Joe Musashi Shinobi

Jelani is one of my best friends. He and I have been connected since middle school. We've been living together since we were 16 or 17. We spent our first five to six years outside, living on our own together, trying to build success in art and music and illustration and content. We had a falling out close to when my pancake art career took off, and we didn't speak to each other for several years while the craziest things were happening to me. In the years since my separation from my previous company, Dancakes, I found that that company had kept me from connecting with St. Louis, with the people in my city, my friends, my community, for one reason or another. And now that I'm free of it, now that I'm back, I feel so pleased that Jelani is back in my life. I'm back to seeing him on a regular basis. My wife, Wella, has a relationship with him. He's being woven into my life, my family, my future, and it's such a blessing to know somebody and to have that kind of a relationship, to be able to get together and have old battle stories and inside jokes that are timeless for us and just to have that much time in the game. This pancake was made for Jelani, and he asked in his query for me to make it have a similar skin tone to him. I didn't read it because the app was so new the notes didn't surface on screen big enough.