Axel Gear Here is a short run through of my history on the underground computer scene ----- 1991 One day I was playing Tradewars 2002 on a local bulletin board system when the sysop broke into chat with me He told me that someone had screwed with my access levels and he was going to fix it Well he must have pressed a wrong key because his entire warez file menu came into view He immedately hung up on me When I came back an hour later there was an email telling me that since I had seen his warez section he had no choice but to give me access as long as I told no one else 1992 I downloaded and uploaded warez constantly for over a year with my slick 2400 bps modem I had seen works from Acid and Ice and really wanted to try my hand at ansi Since the warez scene and art scene were co-dependant at this time (artists drew for warez boards warez couriers moved art packs) it was pretty easy to get into the art scene I changed my name from Soundster to Shattered Link at this time 1993 Well to put it plainly I sucked I couldn t draw worth shit and I think I ripped a few ansis too About late-1993 I finally got decent enough to join a local 619 (San Diego California) group named Chaos 2 Most groups names at this time were acronyms Chaos 2 stood for Cracking Hacking And Other Shit I became the ansi coordinator for Chaos 2 because I drew the app-gen screens Needless to say the group was doomed from the start We couldn t find any suppliers for warez because most people thought we were trying to copy the successful art group Chaos Chaos 2 died a quick and painless death sending talented ansi artists such as P-Chan (Ice) Liquid Vision (Ex-Cia) and Dynosaw (Ex-Shiver) in different directions 1994 After Chaos 2 died a flood of new ansi groups popped up in the 619 scene Of these groups I joined Punk Unity (Not the big one) Studio-X and Pro Some of the people I hung around with in these groups were Asylum Floodmyth and Cyric (MrKite) Shiver a extremely popular national group saw the talent in Pro and decided to merge And that s how I got myself out of the local scene and into the big one 1995 I got on IRC at this time with the Shiver guest account (Shiver95) and hung around #ansi until the account died I drew a ton of of works for Shiver and became one of the more recognized artists in Shiver I was invited to quite a few small groups but I declined thinking Shiver was going to be around forever I was wrong During the final three months of Shiver s existence I drew alot more than I normally did The Guardian told me that had it not been for the extra effort that people like me put out Shiver would have collapsed much earlier I contributed to Lord Jazz s non-member-everyone-can-release-group Bleach and later joined it when it converted to a normal ansi group I had getting into coding at this time and Lord Jazz and I were planning to make a Bleach electronic magazine called Tide but it never happened I got alot of calls from Betrayer at this time asking me to join Saga but I declined Well Bleach fell through and so I went to take Betrayer up on the offer he made Communication was horrible and he ended up calling me at odd hours of the night Three days before Saga s fateful merge into Acid Betrayer signed me up for Saga Talking recently to Ellisdee it appears that I was never technically a member since all hell was breaking loose during those final hours I released a solo pack around this time with some good pieces of work My name went from Shattered Link to Sodium around this time Lord Jazz created another group named Odium which I joined and later left because of it s quick death I also attempted to create a magazine called Crucifix but never reached issue one 1996 Got back on IRC with a number of different accounts I didn t do much until the spring of 1996 when I joined Blade I released a few pieces of work with them including some music That summer Classic Magazine was born which became an instant hit among a good portion of the scene Lord Jazz began his tracking group Fuck Vinyl (7YNIVf) which I quickly joined Acid Productions accepted me that summer where I worked my ass off trying to reach their quality control level I later left to create the mega-hit weekly magazine Acrylic Weekly 1997 Too my surprise Acrylic Weekly was extremely popular but all good things must come to an end I left the magazine and soon afterwards it went to hell I stepped back in and killed the mag before it got any worse I joined Fire Productions and drew some pieces there My style had greatly changed by that time going from a comic book style to my own darker heavily shaded neo-oldschool style I recently left Fire to begin my own art coding tracking group Denizen Fuck Vinyl now serves as our music division and we ve got alot of good talent within the ranks Akairo is my name as of recently The biggest project I m working on currently is Neverworld the deeply involved science fiction comic book being published by Penguin Palace I expect it to be done by the summer of 1997 -----