Today on Mistigram, a seemingly effortless clean, clear, crisp newschool ASCII Mist logo by Weird. Offset on a single-column slant and awesomely purple, she made it look easy. Originally released in an infofile in MIST0897.
For a decade now it’s represented Mistigris on its Wikipedia page after Sodium spruced the entry up with relevant artworks, so for most of the modern period this swell picture has been our primary representation to the world. You could certainly do worse!
Though the theory has been debunked, I like to imagine that the detail work on the surface of the letters represents the skyline of downtown Vancouver (the city that has been the traditional homebase of Mistigris) as seen from the West Side, with a backdrop of the North Shore mountains behind them. It’s a lie, but a nice one!
From the memberlist of M-9801, here’s a striking and unique ANSI art logo by The Extremist. January is the start of a New Year and a rising sun is an optimistic symbol, so it’s perhaps ironic that this was the beginning of our hardest-working and most catastrophic year yet, one which saw Mist crash hard and not stir again until our 2014 revival.
On the Instagram sharing of this logo I allude to an “old poem”, composed basking on modern art one sunny day circa 1999 at Capilano College and released at long last in MIST2000 at the end of last year, but for full disclosure of the ominous foreboding in which I hold optimistic suns (a true native son of Raincouver) I may as well share the whole thing here:
IT IS TOO NICE OUT
to write poetry today.
not for lack of subject matter
- the world is still a terrible place:
genocide—multinational corporate tyranny—human rights violation-
mass extinction—small arms proliferation—rape—
antibiotic-resistant bacteria—wage inequity—intolerance
and right now
right now
a parent
is telling their child
"Because I say so!"
but the sun is out
people are smiling, buying, doing their best to bring more people into this world
(do they know something I do not?)
so like a lizard on a hot rock
I renew my concern for creature comforts -
like a frog in a pot
on a slow stove
I feel no need
to move.
This piece of oldschool Amiga-style 50-row ASCII art was an contribution from on-again-off-again guest Mist artist Feral, at this point (October 1996, our second anniversary collection) formally a member of Trance – no genuine Mist member would ever be caught with such braggadocio! I didn’t know about viewing oldschool ASCII in 50-line mode with Amiga fonts until, gulp, a couple of years ago (I don’t know if it was even possible on period MS-DOS machines) but chee whiz, it looks good that way!
21 years old this month, today’s piece of historical ANSI art is a wildly Fauvist Mist logo by Xeryrus, first released in our June 1995 artpack.
Today’s Mistigram post from the Mist Classic vaults is from the infofile of our 2nd-year anniversary artpack. Drawn by animation enthusiast Etana, this ANSI mascot epitomizes our group’s name (Did You Know that “Mistigris” is French for “alley cat”?)
Today’s pick from the Mist Classic vaults is this ANSI logo by Quebec’s Zoltar, first released way back in MIST1194. A couple of days ago I discussed how Eerie secured us a remote division in the 418 area code (several provinces removed from our homebase in the 604), and Zoltar was proof positive of it.
Today’s Mist promo from our halcyon youth comes from the desk of Neophyte, and was released in this self-contained form as part of a colly in FOS-0197, our second Mistigris World Tour stop, that one being with the group Fistful of Steel.
Today’s Mist Classic piece on Instagram: Eerie (whose work you can continue to appreciate today) was like our training wheels – a colleague of mine in iMPERiAL, minting the “Inspector Dangerfuck” series of ANSIs, he assisted my colleague Nitnatsnoc in getting the to-be-Mist-WHQ The Screaming Tomato up, contributing art to our first few collections and even establishing a 418 (Quebec City) division of Mistigris which continued sending meritorious computer art our way long after he’d parted ways (and was in fact actively aiding and abetting our local nemesis, Integrity, with ANSI we would have given our eyeteeth to present.)
We would have preferred an epic ANSI scroller to this, but as part of our mandate was to incubate and nurture attempts to broaden and diversify the possibilities of computer art, we welcomed this doodly piece of hirez (even if it may not have made the cut coming from an unappreciated genius with a lesser reputation 8)
All caught up now, today’s slice of Mist Classic history comes from the infofile of our very first artpack, an ANSI art logo by oldschooler Tzeentch used in the infofiles hidden deep within the electronic magazine, Kithe e-mag, which was included in MIST1094.
And, still playing catch-up with our Instagram account, we’d previously shared this newschool ASCII art logo (two of them, actually, though the tiny one leaves the “r” our of “Mistigris”) by Crystal Meth of Mistigris, originally released in DARK0597 – the final stop of the Mistigris World Tour.
Exhumed today from a long and uneasy rest, this logo is an excerpt of a longer work credited to Donut Hole and Halaster of the original group Fire, released in MIST0395 during the short-lived merger between Fire and Mistigris.
And one more catch-up piece, this striking Mistigris logo was drawn by Tribe! as part of a larger work in MIST0695.
What a beautiful mess! Maeve Wolf drew us this work of hirez, released in M-9802, and we featured this classic piece of computer artwork as today’s excavation from Mistigris’ ‘90s vaults.
Further catchup from the “all-time Mistigris classics” gallery currently being served up at our new Instagram account, this is a work of RIPscrip vector art from guest artist Prisonernumberone, who briefly passed through Mistigris en route from the original Fire to ACiD. It appeared in MIST0895 and adapts a panel from Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V For Vendetta (long before Anonymous was a germ in anyone’s eye… for that matter, originally (1988) published before quite a number of them would even have been born!)
The slogan was a lovely, if somewhat vague, sentiment.
Today’s computer art classic from the vaults has never been released in a Mistigris artpack (at least, not yet) but rather was drawn by Skavi of The Prana Express and released in one of theirs way back in 2003. We somehow stumbled across this virtuous ASCII logo released in the middle of our long hibernation and repurposed it for our MIST1016 call for submissions, colouring it up (well, expanding its greyscale palette) and hitching it to our loader call for submissions.
Has it inspired you to set something aside for a contribution to our October artpack?
The daily Instagram gallery has been going for a few days, so to catch up and get synchronized we’ll be sharing a couple of them daily here until we can proceed in lockstep. (And fear not, we’ll be continuing with the longer-form features here also. We’ve just been distracted with related works over at Pixel Pompeii recently.)
This was an unexpected piece of guest ANSI from DJ Moses Risin’, head of Happy Fetus Records, SysOp of The Pelvis of Elvis BBS. A great outsider with a great outsider style, we used the art (the graffiti makes it a nominal Mist promo!) as the infofile header for our July 1996 artpack.
Introducing the fabulous new Mistigris Instagram account, sharing a daily dose of classic works from our extensive and positively antique back catalogue from 1994-1998. This was our inaugural post there, an old ANSI logo by Sentience!
The Sixteen Colours’ ANSI of the Day series has always been disproportionally generous to us – since, let’s be fair, despite coming close at our most vigorous, Mistigris ANSI never set the artscene on fire and it was always our most troubled division, eternally torn between striking out on their own or just throwing in the towel altogether. But one of our most consistent guiding lights over the course of Mistigris’ Classic period was Mavrik, SysOp of Daemon’s Gate, host to our BBS echomail network KiTSCHNet and instigator of our newsletter/e-mag (electronic magazine) KiTHE. He, uh, wore many hats, and consequently ANSI art never got his full focus – but when he slipped a few hours in PabloDraw into his crowded schedule, he always got excellent results. (Even today, having dug Mav up from deep retirement, though we haven’t yet tricked him into coughing up any new artwork, he has graciously provided web hosting at mistigris.org , so to him we say hats off!)His appearance in today’s AOTD is the result of a recent swing toward the “roundup” format, of showing off multiple pictures of the same subject. Today’s theme is Julie Winters from The Maxx, and he represents us with an offering from the MIST0695 artpack.
Our back catalogue continues to yield strange dividends! This piece wasn’t granted elite “ANSI of the Day” status on its own, but as part of a roundup of ANSIs of characters from Jeff Smith’s comic Bone – one of the most popular “toon” ANSI subjects of all time. This rendition was executed by Sarcasm of Mistigris but initially credited as coming from the fellow artgroup Dark Illustrated – because we released it with them in May, 1997, in DARK0597.ZIP, Mistigris’ “World Tour” stop visiting Dark and releasing all our artwork in their collection. (It was confusing then and apparently it remains so today, some 19 years down the line.)
Sdaly I don’t have much to tell you about Sarcasm, an artist with an intriguing and idiosyncratic style… who I never met, whose name I ever knew, who came from parts unknown, and who proceeded to appear only nominally in a Glue artpack or two. Given so little to work with, of course we have been unsuccessful at locating him on Facebook, so I don’t have much else to report in this blog post.
This was not the first or even the best appearance of Bone characters in a Mistigris artpack – Babyface had a practice run, then knocked one out of the park in March of 1998 (despite my failure to secure a collaborator to add a second half to it, re-enacting this classic Muppets bit)… but that’s neither here nor there. Loath as I am to admit it, sometimes it turns out there is simply no interesting back story to share!
