“So why a fox girl?”
Slice! isn’t design to appeal to furries, though I hope it does, and for reasons more complex than “oh! a tail, me gusta.” The fox features serve a couple of purposes.
1: The tail provides a great way of expressing emotion and tracking movement. Since the Delivery Girl is mute, her facial expressions, ears and tail will be doing most of the talking for her. The tail also provides a handy visual clue as to which direction she’s traveling in and how fast.
2: The fox features mark her as different. Most good fiction concerns characters who are different from those around them, either as a virtue or a vice. While western fiction values the subtle, manga (particularly shonen mangas) has made an art form out of overtly stating a character’s motivations and incorporating them directly into the character design. That’s what we’re aiming for with the Delivery Girl.
Plus, the fact she’s noticeably different from regular humans, allows us to have her do outlandish things (run up walls, cut tanks in half, etc) without breaking the user’s sense of immersion. She’s not like other characters, and thus, isn’t bound by the same rules.
Shots of the Delivery Girl in motion. The way her tail, skirt and shoes “puff out” emphasizes the length (and strength) of her legs. The large shoes also give the impression of paws.
Final design of “The Delivery Girl,” but not the final colour choice. There’s no getting around the fact that she’s a little sexier here than she was in her original designs. That’s largely because she’s taller and her legs are longer, giving her a more feminine look. The skirt isn’t a blatant attempt at cheesecake, or rather it isn’t just a blatant attempt at cheesecake. The core characteristic of the Delivery Girl is that she’s very very fast, and the tight jeans really didn’t convey motion particularly well. The skirt does. The slightly punk rock look also ties in with her role as an anti-establishment figure.
Knock up of the first cover for SLICE! complete with the new logo.
Attack of the Saints
A quick little something whipped up with Henry Huang.
So why “SLICE!?”
Mostly because it fucks with people’s punctuation when they ask questions like that.
But really, the name just seems kind of obvious. “SLICE!” is both an apt descriptor of what our heroine does and what she carries.
Manga readers amongst you might recognize that it’s a reference to Tsutomu Nihei’s fantastic sci-fi action epic, BLAME! The title Blame! is actually a mistranslation, it’s pronounced “BLAM!” as in the sound effect.
So, let’s talk about SLICE!
SLICE!, for those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter, is a webcomic/print project I’m working on the very talented Henry Huang.
What’s it about? Put simply: A mute, half-fox samurai-turned-delivery girl has to deliver a pizza to the top floor of a giant corporate building controlled by super-powered executives.
Essentially, it’s a parody of shonen manga (Bleach, Naruto, Hajime No Ippo and Gunnm: Last Order being the most influential), action movies and the furry sub-culture, with a dose of heavy-handed social satire thrown in for good measure.
There are deeper themes, some subtle and some deliberately obvious, but our main goal is to make the strip “fun,” both to produce and read. The comic will be “dumb,” but hopefully in the exciting way that films like Machete or Starship Troopers are “dumb,” I.E: deliberately, and in a clever way.
We’re currently in the design phase, and we don’t have a website or a schedule sorted out just yet (sadly, the strip probably won’t be appearing on the Escapist as it doesn’t fit their content profile unfortunately) but I should be able to announce something within the next couple of weeks.
-Grey
Anonymous asked: I'd personally love to see you get into game reviewing, any thoughts on going down that road?
I’d love to but, believe it or not, there’s a certain level of skill and insight required to review a game. I really want to get into that part of game journalism, but at the same time I want to add something new to the craft.
<p>I mostly avoid looking at my earlier work - some people care for it, I do not - but occasionally I rifle through the old comics and pick out the parts I think worked. They’re rarely deliberate, more fortuitous accidents where Cory and I stumbled upon something resembling comedic technique. So, here we are, my favourite bits from the first two years of Critical Miss.
Another piece I did for the Esc without realizing it was old. OLD OLLLLLLLD.
Keith Vaz asks for closer scrutiny of violent games in light of Ander Breivik’s murderous rampage.
Labour MP, anti-gaming demagogue and silk-cushion aficionado, Keither “Vendetta” Vaz, is once again asking Parliament to tighten violent video game regulation. This time he’s using nutball, Anders Brevik’s admission that he used Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to hone his “target acquisition” skills before killing 77 people in Norway last year, as fuel for his argument.
The motion reads as follows:
That this House is reminded of the consequences of the ineffectual Pan European Game Information (PEGI) classification system for video games following the testimony of Anders Breivik about the tragic events in Norway in July 2011; notes that in his submission of evidence to the court Breivik describes how he trained for the attacks using the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare; is disturbed that Breivik used the game to help hone his `target acquisition’ and the suggestion that the simulation prepared him for the attacks; is concerned that PEGI as a classification system can only provide an age-rating and not restrict ultra-violent content; recognises that in an era of ever-more sophisticated and realistic game-play more robust precautions must be taken before video games are published; and calls on the Government to provide for closer scrutiny of aggressive first-person shooter video games.
After the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) was given control of videogame classification over the British Board of Film Classification back in 2010 it backed the Pan-European Game Information (PEGI) system, which has gone on to be the only form of game classification used in the UK. Much like the ESRB, PEGI is a voluntary system which allows publishers to self-regulate.
Fortunately, despite the motion being tabled back on the 25th of April, only eight MPs were willing to add their signatures. For those of you keeping score; five of those were Labour Party members while the remaining three signatures were split evenly between the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Democratic Unionist Party.
