Kickstarter

When you get down to the wire you don't look back, you look forward. 

Tonight begins the intense push to make the Search for Count Dante Kickstarter Campaign go viral by Friday. 

There will be some surprises in store this week. We plan on pushing the campaign all the way around the world by Wednesday with some new bloggers who have come on board. I am editing some new video clips from my trip abroad, where I made a few discoveries. I will be uploading video about the campaign not only here but to YouTube and everyplace else I can. We will just keep on pushing. 

Thanks to John Akomfrah, Coleen Coleman, and R Ross, Barbara Ruhling, Martin J. Keenan and Charles Sykes for their generous pledges this past week. If you know of other online-connected types with an interest in comic books, martial arts, Chicago crime history, the occult, the Cold War and popular culture, be sure them to point them this direction. 

I believe we can make this happen. Watch for out next update. 

Floyd Webb

On April 24, 1970, 26 year old Jim Konsevic, Chicago Judo/Karate champion, died in a fight at the Green Dragon Society Black Cobra Hall of Kung Fu in Chicago. 38 years ago Jim went there to back up his good friend John Timothy Keehan aka Count Dante, head of the Black Dragon Fighting society. No one knows for certain who or what started the fight. In the midst of a fist, foot and weapons free-for-all, Jim Konsevic died of multiple stab wounds from a spear and/or sword, bleeding to death on a Fullerton Ave sidewalk.

This is a key story in the making of The Search for Count Dante. It is my intention to do this section as respectfully as possible. Some of the people involved in this fight live away from Chicago now, I have found a few. 1 in Chicago, the rest in Las Vegas and places like California. Getting them to talk had not been easy. Important court records have disappeared. There is no statue of limitations on murder. The Judge acted questionably in the case. Dante's lawyer Bob Cooley ended up in the Witness Protection program, he had been buying Judges for the mob.

Will I get to the truth? I don't know. It is like the whole question of who started a bar fight. I went searching for the man Jim Konsevic was, not the victim. One of his cousins reached out to me. He told me what happened in the aftermath of his death, the effect it had on his family.

No one was meant to die that night. They called Mike Felkoff, a friend to both parties, to be present to make sure it did not go wrong. It did anyway!

JIm's father died a year later of heartbreak. His mother moved close to the cemetary so she could care for both their graves. There is a toll of sadness behind such testoserone driven folly.

Count Dante, "the deadliest man alive" got his best friend killed, they said. Dante accepted the blame and never recovered emotionally from this event. But still he persisted in selling "the character" Count Dante. He was in it too deep to stop.

I need your help to finish this film. Please back us today.

When I started this project I had no idea it was going to take this long or that reearch would take me this far. I thought this would be a great little short film about a Chicago curiosity, a major bullshipper of the PT Barnum variety. I had no real idea of depth of the character I was investigating. The martial arts community vilified him and ex-communicated his memory. One part of the martial arts community hold him in distain, while his formers students revere him. In the lore of the martial arts underground he is held in awe for his fantastic claims and his infamous comic book advert. It has turned out that Dante is a real man of mystery, and his influence is still felt strongly 37 years after his death.

Today I am in Paris. I came here on a work project with a company I consult for. I mixed some Dante Research with the trip. I have been looking for a copy of Count Dante's adverts in French and his World's Deadliest Fighting Secrets book en Français, LES PLUS TERRIBLES SECRETS DE COMBAT DU MONDE!!! Looks terrifying, right?

I have taken the time left over, after my obligatory meetings, to troll some comic book stores. The first store went looking for was called Gael. It used to sit in the shadow of Notre Dame on, get ready for this, Rue Dante. 

I will be going to Déesse Editions at 8, rue Cochin and Apo(k)lyps at Metro Brochant in Paris this evening looking for Info on the French advertisement that sold LES PLUS TERRIBLES SECRETS DE COMBAT DU MONDE.

The good new is I have located a copy of the book, I will have it in my hands soon. More Updates coming soon. Spread the word to comic fans, martial arts fanatics. We need your help in this journey to complete this film, The Search for Count Dante.

This weekend we make a big shout out to all the comic fans attending this years C2E2 Expo in Chicago. Comics are not for kids, not for the dull and mentally challenged, they do not stunt your growth. Comics are part of our literary culture.It is a culture that celebrates the imagination. C2E2 is rapidly becoming Chicago's Comic Con. It is a big, loud, colorful, fanboy and girl extravaganza. It's looking like Wizard Con has some stiff competition in the city now.

This weekend Straight Out of A Comic partners, SImmie Williams, and Kia Coleman are stoking the crowds who remember Count Dante best. All our mature comic fans (that means old geezers like Floyd Webb) gathered around to get their free Kickstarter Promotional posters. They all remember the following image.

This is it, the advert that launched thousands of martial arts careers and made them members of the Black Dragon Fighting Society. There is a lot of mystery around every thing Count Dante did. His choosing of the name "Black Dragon Fighting Society" is said to have instigated a visit from the FBI.Chicago was one of the active centers of Japanese Intelligence activity inciting Black nationalists in the 1930s and 40s. You'll hear about this in the film.

Dante was a wild animal of the swinging 1960s. Black Panthers, Playboy Bunnies and practitioners of Haitian Voudon were members of his inner circle. His closest friend's never knew some of the things he was doing.

Here is the the poster we are passing out this weekend to get people hip to our Kickstarter campaign. We want to thank AdCom Graphics in Gary, IN for making us the best bargain ever in getting our promotional materials.

Tomorrow I have to leave on a new work assignment and have inadvertently made a Count Dante connection at my destination.

I will save that info as a surprise for my next update.

If you are in Chicago this weekend and want a treat, Get thee to C2E2 (Thorspeak for git yo' butt down there.)

Last but not least, we want  to make a special comic geek shout out to comic artist Micheal Penick (aka Penick Art). He has a special interest in Dante so he's our kind of people.

Look for out next update on a great discovery in the next few day. It might be in video.

The picture above is John Keehan/Count Dante's 1964 class with pet lion. When I obtained this picture I began to look for the people in it.

When you venture back in time to uncover "the secrets of legends," there are usually innumerable obstacles along the way. You need guides, people who can smooth the way in difficult terrains of research. Last Sunday, a very good friend and Master Tai Chi instructor, Joseph "Jomo" Morris, suddenly passed away. Joe was one of the people who was always open to my questions from the very start of this project. 

I returned to a community that is marginal but large. There has not been much film documentation of the martial arts community. It is over a century old and it's history is really part of the development of American popular and sports culture.

Robert Wyrod, with his short film Southside Warriors is one of the few documentarians to venture into "vibrant martial arts tradition that has been flourishing since the 1950s. Focusing on two different schools with long histories on the South Side, the film chronicles how the Asian martial arts have been adopted and adapted by African Americans to cope with life in some of America’s poorest communities." The film features another of my informants, the late Hamza Gregory Jaco, a childhood friend and my first martial arts instructor at the age of 14. 

This passing of all of these men is a major reason why I need your help to finish this film. People are older, some are not in good health. Mortality takes it's toll. Whole libraries of knowledge have disappeared before I could get to them.

Joseph Morris was 10 years my senior, born in 1943. I thought I met Joe in 1981, when I introduced two  Brazilian capoieristas, Eusebio Lobo DaSilva (Eusebio now also teaches tai chi) and Jelom Viera to Nganga Tolo Naa's African Kupigana Ngumi school.Tolo Naa aka Ray Cooper was one of Count Dante's first students from 1961. Eusebio was teaching at the Katherine Dunham Arts Academy in East St. Louis at the time.

We were having a discussion about when Tai Chi came to Chicago and I told Joe about how I had began my study in about 1972, with a teacher who used to teach in Grand Park near Buckingham Fountain. I could not remember his name, but I did remember that during my study with him he lost a few fingers to a lawnmower. Joe said he was in that class. I asked him if he was the guy who used to hit the tree. He laughed and said no. I did remember him, he was all business and talked very little. 

I eventually drifted away from the class and left the country headed to Africa and Joe went to Taiwan. For seven years he studied Yangjia Michuan Taiji Quan with the renowned Wang-Yen-Nein. Over the years Joe became known as one of the top men in tai chi in the world. In that period of tai chi practice my philosophy was influenced and changed by being around the art, I was 19, and I increased my study of Taoism and was all the better for it. 

Joe and I re-connected when I started doing research on the Count Dante film back in 2005. He was a great help in helping me reconnect with people, as I had been out of the community for years. He had great insights, was not in awe of mysterious histories and very objective in his opinions. Research requires great informants and and more patience than I could ever imagine. 

It is at these funerals and memorials that old connections are reborn and new discoveries are made. It was like that yesterday. 

I am going to miss Joe. He gave me a one line impression of Dante that everyone used from that period. I heard it from him first. I am not telling what it is. You will have to see it in the movie.