These are definitely ANSI art. They use the unique PC extended character set (pipes, shaded blocks, etc), the classic PC CGA/EGA 16-color palette, and ANSI escape codes.
I don't think this term is exclusively American ... there were (and are) plenty of European and international ANSI artists. But I'm happy to be corrected.
At the height of the 1992 presidential election, Don Lokke Jr. began publishing ANSI art political cartoons.
He called his digital comic strips "telecomics," and he used them to channel the skepticism and anger felt by everyday Americans about broken political promises and the looming economic recession.
Lokke would draw nearly 300 telecomics by 1995 as part of his business syndicating and selling unique online content to the sysops of bulletin board systems.
By then the great migration from BBSes to the World Wide Web was well underway. Lokke jumped ship, too, and moved his businesses to the web. His ANSI telecomics were soon forgotten, and many of them were lost.
Decades later, I unearthed 145 of them.
This is my in-depth profile of Lokke's work. It's a unique look back in time.
2. Thank you for collecting and providing context :)
3. How come examples are in PNG? Is that the only format you have available, or is there a technical limitation or risk in making them available in original ASCII format?
(Seems pedantic, but I noticed because I'm at the airport -- The article loaded near instantly, but the actual art took a couple of minutes and still loading mid way through :)
Most ANSI art is displayed on the web as PNG because it's lossless and can be indexed to the correct 16 colors. Lossy formats like JPG introduce weird artifacts that screw up the look.
So, for a blog post, PNG is the most robust way to display the art across browsers of all kind.
But you definitely can get the original ANSI files. Lokke packaged every 20 or so of his telecomics into "ALLMACKx.ZIP" archives for distribution. These were very similar to the artpacks that the underground ANSI art scene would eventually use. I uploaded the seven ALLMACK files I recovered and uploaded them to the 16colors ANSI art archive: https://16colo.rs/artist/don+lokke+jr
That's probably the best way (for now) to explore it as a collection or download the original files.
I do have some more Lokke telecomics I located that were not in ALLMACK archives, and so are not submitted to 16c yet. I may just package them up as a "MISC" pack and upload them.
They're not really ASCII art - they are more properly called ANSI.SYS art utilizing the IBM extended character set (which is more properly an extension of ASCII IIRC) - getting them to display correctly in a terminal or a website emulator is a bit of work.
The 2006 book "A History of Webcomics" asserted that "Inspector Dangerfuck" -- created by ANSI artist Eerie -- was "the first known comic on the Internet."
The book offered no dates, no details, and no sources. But these red flags didn't deter later editors, bloggers, and content creators from repeating versions of this statement.
To be clear, the assertion was wrong. Eerie drew "Inspector Dangerfuck" pieces in 1994, and there had been much earlier online comics.
Still, the assertion raises a lot of interesting questions: What is ANSI art? Who was Eerie? What was "Inspector Dangerfuck?" Was it even a comic? Were there other ANSI art comics?
I've written a multi-part series tackling these questions and diving deep into the history of an often-overlooked subculture.
The real question is what is an "online comic" or "webcomic" - especially as almost by definition a webcomic can't predate the web; though an online one could.
There's an extended quote from Eerie at the end of this story where he addresses this (in the context of where/if ANSI comics fit into the history of webcomics).
Yeah he brings up the points I would (which is that "online image" is not the precursor of webcomics, but print and other "indie" comics are).
The first scanner was made in 1957, using that to scan a Peanuts comic would be some form of "digital comic image" but not a webcomic as we consider it.
I do also thing there's something the kids would call a "meme" that these might be closer to; a comic does NOT have to have a narrative or overarching story (though they often seem to devolve to that) - if the only Far Side comic to exist was Cow Tools it'd still clearly be a comic.
Will Eisner and Scott McCloud say that what distinguishes comics from cartoons and other forms is that they are sequential. McCloud's definition specifically exclude single-panels like "The Far Side" or "The Family Circus". In his view they are cartoons, not comics.
However, other people have pushed back on this particular limitation of his definition.
I think there's definitely multiple streams here; the "comic book comic" which is clearly different from single-panic comics/cartoons.
But then you have newspaper comics - some of which are things like Prince Valiant which are just comic books over time, and then there are the "one joke per day" comics which sometimes have multiple panels, sometimes not.
As with many things, trying to tie it down often reveals that it's not really possible - various "string of one-off" comics (even including The Far Side), political cartoons, etc end up having "recurring characters" that end up with a mythos.
For most people, "digital Far Side" would be a webcomic, because it's something that would live on the comics page in the newspaper.
You're very welcome! I've been studying his work for many years. It may not have succeeded financially, but you have to admire his passion in each of his projects.
Yes, the Music Creator has been very tricky to run in emulation on my Mac. Originally, I could not get the installer to work in DOSBox, but it did work in QEMU.
After installing the TMC software to a hard disk image, it ran for me in both emulators. However, it wouldn't play music in QEMU -- though the same hard drive image will play music for me in DOSBox!
So, yes, it works for me locally in DOSBox. But for reasons I don't understand, the music does not play in the Internet Archive’s version of DOSBox.
Jewish cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen died on April 14 at the age of 87, and he is (rightly) being celebrated for “Dry Bones,” his great life’s work. But I would like to highlight his lesser-known legacy: as a tech innovator who tried to bring humor and humanity to the cold silicon world of computers in the 1980s.
Last fall, Josh Renaud gave a presentation to the Atlanta Historical Computing Society about rescuing and researching cartoonist Ya'akov Kirschen's unique computer games and software.
In the 1980s, Kirschen managed to get splashy publicity for several of his projects, but none of it was commercially successful, and after several decades it was mostly forgotten and lost.
This AHCS talk gets into Kirschen's history, the making of the games, and highlights some unique Atlanta connections to the games.
To learn more about Kirschen, or download the software, visit Break Into Chat:
I assembled IGNITE 01, a new artpack released by Mistigris computer arts and Break Into Chat, featuring 18 images and animations created in "Instant Graphics and Sound" (IGS) format for the Atari ST.
IGS was obscure even its heyday. Like RIPscrip, it's a plain-text protocol for encoding graphics, sound effects, and music. But it predates RIP by several years, since it was created specifically for the Atari ST, it has constraints unique to that platform and different from the PC.
I hope my history series and artpack might elevate the profile of IGS, and maybe interest a few more people to try making stuff with it.
If you're not into downloading and unzipping artpacks, etc, you can also experience IGNITE on YouTube with this nine-minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS_riObN32o
I don't think this term is exclusively American ... there were (and are) plenty of European and international ANSI artists. But I'm happy to be corrected.
I got into the distinction a little bit in Part 2 of this series: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2025/12/28/ansi-art-and-webco...