Here’s a post for St. Patrick’s Day.  There can’t be much explicitly Irish-themed ANSI artwork out there, but this must be the strangest item atop that small pile.  It’s an early work (from MIST0195, our 4th artpack) from Nitnatsnoc, SysOp of our WHQ The Screaming Tomato BBS (an eventual post subject of its own, in progress), who got Cthulu into the local small-press minicomics of eg. Ian Boothby (and moving on himself, so we could never discuss them!) and whose sister serendipitously ended up being a comics professional (creating Yokaiden and putting in some art duties on The Simpsons Comics.)

           Nitty (the full handle, an inversion of “Constantin” from a French Immersion social studies word-jumble, was such a mouthful of apparent gibberish that a cutesy shorthand was inevitable) was a scene outsider, always his own agent even when holding membership in (reverse chronology) Avenge, ACiD, Integrity, Mistigris, or the local no-pack-released Sensation.  He wouldn’t do anything merely because it was popular (well, I can’t really account for his interest in the Image comics of the early ‘90s) and while able to play well with others, always acted with independent motivations.

           From time to time, this led to some peculiar choices for the subject matter of his visual art creations.  This one speaks for itself: Lucky, perennially hounded leprechaun mascot of Lucky Charms cereal, in vampire form, intoning the unforgettable caption: “Just try an’ bite me ya wee bastards!”  It’s an odd piece: every element of it is serviceable – a decent font, a well-proportioned freehand embellishment of an established character – but at the same time everything is a bit “off”: where’s the background?  Why no flat ‘toon” shading for a context clearly calling for it?  The transitions from header to pic to font are a bit abrupt… the BBS advertised was by now an also-ran (run by the onetime Op of my first warez board, the 9th Plane of Hell, who rebranded himself “Nosferatu” – who pranked me at the end of my very first “meet people from modem-land” adventure by dropping me off at a SkyTrain station which was not yet in operation – who jumped into the artscene affiliated with PAiN, putting prefab fonts on scans from White Wolf RPG illustrations… but I digress) and, of course… what’s with that picture?  

           We may never really know for sure.

          (Edited to add: the first half of the header text is worth repeating, and may be displayed too tiny to be easily readable:

“Helter (the sysop of Salem’s Lot) claims that this pic should have been drawn for his board.  Apparently, Salem’s Lot is a book about green vampires attacking a town.  Plus, he’s Irish.  Well, he wanted me to mention that.”

Anne Rice was really a ‘90s thing, wasn’t it? Also, for an obsessive Queen fan, that’s a hilarious typo at the end of the header.)