Viewing profile — Kirkman14

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 th…

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 l…

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 ch…

Thanks so much, and I hope you enjoy the blog series. I'm still working on Part 4, but I'm very happy with how the first three turned out.

I don't know if you'd be willing, but I would greatly appreciate it if you would add some of these thoughts as a comment to Part 2 of the blog series!

Ah, now this is something that Part 2 of this series gets into -- how do you define a "comic"? ( https://breakintochat.com/blog/2025/12/28/ansi-art-and-webco... ) Will Eisner and S…

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).

Same here. I was an active BBSer as a teen throughout the 1990s, but was never part of the underground artscene.

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 date…

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 th…

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 …

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 softwa…

How do you raise awareness of a cool but obscure graphics format used by BBSes on an overlooked computer platform in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Well, you could start by writin…

* Download pack ZIP: https://mistigris.org/packs/IGNITE01.ZIP * Watch pack as a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS_riObN32o * Read deep-dive series on history of IGS: https:…

How do you spread the word about an obscure Atari ST graphics format from the BBSing days? Recruit some folks to help you make an artpack full of images and animations showing it o…

This is the second part of a new multi-part deep dive into "Instant Graphics and Sound." IGS was a plain-text protocol for displaying vector graphics, animation, music and sound on…

Developed in 1986, "Magic Harp" was an early attempt at AI-like autonomous music generation. Israeli cartoonist Ya'akov Kirschen's idea was to extract three sorts of "musical DNA" …