Elliot falls between the cracks and discovers a different pace of life on the streets of Chicago.
The rise and fall of it all was a collaboration with Jazz composer and filmmaker John O’Brien. I lost touch with him since and these days can’t find him online at all.
The story was tied to a mythology of the Ben Ishmael Tribe, but later learning for me led to discovering they were not quite as depicted in John’s source material, based largely on the work of Hugo Prosper and others who elaborated to suit their own goals rather than cite the actual history. When we started the project he sent me a copy of Gone to Croatan to read that includes a chapter of which is all about them featuring several parts by Prosper himself.
I ended up only doing this fragment of the larger work, which was written mainly as narrative diolog. And I think it stands up well as is, the rest would have been interesting but I’d rather not have contributed to that questionable ahistorical narrative.
John had also produced a spoken word version of this with both ambient audio and music. His plan was to tour and use the art as a slide show, that we’d produce from the art I also composed into comics pages to publish in print. It was a follow up to a previous experiment he’d done with a noir jazz piece titled “Life at Night”.
The work is mix media, mostly done in B&W and digitally tinted for colour with some notable exceptions like the first page. I regret in some ways that it was left here, but it works as a short contemplation of class and fortune, in late stage capitalist society.
