sigh...

Only the second strip and already it's showing its age.

At the time I wrote this I'm willing to bet a rap artist (let alone dreadlocks) had never appeared/been mentioned in a strip. Well, maybe Doonesbury, the only progressive strip of its time that admitted that there was more going on outside the home than Dagwood running into the mailman on the way to work.

And Run-DMC were THE rap act of the day. Having grown up in the South Bronx, I had the privilege of seeing the roots of rap sprout and grow while a lot of today's hip-hop superstars were still listening to songs like 'B-I-N-G-O.' I'd even done my own fooling around at the turntables and mike, under the name King Ken E. [you can laugh, it's okay]

During those summers, you could go almost anywhere and find Grandmaster Flash or The Crash Crew with their stereo equipment set up, rhyming. Sometimes there'd be two or three crews in the same school yard, battling for the drifting crowd's attention. When Sugar Hill broke out with Rapper's Delight, the idea of rap as more than party novelty was on everyone's mind. We were happy with sixty bucks to do a party. No way we ever thought of the millions rap artists make today.

Run-DMC was the first to show that rap had the potential to go places we'd never imagined in terms of success. And I couldn't think of a better way to show this than give them props in my soon-to-be-enormously-popular comic strip. And maybe have a few laughs as well...