Mistigram: 26 years back, as Mist Classic entered its final year, we thought it would be fun to have different artists in our varied stable of creators demonstrate their different personal approaches toward colouring in and completing a plain Mistigris logo outline drawn by Rage, and the diverse results turned up in the M-9802 artpack collection.
Today on Mistigram, we celebrate this cursive ANSI art Mistigris logo generously drawn for us by Mattmatthew when he set up this very Mistfunk Tumblr site on our behalf (go on, look up at the header) on the occasion of reviving for our 20th anniversary in October of 2014 and … having things to say about it. With a beautiful letterhead like this at the top of your page, you’re almost protected from writing anything barbaric. (Almost!)
Pro tip: if you’re not happy with your work, don’t submit it. If you do choose to submit it, don’t disavow it with regrets written all over the piece. (I do wonder which part of this was the good start, speculating… perhaps a yellow rectangle?) It does reveal the weakness at the heart of the vague “mistfunk” current – empowering as it was (and it did inspire some great art!), it’s impossible to know whether you’ve got the funk or not. I’m not sure what Rage had, but I don’t think it was funk.
The typical compromise was that if we were on the fence about a piece, we’d run it anyway – otherwise a stung artist would flee to a less discriminating group to vent all their stuff, and we’d wind up cut out of the loop once their skills improved and they consistently wowed people. So despite everything, this went in the pack as an investment in the future. Only one problem: making this artpack, spinning this sow’s ear into a hypertext silk purse (we gambled on a big step into the future by trying to release an artpack-as-website in August of 1998… and lost big) fell flat and the attempt resulted in a total deflation of morale and momentum (from an historically unprecedented spree of monthly artpack releases), culminating in the end of Mistigris Classic and nearly 16 years of torpor. So it’s a lose-lose: we accepted Rage’s lukewarm art and never did get a chance to intercept his more skilled, confident work – indeed, we don’t even know his real name and have no way of locating him today now that we have gotten over ourselves. (And, er, probably my dragging his juvenilia through the mud will not much inspire him to emerge from the woodwork. As I said on Instagram – “Funk you too, Cthulu!”)
The curious thing about the “Mistfunk” movement is that, unlike dA pHUNK, lacking a gold standard for mistfunkiness (mistfunkitude?), it could be whatever you thought it was. This is definitely … something. Funky? …I don’t know about that. Mistfunky? It must be, it says so itself!
Bonus! See the “krap” logo on his baseball cap in homage to the plucky little crew who provided such an infusion of fresh blood and morale into Mistfunk!
This monochrome newschool ASCII logo was drawn by Weird – who drew us a lot of logos, didn’t she? – and released in our 3rd-anniversary artpack back circa October of 1997. It doesn’t read “Mist” or “Mistigris” – remember, we were busy reinventing ourselves as, if not an elite clique, at least a hip crew… an approach which worked until it failed.
The helpful transition from Mistigris to Mistfunk (even today, a useful workaround for namespace conflicts here and on Twitter and Instagram) was deeper than a mere rebranding – in addition to a fresh, post-World Tour identity, it went as far as yielding several pieces of internal jargon (such as “chunk” for awesome and “flog” for its opposite.) The move to Mistfunk probably would have been very useful if we’d followed Tribe!’s early lead and gone down that path in 1995, but by 1997, the whole artscene had so little gas left in the tank that we were but one high school graduation away from a stark crossroads.
