It has been brought to my attention that a beloved and extremely niche part of my adolescence has crept into the historical record in kind of a sideways manner, and due to the inconvenience of digging for primary sources, is muddying the historical record. Well, here I am to help to set things straight with the receipts.
David Turgeon is an accomplished and respected author now, but thirty years ago he was Eerie, an iconoclast in the computer art underground, firing on all cylinders, turning emerging conventions on their heads and desperately expressing himself in every new medium that offered itself. (I characterise him as the Picasso of his milieu, mastering every new style before casting it aside in pursuit of the next big thing.) Despite being separated by the vast expanses of Canada, the two of us were colleagues in the 1994 underground computer art crew iMPERiAL, where from his home base at Sarcastic Toaster BBS, he produced ANSI art illustrations at a blistering pace (one month more than one new piece made daily, a record that has likely never been surpassed) for a multitude of crews (several of whom had exclusivity clauses among their membership, which they were only too happy to waive in his case.) He made a big, formative impression on myself and my colleague Nitnatsnoc in the very earliest days of the 1994 establishment of my (still-running) Mistigris computer art collective, and basically we will never forget him.
Growing up in Québec, he had different cultural influences than we did on the West Coast. Specifically, he'd been raised in an environment dense with the influence of the French bande dessinée tradition, what we might describe as comic strips or comic books. The gloss isn't entirely 1:1, just as manga aren't simply "Japanese comics", but some of the most well-known BD properties to emerge in translation include Tintin, Asterix and the Smurfs. They often (well, not Hergé's "ligne clair", but I digress) have a cartoonist's loose flair to the linework, enabling a great deal of emotional subtext to be communicated in exaggerated broad strokes in place of details that are not literally illustrated, merely suggested. Kids in Anglo North America who wanted to draw comics when they grew up might study anatomy and the physics of fabric drapery in order to reproduce the virtuosic power fantasies that played out in superhero comics, but the more casual visual vernacular of bande dessinées would allow an artist to hit the ground running and illustrate pages in shorthand at a quick pace without having to so exhaustingly demonstrate how much work they were putting into every panel. ("I have drawn all the muscles in the human body. Now... I am drawing additional muscles on top of those muscles!")
But, as I said, I digress. While all other underground ANSI artists were falling all over themselves to illustrate the latest noseless heroes of Image Comics (you have your pick: Grifter, Spawn, Maxx, Pitt, Superpatriot), Eerie had his own original character, the gritty and unpowered detective Inspector Dangerfuck. Was this an innovation in webcomics? Not entirely, a) because he wasn't on the web per se, but rather shown on BBSes, and b) because mostly his recurring appearances were simply single static images used to promote or advertise bulletin board systems. Scott McCloud indicated how much can happen in the reader's imagination between comic book panels, but Eerie took it to another level, nearly every glimpse from the world of Dangerfuck seemingly a snapshot from an entirely unrelated adventure. They were like reading action scenes from the same comic book series several issues apart, only you only got to see one panel per issue.
Someone cited Dangerfuck on Wikipedia as a webcomic innovator (hm, this is one of the more academic sources noted in that reference, and they probably picked up the rumour from this earlier text), and many others have repeated this factoid without substantiating it, because what kind of weirdo can still see old computer art from 30 years ago? This material is all hidden in plain sight over at the 16colo.rs archive, of course, but I have pulled it out from there to share with you explicitly in this blog post, chronologically, because I personally have a soft spot for Inspector Dangerfuck, my favorite character whose name you should never Google at work. (Please click on these images to view them up close with readable text, they're full of flavour!)
His first appearance in the historical record is in a BBS ad for "The Line Of Fire", and I expect the artist asked himself "if this BBS name described an exciting moment in a comic book, what would be going on at that moment?" the same way Quentin Tarantino reputedly asks himself what he would be seeing on-screen while listening to his mixtapes.
This next piece (above) is also contemporary to the previous illustration, dating to July of 1994. It is an advertisement for The Cannibal Cookhouse 2, and its psychedelic nature was very charming to my teetotalling teenage self. Many artists would struggle against the limitations of good workable flesh tones offered by the ANSI palette, but Eerie was happy to colour his characters all sorts of weird hues and tints to avoid getting bogged down in that quagmire.
This August 1994 advertisement for Noise Patch BBS (above) is the only genuine piece of "sequential art" (as Eisner would put it) in Eerie's Dangerfuck catalogue. Also that month Eerie programmed Dangerfuck into a cartoon, a whole other paradigm for sequential art. It was an MS-DOS executable, so I have captured its output and dumped it to YouTube for your convenience:
I believe it was nominally an advertisement for World of Weirdness BBS. Then iMPERiAL closed shop, and Eerie and I were about to travel in very different directions. All of his remaining Dangerfuck work was done for the Relic crew:
That one was drawn in September of 1994 as an advertisement for the BBS Golgotha Tenement Blues. (Also in this month's Relic pack we see the first appearance of Eerie's next original comics character, "Noise".)
In this October 1994 interface for the Paralysis electronic magazine, we are seeing Dangerfuck on the downswing, on a smaller canvas and divorced of his capers. Perhaps the well of inspiration he was providing to Eerie was running dry.
In this joint advertisement for Vektor BBS released the same month, the artwork is getting bigger again but Dangerfuck is relegated to merely hosting it, padding out a sideways illustration of the Maxx.
In this extra-wide ad for Underworld Element, released in December of 1994, Inspector Dangerfuck embodies the friction experienced by unknown original creations pitted against more famous commercial characters (yes nominally Spawn is also an indie character, but obviously they are in different classes) in an exciting unlicensed crossover.
Fortunately, Eerie had fans. In 1996, for the ACiD-50 gala (apparently drawn for use on his The Screaming Tomato BBS, the Mist WHQ), my pal Nitnatsnoc made this ANSI fanart of Eerie's two great comics heroes, Dangerfuck and Noise, together at last for the first time:
... and finally Nitnatsnoc revisited his previous thesis in a Function artpack from 1998 (you'll have to zoom in), adding a second act to a Noise comic by Eerie by introducing an erratic Dangerfuck as the villain in his last known appearance:
The parting words are telling -- I would love for there to be more Inspector Dangerfuck art out there in the world, especially since he's become so famous on kind of dubious grounds. But if I want to see more of it, I may have to be the one making it.
In any event, this concludes our visit to the cloudy realm of Inspector Dangerfuck, who touched on the world of computer comics very early -- but most probably was not foundational to the webcomic world that followed. This walk down memory lane was precipitated by some questions by Kirkman of Break Into Chat, who has been journalistically interrogating the false narrative of Dangerfuck's influence. His article on the subject will no doubt prove to be just as interesting as my dishing the goods, so do please keep an eye open for it!
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