I'm not sure what's going on with the light sources in that picture, whether Gotham City really is burning and Batman is at the centre of the explosion, but those questions aside it's not a bad composition, with tasteful use of ASCII box-drawing characters for fine detail in deep shadow. The "Michael" tag suggests to me that this may be an incompletely-captured creation of prolific PD ANSI artist Michael Arnett of "Smile" fame.
Despite space-consuming use of black outlines in the (ultimately triumphant) underground ANSI art style, Tom Bradford somehow manages to cram in an incredible amount of detail in his Batman's physique, with different muscle groups isolated, utility belt and grapple hook gun clearly shown, the contours of a flowing cape indicated with appropriate use of shadow, etc. It's a pity he exhausted his allotment of detail, because the rest of the scene is drawn in pretty broad strokes, but it definitely tells the viewer where to focus their gaze!
The DoLittle gets points for ASCII art bats and reinterpreting the Batman logo with a Yen symbol at its heart, and for leaving the rest of the actual detail to the viewer's imagination.
Some stark lighting here shows us where you really run up against the limits of single-screen ANSI art portraiture of multiple subjects. Of course, the limiting factor here is height rather than width, so it's not clear whether focusing on an individual face would have granted any additional opportunity for detail... unless they were in a reclining "landscape" position, recumbent on the Bat-bed. Robin's isn't much of a disguise here and his nose, I'm sorry to say, makes me think of a dangling gonad. My apologies, ANSI-Mation! I say what I think.
Here's Tom Bradford again and I have to say I think he's just the more talented of the two artists, because he manages to cram two faces in to a single screen, with smaller footprints, and at once do a better job at showing both of them. It's a very thoughtful Batman and Joker tableau (well, Batman looks pensive, I don't know if the tableau is) with our first (and last) real Batman logo of the bunch!
By every metric, this demented ANSI portrait of the Joker fails, and yet in its very offbeat aesthetic choices (not just StUdLyCaPs but each laugh is drawn in a different, yet equally broken, way. And his eyes! And... the apostrophe use for comics there is really mind-breaking!) it helps to convey the fractured psychology of its subject. I give it a pass. And that takes us to the end of the Batman gallery! But what of Bats' chief colleague in the World's Finest?
Well, yes... in 1992 Batman's colleague Superman was briefly dead at the hands of Doomsday. The bleeding Supes logo was used on the bag Superman #75 was shipped in during Dec 1992. But it's OK, there are other DC heroes still in the eaves, ready to keep the world safe!
Yes, as you can see, Aquaman was at the ready when called upon to draw an ANSI art logo for his zippy friend The Flash. Just kidding! These are two different logos presumably drawn by two different (and unknown) artists at two different times, but they go together very nicely. By which I mean they're both terrible, but they're about on par with the level of terribility of the other one.
OK, OK. Enough with the DC comics! Marvel was tearing up the charts in the early '90s, where's all the Public Domain fanart of Marvel superheroes? Well, there's this ... creative tribute to the 50th anniversary of Captain America, which would have taken place ... well, it was issue #383 in 1991, with cover art by later DC publisher Jim Lee. (Its cover art was quite a bit better-executed than this screen, but this has a gutsiness all its own.)
In the late '80s and early '90s, the X-Men were on fire and their breakout rockstar was the Canadian living weapon known as Wolverine, Bub! If you like drawing symmetrical faces without having to worry about noses (a foreshadowing of a whole wave of Image heroes to come), then his visage is definitely the one to ANSIfy! I wonder why the breaks at the top of his mask's "ears"? Good work, Ron Czarnik!
In the '60s and '70s, Ghost Rider was on fire. Just kidding, he's always on fire, that's kind of his shtick! This portrait is perhaps our most sophisticated seen so far, with a combination of shading characters used in tandem with the black outlines that eventually defined the underground ANSI art aesthetic (though drawing as early as 1991, the artist is really setting the tone for the successors to follow here.) Tom B? Is that Tom Bradford, as seen above? It seems to be hewing to his high level of quality. Bonus points for effective use of text characters in the eyes and teeth. Hats off, Tom! (Ghost Rider never wears hats... they'd just burn up immediately!)
Ahh, Peter Parker, I can see that you slept on your tennis racket again. Spider-Man is a character with a brilliant character costume design, but one with a fatal flaw: the damned web all over everything. Try to reproduce it literally and you have already failed. (Granted, given the "potato balanced on burrito" shape of this composition, it was never going to be a winner.) Leppa, I'm sorry, you get points for trying but your example is going to have to stand as a cautionary tale of what not to do.
Now dig this! There is plenty going on here that shouldn't work -- combining a naturalistic fluid pose with an ASCII-character cityscape (the subtle dots on the near edge of the middle building slay me!), carefully balanced on webs made of slashes, but this screen's artist neatly sidesteps the pitfall of the costume's web pattern by... ignoring it altogether. Excellent use of two-tone shading (the ANSI palette is doing a lot of heavy lifting here), and name-dropping Parker's place of employment really ices the cake. I don't know if it's even possible to fit any more win into a single-screen Spider-Man ANSI tableau!
OK, we're done with Marvel, but as far as niche cases go, there's still one very important avenue to explore: Mirage Studios' primary export, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. ANSI colours don't provide great matches for their identifying bandana-masks, but I'm going to call that one purple, making Stinky's terrapin above Donatello.
Ninja Turtles, especially this cheerful, Archie-Comics variety, must be Public Domain-adjacent... Doctor Who is an exceptionally PD-style nickname. There's a minimalist elegance to this portrait, which contains everything that it needs to and nothing that it does not. Blue mask =Leonardo
Here's an ANSI portrait with a little meat on its bones! You hear about using thick black outlines when drawing underground ANSI art, but in this unusual case, everything that would normally be outlined in black is coloured in, and everything that would ordinarily be coloured in is left in black! It's a curious experiment in negative space. I wouldn't want to see an entire artpack of work in this style, but this piece flies on its own. PS -- weilding dual sai, mask or no it was always gonna be Raphael. Nice work from Ren of Mirage! Don't know how your piece fell in with the PD trove, but it sure helps you to float to the top!
Finally, here's a fun oddity, an original superhero in the comics style, drawn by the Public Domain hero artist discovery of this post, Tom Bradford. I have no reason to believe he ever went the distance and drew portraits of the other members of the Wild Herd, but it's a fun stupid idea. Congratulations! to Tom for drawing this picture, and to you for making it to the end of another one of these posts! When you get a chance, do please check out our MIST0720 artpack collection for some more underground computer art-style takes on comics subjects!
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