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Nelson at the Ives Main Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library. This week, he'll be presenting some of his work at the Trinity International Hip Hop Festival in Hartford. Lucy Gellman Photo.
The little boy—later, we’ll learn that his name is Franklin—pedals forward on his bike, eyes fixed on the horizon. He is focused, determined; his mouth hangs open, as if he’s about to shout something into the air. His hands, fingers gently rounded, grip the handlebars. On his back, a green bookbag sits snugly across his shoulders, whole universes stuffed inside.
Welcome to the illustrated version of The Mind of a Saint, a collaboration between artist Raheem Nelson and the lyricist, writer and musician Skyzoo inspired by the eponymously named album and series that inspired it. Based on decades of Black history—and John Singleton’s FX series, Snowfall—Nelson has released a limited run of the book, selling hundreds of copies to a dedicated fan base.
This week, he’ll be presenting it at the Trinity International Hip Hop Festival, a program of Trinity College in Hartford. In a time of increasing uncertainty, he’s counting it as a personal win.
“This has opened a lot of doors already,,” he said in a recent interview at the Ives Main Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library. “I’ve gone from fan to friend to collaborator. It’s a dream project, honestly.”
The idea for the collaboration was born a year ago, after Nelson found himself particularly moved by Skyzoo’s The Mind of a Saint. The album, which came out in January 2023, presents 10 tracks from the perspective of Franklin Saint, the character at the center of Singleton’s Snowfall. In the series, Saint is a young Black kid growing up in 1980s-era Los Angeles, the son to a real estate agent and former Black Panther with whom he is estranged.
Through a series of events—call them decisions, call them systemic failures, call them America’s war on Black men—Franklin becomes involved in selling drugs, using it to build wealth when other sources of labor and income consistently come up short. Around him, America is veering toward the height of the crack epidemic, particularly pronounced in dense, populous and segregated cities like Los Angeles.
When the series came out, Skyzoo—who grew up in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s—found that it reminded him of a system that had failed generations of Black men and Black families, in a chapter of recent history that felt distinctly, cruelly American.
“The idea of ‘The Mind of a Saint’ was inspired by growing up in the late 80’s and early through mid 90’s as a child growing up in NYC and seeing the effects of what I, amongst others, feel was a premeditated and predetermined plan to wreak havoc on communities of color, communities of people who look like myself,” he wrote in a forward to the book. “Communities like the ones I was born and raised in.”
The album blends snippets of the show and tight, often poetic lyrics and audio. In “Panthers and Power,” for instance, Skyzoo samples a tinny, archival recording introducing the Black Panthers’ 10-point program, launched by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in the 1960s. Later in the album, the artist has moved on to the fifth season, and opens with a clip from an episode about the devastation and isolation that comes, inevitably and frequently, from participating in violence—sometimes because the system is already rigged against you—that guts the same communities that raised you.
The first time he heard the album (which, of course, turned him on to the show), Nelson was equally moved. He kept listening, finding new things to appreciate each time he pressed play and traveled through the 10 tracks. A lifelong music lover and self-described grown up “geeky kid,” he’d already been following Skyzoo for about a decade, all the way back to his “Barrel Brothers” and “Music for My Friends” days.
What hooked him, in part, was how cinematic the album felt, as though he could see the scenes playing out in the three- to five-minute chunks that comprised each song. In Snowfall, Franklin Saint is named after Peanuts’ first Black character, himself also a creation of 20th-century Los Angeles history. Nelson, who has been drawing comics for as long as he can remember, couldn’t stop thinking about what an illustrated version might look like. He ultimately decided to reach out to the musician, and leave the rest up to fate.
He was thrilled, if also surprised, when Skyzoo responded.
“I went to bed one night and it kind of hit me,” Nelson remembered. “I wanted to do an art series based on every track of the album—to add something to the music and the show. We would have conversations about what the art would look like—there was a lot to pull from. Each song portrays just a segment of the show.”
Now, it lives out in the world, chronicling—not without a critical eye—the same time period that both Singleton and Skyzoo dive into with their work. From Nelson, a viewer can see Franklin’s descent from convenience store clerk into a young guy caught in the midst of a drug epidemic that is so much bigger than him, struggling to step back without losing everything he has.
On one page, he and colleagues roll giant, snowball-colored boulders up a hill, his head tilted down as a supervisor—call him a kingpin, or maybe an overseer—looks on from above, a foam cup perched in his hand. There’s something deeply Sisyphean here, undercut with the fact that it’s a cartoon character bringing the scene to life.
In another, Franklin is hunched in his kitchen, in front of a pink platform that reads “Mother Knows Best.” Behind it, his mom, Cissy, listens with her head tilted to one side, a concerned look on her face. Behind her, an electric mixer sits untouched on the counter; the buds of a tree and smear of sky appear through a window. The image works on multiple levels, a direct quotation of Schultz’ comic strip, in which Lucy sets up a lemonade stand and offers five-cent psychiatric consults to Charlie Brown.
What Nelson nails, in this Schultzification of Franklin and of those around him (the characters, all done in a Peanuts-esque style, are figures from the FX series), is a balance between the fleeting, delicate and precarious nature of youth and the devastating realities of a drug epidemic in which the U.S. government (and a growing, anti-Black surveillance state) was an active participant.
If a reader knows Peanuts, that makes sense: Charlie Brown is a kid with a generalized anxiety disorder, always on the precipice of some existential platter of woe. Nelson, a son of New Haven, grew up loving the series. It’s also cheeky: Peanuts’ Franklin has good grades, he plays music, his dad is a Veteran and he doesn’t get in trouble. He meets Charlie Brown on the beach, when he returns a ball to the character. Here, that gentleness is punctured by something much more raw.
“Raheem has been an excellent illustrator and artist in his own right for as long as anyone can remember, and the inspiration that he drew from my lyrics came together in a way that I couldn’t have pictured any better in illustrated form,” Skyzoo wrote in a forward to a limited print run of the book. “Proud is an understatement … I’m humbled and gracious to see it come together.”
For Nelson, it’s part of a creative dream that’s still evolving. Eventually, he said, he’d like to hold an exhibition of his work in L.A., with the showrunners, cast and crew members from the series. Six years after Singleton’s death in 2019, that carries even more weight, as a way to keep his work alive.
“I create art because I love it,” he said. “I create art because I want to make the world a better place. I wanted to tell this story without judgement, in a special way.”
Learn more about the book here.