Thanks again everyone for all the support you’ve shown Slice over the last year and a bit. I felt like it was time with the wrap up of the mini-series to show you where Slice came from. His real beginning middle and end.

Lets start from the very beginning, as a kid I loved to draw. I would draw on anything and everything, it was so bad that one of my High School math teachers asked if I would draw I picture of Wolverine for her son who had seen my doodles on a test of mine she was marking at home the night before. I had failed the test, but I had gotten my first request… and I had always thought that teacher was cute so I of course did the drawing. Sorry I dont have it to show you.

The point is I was more interested in drawing then anything else. Up until JR. High I never knew what it was I was doing. I would doodle all kinds of things. People from TV, GI Joes you name it I did it, but I hadnt discovered comics yet so I didnt have an aim with my art… it was just something I did in my spare time.  In JR HIgh I was introduced to my first comic. It was an Incredible Hulk issue Christmas special with the grey hulk, I dont remember what was being said to the Hulk, but I remember him replying “I represent that remark”. For some reason I found that very amusing. Over time I started drawing nothing but comic characters, even starting a small tradition of drawing Batman pictures for my brother at Christmas time.

IN High school (Halifax West For those of you wondering) I spent a lot of time in the art room. It was there that I started playing with the idea of really getting into art as a career, but I was a slacker for lack of a better word and I didnt take things very seriously. I did submit a few things to Image comics and Marvel thinking that there was no way I wouldnt snag a job, after all my mom said I was really good.

after the first rejection letter I sent some other stuff as well only to get a nice letter with the words “NO” on it.  In truth they were nicer about it then that.

After High school I drank, a lot. I was very lost in what it was I should be doing with my life and so I guess I just sort of thought things would take care of themselves. In what can only be described as a defining moment in my life one of my closest friends, Winston, died. I really didnt know how to deal with it at all. So I thought the best thing to do was to drink more and more and more. My life from the age of 19 to about 25ish was nothing more then a drunken haze. In that time I did nothing productive except meet my future wife Jennifer, who for whatever reason stood by me while I wasted my life away.

Eventually I did start to see the light and stopped dwelling in self pity. I recognize now what I didnt then and thats that life sucks when you lose someone that you care for, but life also goes on and so we must do our best to live the best life we can one day at a time.

Enough of the sappy stuff… geesh… eventually I did walk away from the booze and I buried my head back into drawing and the world of comics. I had gotten rusty and felt that I needed to practice and so I starting using old sketches of characters I had made up when I first moved out on my own to make my own comic. I called it “Crew: 1″ . It was team of super heroes who were brought together to stop a great evil… original I know. The picture Up top shows the characters that were showcased in the comic.

The lady with the giant boobs was the leader and her name was The Gwyneth, dont ask why I have no idea where I got the name from but I thought it was great… shows you what I know.  BY her hip was Chester, he was a guy about as big as the Hulk but had an outfit that formed to him much like the liquid Terminator from T2. If you’ll notice the diamond on his helmet, this was the root design for the diamond on Slices chest. Now that we’re on the topic of Chester, you maybe wondering… this guys name was Chester and the Slice you know got his powers from the Chester Diamond… whats going on?

Well, Im also a big fan of Indiana Jones and in “The Last Crusade” its acknowledged that Indiana is in fact not his name, but was his dogs name from when he was a kid. I took this idea and used it to my advantage. I had a dog named Chester and made this character out of respect to him. He was half Colly and half German Shepard, and he had a small patch of  brown fur on his head shaped somewhat like a diamond.

However at this point the diamond as we know it didn’t exist yet. Below Chester is none other then Slice, also known as bald Slice. His name was Slice and he was immortal and he did have a Goatee, but thats pretty much where the similarities ended. In this version of things Slice was a combination of two souls, one from a man that died in Scotland in the 1100’s and the other from a man who died in modern times during the Gulf War. The two were related and upon dieing both men saw a strange woman who combined their souls to create one man, named Slice…. because he had a sword. You can see why I changed his origin story IM sure.

The rest of them are of no real imortants but on his bottom left was Sadi, my Snake Eyes character. Under him was Rose, she was an android. On his bottom left is Mike Tree who was sort of their PR guy. And on the far right of the page was the main villain and The Gwyneth’s daughter, Val.

The over all story was set up to be like an RPG video game. This band of people are brought together to stop a great evil but in order to do so they need to find a bunch of artifacts that would make them even stronger and by the end of the series this crew was going to be combined to make one super duper super hero, Crew: 1… it seemed like an amazing idea to me at the time.  I did finish two whole issues. I sold a couple of copies of issue one to Strange Adventures for about twenty bucks… I was so happy.  Actually no I wasnt, I hated the finished product so much that I never went back to see if it had any feed back and I sure as hell never made any copies of issue 2. I was positive that anyone who may have read it would have laughed at me and I was not ready for that.

With that said Slice as a character grew  on me. In Crew: 1 he was sort of a throw away character that I designed because I felt I needed a Wolverine type character that I could use for some real neat hack and slash pages like the one shown here.

But as I did issue two Slice started taking more of a front seat for me, being a big part of the story. I was starting to like his character more then the rest but felt that I needed to keep him the way I designed him, you know for the fans (what fans? I dont know).

After dropping off my finished product to the above mentioned comic store and then tucking tail and running I decided I should go to University, NSCAD to be exact, but shit happened and I really dont want to get into here  because my head might explode again and I dont want to clean brain off my monitor.

At the end of the day I got a rejection letter from them after I was pretty much assured that I would have no worries of getting in. I let my job that I had at the time run out because I was going to be going to school and blah blah blah…. I whined and cried about it for awhile, all but giving up on art all together, with the exception of my Ray of Halifax work I did pretty much no drawing of any real importance for years.

However, when I did sketches I would often do Slice and Chester. I felt like someday I would use them again in a less convoluted story then Crew: 1 but didnt know when that time would be.

next week in the part two of this story Ill explain how and why A Slice of Fate came to be and the strange events that lead up to this website. Its a story that literally takes place between a hair cut and a 1857km road trip.

But I leave you this week with the last page of issue 2 of Crew: 1 and you can see how I had already started to play with Slices look trying to make him stand out more as a main character and whats that on his head? The diamond emblem makes its way onto Slices costume, thank goodness I got rid of the helmet.see you next week.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Issue 4 Sept 2009, comic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.