Son of Strelka

This is chapter 3 of the Obama project, entitled Son of Strelka. A previous version was posted as Birth of Anubis, but I decided (a) to change the title and (b) to refocus the end of the chapter so that it concentrated more on his parting with his mother.

The story is fairly simple: our narrator is born fully-formed, but with the head of a dog. His family and village had counted on his birth to help them out of their troubles somehow, but instead they are freaked out by his general dog-headedness. His mother is forced to leave him to wander the world alone for reasons that are somewhat obscure.

The name Strelka comes from history. Strelka was a dog, one of the first two animals to return from space alive (Laika died in transit). When she was brought back she was bred with another dog in order to determine whether there were permanent side effects due to the radiation she received in space. One of the pups from that mating was then given to the Kennedy family, and when he grew up he sired puppies with one of their other dogs. JFK apparently called these puppies "pupniks".

The suggestion from the title is not that the narrator's mother is the actual Strelka - she's human, for one thing. It's just that the whole radioactive space dog connection makes that the perfect name for his mom, so I decided to go with it. In fact, I'm renaming the entire project either "Son of Strelka, Son of God", or maybe just "Son of Strelka". Haven't decided yet.

Barackalypse Now

Following on my last post about the beginning of the world, I now also have some music for the apocalypse chapter of the Obama project. In this chapter our hero is witness to the end of the world, and is left wondering what the point of it all was.

The music is a collaboration with EBA, who I've mentioned before. EBA is a really excellent turntablist from the Atlanta area, and he and I have wanted to do something together for a while. This one worked out really well - I threw in some noises and played drums, he threw in a lot more noises and some crazy-ass scratching, and the end result sounds like The Dust Brothers destroying the world. That's exactly how it should be. There's going to be some tweaking on this before it's finally done, but what we've got already is too weird not to share.

By the way, EBA has a podcast at shapelessmass.com, which you should totally check out.

Creation

I finally got some music done for the first chapter of that weird-as-shit Obama project I'm working on. Even better, Ainsley Seago agreed to do the art for this chapter, and judging by the concept sketches below it's going to freakin' RULE.

This chapter tells the story of the very first man, who was born as a fruit of the only tree then in existence. He finds himself in an empty, barren world, and so he climbs to the top of the tree and summons the rest of the world into existence just by speaking the names of the things he wants to create. He gets a little over-eager, though, and accidentally creates a monkey in midair which promptly plunges to its death. Embarrassed by this, he resolves to do a better job and creates many of the positive things in the world before he disappears.

Click on the second picture to see the whole thing.