I'm working on websites and lettering today, so I've got nothing new to show you. But it's Opening Day for the Cleveland Indians today, so I thought I'd post some of my Slider stuff.
From 2002-2006 I was the artist for the "It's Slider Time", a monthly feature in Game Face magazine. The piece was half-comic, half-puzzle page, and I wrote and drew the entire feature, including creating the puzzles. When it first started out, I wrote it as an adventure strip, having a loose "Someone stole all the bases" storyline. At the end of every strip, the thief would leave a clue that would be the puzzle on the facing page. Kids could solve the puzzle and find out where the next base would be at.
With a month between strips, I didn't think the adventure format worked well, so I switched to a humor format, and I thought that worked much better. Writing the joke was always the hardest part. Occasionally I worked with the actor who played Slider to come up with the jokes. Two things were funny about that: First, he'd call and say "Thom. this is Slider." No, you're not Slider, you're Dan, the guy who plays Slider. You're not Batman. Batman can call up and say "This is Batman." Second, some of the help was very often a starting point. "We should do something about the hurricane that flooded the Winter Haven spring training facility." (Yeah, because hurricanes and mass destruction are hilarious.) Oddly, those starting points helped a lot. When you've got an infinite field, it's hard to narrow it down to find the funny. When you're given the starting point of "It's All-Star Balloting time", it gives you something to focus on.
I also did the infamous "Where's Slider" cartoon, too, for the 2004 Spring Training edition. This was a tremendously successful piece, and won a number of awards. It also took two solid days to complete because of all the detail. When it was done, my contact at the Indians was raving about it. I told her "It's a great piece. I'm very proud of it. And I will never, ever do it again, unless you increase my pay drastically. It almost killed me."
The strip also featured tons of my trademark in-jokes. When I needed a newspaper photographer, I drew him to look like Jimmy Olsen. And, while the jokes were aimed at kids, I'd throw in a few funnies that would probably go over their head. When Slider was actively campaigning for the All-Star ballot, that strip ended with Slider folding in a press conference. It was during the 2004 presidential campaign, so he was asked "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the National League?" (Joe McCarthy), "Were you a member of the Ohio National Guard" (playing off the George W. Bush Air National Guard controversy) and "Do you drive an SUV?" (playing off John Kerry's at-the-time famous "No, I don't own an SUV… tmy wife does.")
In 2005, after three years of the comic strip format, new management took over and the strip became a straight-up puzzle page with spot cartoons of Slider. It still looked good, and continued to improve from an artistic standpoint (man, I can't even think of that first strip without cringing) but it was nowhere near as much fun to do. In 2006, there was another change in direction, and Game Face magazine switched from being a monthly program book to more of a Playbill format, where it was printed once, and flyer inserts were added to change the information. That year I did my last comic for the Spring Training edition. There was talk of bringing me back to do the 2007 Spring Training issue, but we couldn't come to payment terms.
I guess that Trot Nixon deal really tapped out the club.
Still, Slider was one of the coolest jobs I had. And, as my friend Sean told me just last week, "Nothing leaves the resumé." So mine will always says that I worked for the Cleveland Indians, and that's pretty nice.
Below are some of the strips from the 2004 run. Click, and they shall embiggen.
Now… play ball!
