Yesterday on Mistigram, we featured this appearance by our random Twitter textmode acquaintance Spitoufs (aka Lobo) from the recent MIST1116 artpack release. It’s a coloured ASCII art rendition of the 1913 Japanese superhero Ōgon Bat! (Don’t worry, we had to Google him also.))
Everyone’s always making ANSI art of comic book characters, but no one’s ever making ASCII art of comic strip characters. So alike, yet so different! This year in MIST1116 we compiled what must be a decade of textmode doodles made by my old TABNet colleague Pannekoekologist into a digest of textmode art adaptations of Tony Millionaire’s ‘90s alt-weekly staple, “Maakies”, boiled down into something we couldn’t resist calling “Maakscii art”. Pictured here is the dipsomaniac character Drinky Crow, likely mere panels before filling his head with bullets.
It gives us great pleasure (and enormous relief) to announce that MIST1116, the Mistigris computer artpack collection for which we’d been gathering submissions since the end of April, is finally out following a series of delays.
With a strong current of pieces dealing with themes of technology, transhumanism and cyberspace, there’s also plenty to enjoy to suit camps old and new alike – several varieties of textmode artwork, including typewriter masterpieces and an unstoppable parade of teletext, plus the “real-life” art forms historically absent, including drawing, painting, photography and collage. (Still no dance! We’ve got to have something to strive toward, I guess.)
And keeping us relevant despite our celebrating the occasion of our 22nd anniversary, the kids will enjoy an unsettling SnapChat face-swap and an canonical literary work transliterated into emoji.
(Also, at least three accordions. They’re made to fit in there thematically somehow, but huh – go figure!)
If you’d like to download the entire collection in one 185-meg go for local enjoyment, please point your web browser to bit.ly/MIST1116 ; if on the other hand you’d like to wander through a garden of thumbnails via a web gallery, textmod.es is hosting (most of) it at bit.ly/MIST1116gallery
Today on Mistigram we featured an extraordinary ASCII art / hirez hybrid by Dead Soul that first ran in our January 1998 artpack. I’m not sure precisely what relationship there is, if any, between the foreground graffiti logos and the manga-style ASCII art in the background, but they are most definitely juxtaposed.
The Mistigram pool is extensively shuffled according to a few criteria so we don’t get all the same artform in a row, there’s a good mix between early and late Mist classic, keeping too many logos in a row from appearing and preventing an individual artist from dominating a week unless we darned well deliberately intend for them to do so… but we don’t adjust for subject. This picture was planned to run weeks and months ago, but ended up in a spot where we would have ended up with two or even three Spawns in a row. There is probably room to do Spawn Week, but if we do end up rolling that way, I’d prefer for it to be on purpose 8)
Today on Mistigram, this thunderbolt-and-lightning-very-very-frightening-y newschool ASCII art Mist logo by Crystal Meth, originally drawn and released in July of 1997. Those letters… must not be grounded!
Today on Mistigram, the conclusion to that piece shared a couple of weeks ago – the rest of Muton’s superheroic newschool ASCII art piece from our third anniversary, capped off with a killer logo by Weird! What more could you want?
Today on Mistigram, another exciting piece from the then-overlooked newschool ASCII artist Crystal Meth. Here we see not only a cruel, wicked pointed greyscale Mist logo, but also a chief contender for the all-time title of “smallest textmode Mist logo”. Not bad!
On Mistigram today, the top third of this newschool ASCII art Mist promo by the long neglected Muton, with Olde English thug lyfe typography and an unknown presumably Image Comics superhero. We’ll be revisiting the bottom portion of this particular piece down the line.
Today on Mistigram, an oldschool ASCII art Mist logo by Feral, originally released in July of 1997. Simple but effective!
Today on Mistigram, we feature another historical piece of colourful newschool ASCII art by crowd favorite Weird, who beefs up her creative letterforms with some sassy smiley faces. It is admittedly an odd place to break the word “Mistigris” in two, but where would be less odd? This piece was first released in our July 1997 artpack.
Today on Mistigram: a newschool ASCII art logo by Dead Soul excerpted from a larger piece, released in our Mistigris World Tour stop with Dark Illustrated in May 1997. (phew!)
Today on Mistigram, we have this piece of newschool ASCII art by Crystal Meth, a dark horse Mist member who always flew under the radar despite an appetite for learning through experimentation, now hopelessly lost forever. This work is exceptional by 2016 standards, but was just another grain of sand on the beach in 1997 – the piece was released in (perhaps our best artpack of the classic era?) our Mistigris World Tour joint release with Fire in April of 1997.
Everybody loves Weird! I don’t know that we have too much more of her work coming up before we transition out of the world of Mistigris promo art, so here is one of her all-time great Mistigris promos – not just typography (which, let’s be fair, I’m sure she could bang out all day long) but also a charming newschool ASCII art illustration and catchy slogan (a distant reference to E.T. and his penchant for Reece’s Pieces?)
19 years ago to the month Dead Soul drew us this clean experimental newschool ASCII art Mist logo. It’s simple, but there’s surprisingly a lot going on beneath the surface.
Today on Mistigram, a guest appearance by one “Everlast” (presumably not our 604 colleague in RAiD… thanks for nothing, House of Pain!) with this oldschool Amiga-style ASCII art Mist logo from our 2nd anniversary artpack in October of 1996.
Today on Mistigram, a work of newschool ASCII art by Publius Emeritus II from our 20th anniversary / revival artpack of October 2014, the first drawn by the artist in over a decade and a half. It plays with the conceit of the numerical substitution cipher (eg. num3r1c4l 5ub5717u710n c1ph3r) traditionally employed by elite hackers where numbers are substituted for letters of a similar appearance, and here takes the conceit further by rendering the numbers themselves out of different characters! Mise en abyme, my friends!
