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Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!  Admittedly it’s hard to draw ANYTHING in the ANSI medium – and it’s hard to draw as abstract a concept as “love” in any medium!  So how do you draw an ANSI of love?  (No, Tumblr, that’s a rhetorical question, not a poll I want to include in this post!)  Plasticised Rob Liefeld Image Comics combat dolls there are a-plenty, but in a sense that’s nearly as far from the heart of the matter as one can get!

Here are a few takes on related topics from the period 1994-1998.  We open with a collaboration between Tincat (illustration) and Lady Blue (poetry): so there wasn’t a lot of visual art we released about love, but there sure were a ton of love poems!  (I had one entire wall of my bedroom plastered with ones I’d written over the course of this period.  Each one was encoded with a simple message immediately apparent to its recipient: warning, do not engage.)  This one could have used a bit more proofreading, but between the words and the image, it suggests an intriguing enough point of ambiguous emotional intensity: if love is right, then why does this feel so wrong?

A bit less ambiguously is Mr. Flibbles’ unabashedly adolescent celebration below: we, the men (and lesbians) of the ANSI artscene, don’t love a specific woman in particular – we just cherish their entire class.  As embodied by signage iconography from public washrooms.  How romantic!  Well no, but still… awesomely punk rock.  No apologies!

The next two pieces enshrine the perversely personal as embodied by the French expression “vive la différence!”  The monstrous hand-holding was a guest piece by DJ Moses Risin’ of Happy Fetus Records, SysOp of The Pelvis of Elvis BBS, while the following piece – the ones whose cups runneth over – was a witty take on excess and objectification by Etana.  How deep is your love?

One more punk rock kick to the teeth – hey, this was the ‘90s, heydays of eg. seeing L7 playing the annual Rock for Choice festival – is an explosive chance meeting between a sperm and an egg in a restaurant, a loaded visual metaphor by Haquisaq.  Love and consequences!

Finally, I’ve embarrassed everyone else with their juvenilia, so it’s time to rake some of mine across the coals.  You never saw this one in a Mistigris artpack, as it only ever appeared in INT-0496.ZIP – as the header suggests, a release of our local arch-nemesis group Integrity.  Their policy was to release ANSI art only, which meant that instead of merging profitably they would just periodically skim the talent off of one of our departments.  Consequently it was a bit of a coup to have a lit appear in one of their packs.  The house style was pictures of “babes” (I believe this is Vampirella?) and through chats between myself and Darkforce on their WHQs the House of Style and the Ho-Zone (keep it classy, guys), we negotiated the illustration and release of this piece in their artpack.  (A pity it’s so middling!)

N.B. – “The Girl With Electric Fingers” kissed me once over the course of our 10-month relationship, then went on to be a sex and sexuality columnist at her university newspaper.  Gentlemen may not kiss and tell, but poets take inspiration wherever they can find it, and are prone to making mountains out of molehills.