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 :)
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.
It’s a technicality - they call it ASCII art in the US even though it includes both non-ASCII characters (IBM extensions) and ANSI.SY’s escape sequences to change colors.
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.
1. Awesome!
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 :)
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.
It's weird to see this called "ANSI art". Is that an American thing? I don't think I've ever heard that in Europe, everybody calls it ASCII art.
It’s a technicality - they call it ASCII art in the US even though it includes both non-ASCII characters (IBM extensions) and ANSI.SY’s escape sequences to change colors.