[gallery]

By and large, the denizens of Mistigris managed to avoid that pathetic ANSI artscene pitfall of “ripping”, ie. (being caught) claiming credit for the hard work of others.  (In retrospect, longterm VGA department head Grim Reaper / Thanatos and musician |<ing |rthur were both found to have engaged in some dubious practices in this area.)  But languishing in our obscure corner of the continent, it never occurred to us that someone might find us and take credit for our work: the ideal victim is virtuous yet unknown.  We maintained as high a profile as we could but never imagined that our work was worth stealing – it turns out that we were selling ourselves short!

We learned that we’d been the subjects of this heinous act in 2003 when RaDMaN of ACiD looked up Cthulu and asked about the contents of this February 1997 artpack (available, as best as we can tell, here exclusively) by a one-pack group named “Mistic” – because if you’re going to repurpose artwork, it may as well be from something that already sounds kind of like yourself… less reworking needed.  The Mistic pack wasn’t exclusively populated by Mistgris rips, but they were present in a sufficiently peculiar density as to make their pack look like a kind of Mistigris pack from Bizarro world.  (Maybe the remainder of the pack is merely ripped from other sources, I don’t know.)

The Mist rips are all credited to the group’s founder, Air Walker (whose other ANSIs are presumed as well to derive from alternate sources), and they’re taken from a variety of artists who displayed work in the MIST0696.ZIP collection eight months prior – descending from the top (Mistigris originals on the left) we have our memorable FILE_ID.DIZ by Nitnatsnoc in his distinctive original toony style, a striking piece by Babyface, the sinister face by Solar Menace, a font by Platinum celebrating our distinctively-strangely-named group WHQ The Screaming Tomato (oh no, this is for an entirely DIFFERENT “The Screaming Tomato” BBS based out of Washington!), and two illustrations by Kestrel – one of which was used in our memberlist!  Basically Air Walker stole just about a full half of the textmode art from our 0696 pack.

Now, many of these pieces were watermarked by their artists – slipping in their initials amidst the blocks that make up the piece – but that was always just a formality, it being trivial to find and replace one artist’s initials with another’s.  The artist’s remarks are generally preserved (“I can never draw fists…”), ironically so when they tout the originality of the work or actively solicit payment for further work.  (This also presumably gives us the full name and home address, circa 1997, of the culprit – don’t worry, Ethan Sullens of Birmingham, AL, I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations is up on this one.)

And then, there’s the humiliating hypocrisy in their infofile.  "All work is owned by Mist"?  Well, in a manner of speaking: yes.  Also, I can breathe easy knowing I’m cleared of of the legal mumbo jumbo of your depraved mind.

In short, disappointingly there has always been plagiarism and there always will be, but there is no quick route to artistic talent.  (And this isn’t even the only time it happened to humble Mistigris – maybe next time we’ll tell you about the time ACiD released an ANSI that previously appeared in a Mist pack!)

The only question is: how come nobody ever plagiarised our lit?  It was lying around knee-deep all over the place and nobody would ever have realised where it had come from because no one read it in the first place!  Basically, that would have been the perfect crime.

(Update, June 2015: Air Walker explains!  We’ll have the exclusive scoop for you in a response blog post coming up shortly…)