In honour of the imminent release of the MIST0720 Mistigris artpack collection celebrating computer art takes on subjects from comics -- comic books, comic strips, webcomics and underground comix, etc. -- here's a patented Pixel Pompeii look at how the same territory was covered by Public Domain ANSI artists of the late '80s and early '90s before the rise of the underground computer artscene. (Otherwise put, an '80s examination of the pop culture of the '50s, '60s & '70s, revisited in the '20s.)
Back in the stone age, we connected over telephone line connections to Bulletin Board Services run on private MS-DOS computers, illustrated only by ANSI art of the Public Domain style. And what was contained in those ANSI art screens? Well, much as print journalism was a larger force in our society, their daily or "Sunday funnies" comic strips proved to be a surprisingly popular subject to use to decorate, celebrate and advertise BBSes -- or just to enjoy as an end unto themselves! I open this post with a suite of comic strip ANSI illustrations made, seemingly by the same -- anonymous -- artist, first rhapsodizing on the life of a computer user then transitioning to specifically singing the virtues of "the Sports Complex" BBS, whose phone number, location and SysOp I have been unable to unearth at bbslist.textfiles.com. (Perhaps not the most effective way to advertise your board, lacking those particulars?) There are some stylistic similarities and some differences among the pieces -- the style is sufficiently crude that it is impossible to conclusively determine whether they were all drawn by the same PD artist with their fists and a copy of TheDraw, or if it was just a comics fiend stealing comics ANSIs drawn by others and graffiting an ad for their BBS all over it (a commonplace practice in the Public Domain ANSI art sphere)... but I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
This first ANSI screen focuses on Thor, caveman inventor of Johnny Hart's prehistoric comic strip B.C. (running since 1958, uninterrupted even by its creator's death!), regretting that he hasn't yet managed to invent the PC from rocks and sticks.
In this ANSI art screen it seems that Cathy, the eponymous protagonist of Cathy Guisewite's autobiographical? comic strip, which ran from 1976 through 2010, is returning home from an underwhelming date with Irving. Of course, she would have no more fun online, fielding tiresome "a/s/l?" requests on IRC all night long from thirsty nerds hot to cyber. (Knowing that, what does that say about her mother?)
Of all the syndicated comic strips, I've got to say that the Lockhorns (est. 1968) are one I would least expect to be promoting anything modern or high tech. The gimmick is that they fight and squabble (hence their apropos surname) -- perhaps it is only through judicious use of online time-outs (or venting stress by blowing up each others' planets in TradeWars 2002!) they they are able to hold their marriage together.
Beetle Bailey dates to 1950, enlisting into the Army at the outset of the Korean War. It still runs today -- which is really no less odd than if M*A*S*H were still filming new episodes. The military often enjoys use of technology years before it becomes available at a consumer level, so when everyone else was calling BBSes, Pvt Bailey should have been cruising UseNet newsgroups on the DARPANet! Unlike the previous comic strip subjects, this one has been adapted by underground ANSI artists a few times -- if you like, to help compare and contrast, you can check them out.
An old friend with excellent ideas proposed a Robotman (comic strip) / Robotman (Doom Patrol comic book) mash-up for the MIST0720 artpack collection, but sadly a lack of time and talent resulted in the impossibility of that fated collision. In the meantime, here's a historical artefact for you, the comic strip incarnation of Peter Shelley's 1985 Robotman licensed character (also used in an unrelated cartoon), keeping the seat warm for Jim Meddick's Monty to take over, starting with his appearance in 1993, culminating in his complete usurpation of the strip in 2001. Trivia: the comic strip syndicate tried to foist the Robotman character off on Bill Watterson as a condition of syndicating Calvin & Hobbes, but as we learned, he had no need for it. Robotman was only engaged once by the underground computer artscene, appearing here as a rendered 3-D model. (And no ANSI artists, as best as I can tell, gave a fig about Monty.)
Again, these ads are kind of weird, evangelising the plugged-in, online lifestyle to people who are already there, and endorsing a BBS that cannot be called or located due to a lack of any relevant digits. Maybe that's why the Sports Complex doesn't exist anymore, despite these great ads. So, here's Dik Browne's 1973 strip Hägar the Horrible (joining Hagar here is his wife, Helga.) It's perhaps a fun thought experiment to consider what BBSes run by Vikings would have been like -- online Althing parliaments soliciting user input at the voting booth, or gnarly coordinated raids in Barren Realms Elite? Probably somewhere in between. For whatever reason, Hägar proved rather relatively popular in the underground online artscene, and here are a few specimens for your enjoyment.
(Bonus Hagar!)
This subject was unavoidable, the titan of 20th century comic strips: Charles Schultz's Peanuts, here featuring Good ol' Charlie Brown, Woodstock the bird and the notorious kite-eating tree. An attempt of mixed success, but boldness points for the extraordinary use of box-drawing characters to illustrate fine sleeve / string details. There's even a shaded block (one, on the back of Woodstock's head), a stylistic hallmark otherwise reserved for artists from the underground PC computer artscene. (Seriously, it's the very first time one such character has appeared in this blog post so far!)
Yea, Peanuts figures so prominently in the comics canon it doesn't just appear twice in this blog post, but even within this series by the same artist! He was like... maybe I should base an ad on Rex Morgan, M.D. Or I could do another Peanuts strip! Points for the expanding Zs in the snoring word bubbles, the use again of ASCII box characters for hair, fabric and desk details (single-screen small-scale is hard!) and the "close enough" background colour boldly used on the left side of Peppermint Patty's arm, a problem later solved by iCEcolour... and all of them lost, plus more, looking at what they did to Marcie's face. Patty, kill two birds with one stone: write your book report on some classic space opera, then liven it up with episodes from your TradeWars session, dramatized!
Only here do we briefly switch modes into "black outline" style, which while more conforming to later underground ANSI art aesthetics, doesn't do many of these characters any favours. This is Brian Basset's "Adam", which I was floored to learn has been running since 1984. 36 years is a long time to have been raising a six and eight year old. The strip's later online rebranding, "Adam@home", wouldn't even have made any sense that early. (Then again, posing the character as an internet addict in the '80s wouldn't have made much sense because it was somewhat slim pickings for compelling activities to conduct there!) For context, the first version of what would become Outlook was released in 1996, the same year Hotmail launched (before being eaten by Microsoft.) Perhaps in its early years, it could have been named after a Compuserve user ID, but "78736, 5177" wasn't quite as catchy.
Which brings us to the unavoidable cultural phenomenon so potent it was uniquely embraced by computer artists underground and Public Domain alike! There was something special about Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, which I have cocktail-napkin clocked as the second-most-ANSIfied single subject of all time, weighing in only behind Todd Macfarlane's Spawn, the slavish fixation bound to the computer underground like a ball and chain. This marks the end of the Sports Complex ads, but here are a few other Public Domain artists' takes on the boy and his imaginary friend:
Calvin & Hobbes can't agree which one of them should take the fall for some unstated transgression (I always say: blame the non-imaginary one.) This one is an ad for "The Mist" BBS, which I have to say has an excellent name, a pity they didn't draw a logo for it! (That's a little Mistigris humour, friends.) The typography is a little rough (by which I mean, chunky on the low end) but as you've seen above I always appreciate attempts to squeeze in fine detail using ASCII box characters. Dig that tiger's toenails! Supposing that this screen was drawn by the advertised BBS's SysOp, I have to give credit here to Tom Baddley.
Ah, a throwback to the classic "If You Don't Buy This Book, We'll Kill This Dog" humour kicked off by a National Lampoon magazine cover in 1973. Calvin looks only a little worried -- this kind of hostage situation is a little outside his standard space opera / dinosaur wheelhouse, but he's always got a plan in his back pocket. And the ANSI bomb here is literally a light-the-wick, thrown-by-an-anarchist bomb, drawn using ASCII characters but coloured with ANSI colour and hence described as an "ANSI Bomb". Lots of Blue Wave tagline files had gags about "ANSI bombs will be returned to sender" but I don't know if anyone actually knew what they were supposed to be - I gather it was when Trojan malware would exploit weaknesses in ANSI.SYS to remap certain keys on the keyboard, perhaps eg. changing the code resultant from pressing the Esc key to echo y format c:.
With the expanded canvas and the rubbery feline physique, Hobbes really does seem to give you more to work with, as an artist, than Calvin does. This extraordinary screen appears to be taller than 25 rows, meaning that its pre-ACiDDraw artist would have had to perform some contortions -- like drawing the top and bottom halves separately, then joining them after the fact with copy top.ans+bottom.ans=hobbes.ans -- in order to generate it. (Look out, I'll use any excuse to pull out old neglected MS-DOS commands! This is apparently the process whereby period ANSI art superstar Eerie would make all of his masterworks.) This is just the drop in the bucket as the metadata-tagging project goes at the pace of volunteers, but there really are literally mountains of Calvin and Hobbes ANSI art renditions made by underground computer artists if you'd like to see more of these, likely executed more successfully.
Bonus Calvin, by The Catt!
And a brief interlude as we return to Peanuts, a popular subject even for the underground computer artists, featuring an Ebony Eyes portrait (the ne plus ultra of the Public Domain ANSI art scene) of the Protean beagle Snoopy as "big man on campus" Joe Cool.
(Bonus Snoopy also, a popular twist on a well-known character -- they love computers, too!)
The hipper, cooler number 2 to Peanuts, in the late '80s and early '90s Jim Davis' Garfield was an unstoppable force of pop culture, eating lasagne, hating Mondays, and promoting an ideology of big, orange saltiness. Here he is in a quiet moment of cuteness, cuddling his teddy bear Pookie, drawn in ANSI art again by the amazing Ebony Eyes. (Did she intend it as an ad for Third Stage BBS or was that thrown in by a vandal after the fact? Hard to say.)
OK, we interrupt this post with a RIPscrip vector art screen (from a related article that just strayed across one of my Facebook groups) dating to the same period, originating from similar Public Domain sources. (I don't want to make assumptions about your lack of eliteness, Herb Dunn, but anyone who uses their real name as their handle is immediately suspect, and crediting the company that owns the character, as we've already above seen Ebony Eyes doing, only doubles down on it.)
As you can see, Garfield proved to also be a popular subject for toony underground ANSI artists to adapt into their medium.
One last visit from Ebony Eyes to the realm of the comic strip, here turning the mirror on two lumpy faces from (Vancouver Island local!) Jim Unger's "Herman". No room here for torsos or, uh, the gag, but EE always does good work.
Most of the comic strips ANSIfied by the Public Domain had been appearing in newspapers for decades before going digital in this fashion, but Mother Goose & Grimm was part of the post-Garfield New Wave, emerging in 1984. Here artist Brad Garner appears to be taking a victory lap of sorts for having won a contest with this adaptation. It's not bad, but let's keep things in perspective here: the worst of the underground artscene adaptations of this character are likely better than the best of the PD ones.
As if to directly illustrate my bold claim, here's another ANSI adaptation of Mother Goose & Grimm (well, Grimm at least) by an underground ANSI artist (am I reading the high ASCII characters correctly, "Slam Dunk"?) boasting membership in the iCE crew. Now, this isn't iCE-calibre work, but things were very different in the early days when the aesthetic was still being worked out and occasional representatives of underground computer art would wind up being circulated in Public Domain circles.
Here's an oddball specimen: the subject of this screen, whose artist's identity is encrypted inscrutably in the ASCII characters at bottom right, is one of Don Martin's furshlugginer caricatures from the pages of MAD Magazine. Not quite Sunday funnies material, but I'll take it! Is it possible that this is the only ANSIfication of this artist's distinctive and substantial body of work? I think so! Not a great representative, but it's still the best in its class.
It's difficult to believe that Dilbert has been with us since 1989, but Scott Adams is still on the scene and, like Dave Sim, he seems to have been afflicted by Cranky Old Cartoonist disease. This piece also escaped from an underground artpack, drawn by Super Dave for Doorway to Insanity BBS. There are a couple more Dilbert pieces floating around in the artscene archives.
Rounding the bend here, we have Burp!'s (not Burps') brutally minimalist Public Domain ANSI art adaptation of a classic single-panel gag from the master of that medium, Gary Larson's "the Far Side", the defining comic strip of the '90s. Did You Know: Larson has just picked up drawing gags again for the first time in 25 years after discovering just how easy doodling on a tablet is? His ubiquitous strips got a little attention from the underground artscene also.
Finally, a couple of pieces from way back in left outfield: possibly the only ANSI art adaptation of Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead ever made (by "es") to the present. Good thing it's labeled with a logo, or it might have been mistaken for a sprouting yam.
And while the Smurfs are better known as stars of cinema and television, they got their start (like Tintin and Lucky Luke) in Belgian comic books. This 1990 piece by MCL is simply too gonzo not to share, and if I'm reading the odd background colours correctly, in its original form this screen would have used ANSI's deprecated blink effects to produce a two-frame animation where Brawny Smurf really dishes out the abuse, endlessly. I'll see if I can't update this post with an animated version.
The underground artscene also yielded some Smurfs, but while they may be more technically accomplished, I doubt that any of them will meet this one's punk energy.
(Bonus Smurfs!)
And there we go! Hope you enjoyed this rare post to the dusty Pixel Pompeii stacks! Keep your eyes peeled for the MIST0720 comics-themed artpack collection, expected to launch tonight, and... keen students of ANSI and comics will no doubt have noticed the conspicuous omission of an elephant in the room: Bloom County was the subject of so much ANSI art, I gave it a post all its own five years ago. Cheers!
(PS -- you like superhero comics? I just gave that subject its due -- how it was dealt with by Public Domain ANSI artists -- in the next post!)
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