each of us, like the Force or something else supernatural that you can’t explain. It’s like ‘Swagger’ which is the new (old?) word for Cool. And that’s always going to be an individual thing, even if the music is going through something, the other elements are still here and moving.

You can really see that the black artists for the most part have fumbled rap, and the white underground/backpack guys seem to have picked it up and ran the other way with it for a score. Atmosphere, Brother Ali (He’s white, right? I know he’s albino, but thats not a race) I even kind of like Asher Roth. They’re more interesting than Weezy. Not that it’s a race thing, but this is nobody’s fault but ours.

I don’t think commercial rap can be saved. I’ve still got my purple tape, so I could care less what happens!

• Let’s move on to comics - of all your work, Detective Boogaloo is my favorite. What inspired
  ‘Detective Boogaloo’ THE COMIC?

BOOGALOO is my study of rap music. It’s the Caine and Abel story told through the veil of music. Boogaloo is Old School hip hop and the world he lives in is New. It’s a class struggle on different levels. I enjoy taking stabs at the new hip hop culture and how silly it all is. I know that we looked silly then, but it was ours - fresh and never done before. Boogaloo is that part of my subconscious that deals with music. I have other properties that deal with other topics, but Boogaloo is one of the dearest and precious to me.

• ‘Detective Boogaloo’ lives in a very distinct world that’s different than say GOTHAM CITY or METROPOLIS? Describe the world he lives in and what inspired it.

BLING CITY sounds just like what it’s made to be - and getting frighteningly close to reality. This city is Philly, NYC, wherever - in my minds’ eye it’s very east coast - and polluted with a hip hop culture that spread out without any restraint. The newscasters, such as Brent Brockensmith is a white guy in a suit with a basketball jersey slipped over it, and tight cornrows in his hair. It’s the deathknell mashup of the end of common sense and freedom of speech/conformity wrapped in hip hop ’self-expression’.

• How much has Philly - as a city and a musical outpost - informed your art?

One thing I get a lot of notice for is my color theory, or use of color in my comics. That is ALL philly and graffiti. I was a 6th grade, wide-eyed kid who got introduced to hip hop like it slapped me in the kitchen of my neck - all of a sudden there was this world where any oddball colors of markers you could find could make a dope graffiti scheme. That and hip hop videos have fouled any ‘proper’ design sense.

Another is that there is no love in Philly. This is such a creative town - lots of people with untapped talent which hone it to such a sharp point because there’s no patronizing pats on the back - nobody gives you fake praise here. You’re either dope, or you go home. That’s why so many high-end rappers come out of Philly - you’re not allowed to create garbage here. If you do, then you’re to the curb.

• If you could take one mainstream character from Marvel and one from DC and re-do them, who would it be and what would you do?

Somebody asked me that before, but I forgot my answer. It’d probably be Iceman and Green Lantern. They’re pretty cool but could be flipped.

• What inspired the BBWW blog (Big, beautiful Wonder Woman?) How’s the response been? Any new Big Beautiful Blogs in the works?

The story goes like this - Cartoonists keep sketchbooks just like fans do, of their favorite artists. Our sketchbooks are usually filled with odd ‘themes’ - just weird stuff to make your pals draw after being confronted with 30 requests for Catwoman over the course of a comic convention. I started one called Fat Wonder Woman. It was just a mashup of words, and it was kinda funny. I like big girls, and Wonder Woman is supposed to be an icon of female ‘everything’, so it seemed like a cool theme.

The blog came about after pals kept telling me to make a blog of the sketches. I never thought It’d be going into its’ 3rd year on the interwebs, and have close to 250,000 unique visits. I get submissions from all over the world, like Brazil, Denmark, Greece, etc. I enjoy the international artists the most, because other places have a whole other take on what Wonder Woman is supposed to mean. She IS america to some. But if she’s fat, and being portrayed in a sexy, strong way - that blows people’s minds!

I’ve had hundreds of people stumble onto the site via google, and want a laugh, then get humbled when they realise how most of the artists have chosen to draw these spectacular renditions of a powerful woman, who happens to not look like a pretzel rod. Some cats can’t handle that. I enjoy the questions it poses. I look at myself as a curator of the blog at this point, as I collect submissions from around the world and hang them on my wall, so-to-speak as I see fit.

Jamar doing BIG THINGS:

• You currently host the GLYPH awards - how’d that happen and what’s that like?

From being in the indy comics circle since 1997, I’ve befriended a wide array of people. People who stayed around in comics – some who fell off, but all of them really dedicated to the craft and medium. One entity was Rich Watson – I bought some of his comics at a SPX in 1999 or something, and really dug it. So come to find out years later he’s running a popular blog about the black experience/artists in comics, and also hooked in with the ECBACC (East Coast Black Age of Comics Con) here in Philly. Rich didn’t like hosting an awards show, I like to run my mouth, and I also have been known to throw a joke or two around. Rich felt it was a perfect fit.

I’ll tell you something – it’s really scary at first. This will be my third year hosting this Spring, and the first year I hosted, I had the shakes and understood what comedians go through with the idea that bombing is worse than death – and I thought I’d pass out on the stage. But my pal Keef Knight (The Knight Life, K Chronicles) gave me some great advice: He told me to get up there and act like I’m just having a conversation with a room full of pals. I was fine after that. I may have been a little cocky the second time and I felt like the crowd wasn’t feeling me as much as the first, but some of the guests in attendance had this look on their faces like I needed to play the spoons or something – they wanted ENTERTAINMENT, so whatever I did wouldn’t be good enough. Folded arms and the Twist-Face, you know the look! This all could reside in my head and I did fine, but I’ll never know. . .

• You just got a book deal? Word? How’d that happen? Tell us about it.

The short: it came across my desk in a few different ways that Beacon Press was looking for a cartoonist to adapt Geoffrey Canada’s FIST STICK KNIFE GUN memoirs into a sequential art format. I got in touch with the publisher, and then had to submit a proposal, along with sample pages and the whole nine. I was picked from a pool of other cartoonists up for the gig by Mr. Canada and here we are. I’m very excited about the project and have already begun the adaptation. It’s due to be completed at the end of 2009, so we’re out of the gate.

• Been doing any podcasts or interviews recently?

Oddly enough, I’ve had a full dance card lately! I just completed an hour-long interview on Webcomics News & Interviews, a podcast, was a guest on the Handsome Genius Club [http://handsomegeniusclub.blogspot.com/] and am slated to be a guest on Kent Haines’ live comedy talkshow “Why am I not Famous?!?” here in Philadelphia at the end of March. It’s an improv theatre thing, so I’ll be on stage in front of an audience, mainly talking about BBWW. The blog has a lot of fans among the local Philly comedy set.

• What else is popping off for you?

I’ve come to a place in my career now where I’ve stopped trying to grease up things I haven’t done yet, or Big Up a lot of things which have yet to see the light of day. I have my hands full with projects, and a few things that haven’t been completed from last year. I’m just looking forward while trying to tidy up the past. Onward and Upward!

The modern day MULE BONE question (aka, my one DEEP question for you:)

• There has always been this tension in the artistic community about defining the
  ‘proper’ depiction of black life. You can see it inevitable backlash against ‘mainstream’ rap by ‘underground’ rappers, or against the ‘coonery’ folks see in Tyler Perry’s movies. So, point blank: Is there a ‘proper’ depiction, and if so, what is it based on?

Man, that’s such a tough question. I remember when the Cosby Show was on, and even though everybody watched it, I said it then, and some people agreed – that WE didn’t know any black people that acted like that. It almost seemed… too homogenized – too white? A black doctor and a black lawyer in a big assed brownstone in NYC and all the kids spoke the Kings English and said ‘yes dad’, and ‘thank you’, and they had all of their teeth. Is THAT what real black people act like? But Good Times was ‘funky’ and had ‘heart’, but they lived in the heart of Cabrini Green in Chicago, and that was cool… right?

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably best that America sees black folk as just being normal, and not some exotic animal that needs to be viewed behind glass. We do it to ourselves, in a way – I think city blacks love to wear the ‘hood on their sleeve, and I’m guilty of that sometimes, as I have black friends who are from the suburbs, and there’s some things I view as cultural similarities that they don’t connect with, but doesn’t make their experiences any less real. If there is a proper depiction, It’s going to come from seeing a wide view of us in different lights – the hood, the black debutante, the thug, the nerd, the millionaire, and everything in between. You have to agree that nobody has anything to say about the black love films, or ‘This Christmas’ or whatever – honest, good depictions of us do exist, but it’s easier to glare at the extreme cases. I think it all needs to be there.