Today on Mistigram, a joint ANSI art depiction of X-Man Colossus drawn by Wetworks of Mist and The Green Hornet of Dark Illustrated as part of our Mistigris World Tour appearance with Dark in May of 1997. I’m not certain who did what, but I’d put good money on that background fire having come from the desk of TGH.
Today on Mistigram, this ANSI art one-panel comic strip which was used in the infofile of our Mistigris World Tour appearance with Fire in April of 1997. It was drawn by our resident font specialist Platinum, and we’re glad to also be sharing it with you today.
Today on Mistigram we feature this four-way collaboration from our May 1997 Mistigris World Tour stop with Dark Illustrated – the ANSI art portrait of Todd Macfarlane’s Image Comics mainstay Spawn was drawn by Mist member Dead Soul and Dark members Samurai, The Green Hornet, and Corinthian… who would go on to feature further in Mist artpacks before disappearing altogether. (Has anybody out there seen Corn?)
That there is a pixel perfect digital fire effect.
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 featured this (excerpted) piece of ANSI art by Jughead (a name we’ve heard lots of lately!) from the Mistigris World Tourstop with Dark Illustrated in May of 1997. The piece was just touched-up enough by Samurai of Dark to make it a joint production, but we take all the credit for it and consequently claim bragging rights with the giant logo on top – it’s not a Mist promo, this portion just gives that false impression.
I try to mix up our Mistigram features by genre, artist and age, but once in a while our manual algorithm seizes and we end up with this situation, two pieces from the same artpack two days in a rown. Go figure. So here we are, with another piece from our Mistigris World Tour stint with Fistful of Steel in January of 1997. It’s a twirly, whirly Mist logo (I know, that “T” is something else, isn’t it?) drawn in RIPscrip vector graphics by Neophyte, midway along his quest from Solar Menace to Quip (… and beyond.)
The Mistigris World Tour was scheduled to begin just after our third anniversary in October of 1996, but as decribed in Wikipedia, we had a hard time of things when groups we’d made plans to jointly release with had an unfortunate tendency to up and die just before we joined forces. First it was Ophidiac, then TeklordZ… we just managed to squeak in a combination artpack with Blade at the end of the year, and then continued into 1997 with Fistful of Steel in January, which is where this positively shattered ANSI art logo by Jughead appeared. (This in some way accounts for discrepancy between the date shown on the logo and the release date of the artpack containing it; the art was always phresh, if not necessarily fresh 8)
Today on Mistigram: this ANSI art logo, unmistakably by The Extremist, was just a small part of a much larger (500 lines!) multi-artist collaboration in the Fire tourstop of our Mistigris World Tour, but playing to Instagram’s strengths, we provide you the excerpt. Maybe you didn’t think that the word “Mistigris” had that many pointy letters in it, but he could always find a way to coax the points and edges out.
Today on Mistigram, this postmodern, deconstructed angel by our Hawaiian member Kyo – the computer counterpart, perhaps, to the album art to Nirvana’s 1993 album In Utero. It was released in May of 1997 in our Dark Illustrated visit on the Mistigris World Tour.
A big change of pace for today’s Mistigram post: this is a piece of hirez (high resolution artwork) by Weird, most recently seen rocking the Alpha-Bits logo style in newschool ASCII art. But the times were changing (this is from our January 1997 Fistful of Steel artpack on the Mistigris World Tour), and sometimes you have to go from being the best at the old style to being a rank beginner of the new style. Certainly Photoshop gave artists powerful options (did I mention lens flare?) that PabloDraw did not, so in the interest of moving forward our artists had to shift gears from time to time. Weird ended up doing visual work for the video game industry, a path that assuredly this kind of stuff unlocked more helpfully than her elegant but outmoded ASCII art. But commercial concerns aside, that latter has probably better stood the test of time as an eternal classic of computer art 8)
Straying from the status quo was a delicate gambit in the competitive underground computer artscene, where anything other than conformity to established standards would be considered failure. And when the standards were to plaster artpacks with anatomically impossible babes in sprayed-on costumes, how could one beat them at their own game? By applying reductio ad absurdum: “More is better, right?”
This piece of ANSI art was drawn by animation buff, Hallucigenia founder (13 paltry months down the road) and Dreams of Dark, Enchanted Lizards SysOp Etana, helping Mist to distinguish itself among the big fish in Dark Illustrated, asserting ourselves in the culmination of our Mistigris World Tour in May of 1997.
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.
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.
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!
Mistigris was extraordinary. I could just end right there and it’d be true, but I have a point to make here, so I’ll continue: we were extraordinary in our commitment to the spectrum of computer arts. Many groups were ANSI or ASCII-only; some also accepted the filesize-thrifty vector art format of RIPscrip. Some took the extraordinary next step of committing to the file-size increase of having a high-resolution art (or “VGA”) division, and few further also folded in bulky tracked computer music. Those who could included programs, but typically that only went as far as an application generator and a file viewer. And then, of course, there was our most unconventional inclusion: lit – which, if we included, meant that we basically had to take in anything that came our way. But let’s back up a few steps here, because it really is tracked music I’m discussing today.
Following a couple of false starts with Ophidiac and TeklordZ, our very first realized Mistigris World Tour stop was in December of 1996 with the long-running B-list group Blade (B-list ha, I recall we described this one-month gestalt as “Blistigris”) – and as a second-stringer, like us, they were forced to take what they could get, making them our only tour companions to enjoy pre-existing lit and music departments we could just slot our releases in those formats into. As the false starts had delayed the start of our tour (originally intended to get underway immediately following our 2nd-anniversary release), Blade inherited quite a backlog of pent-up submissions. Fistful of Steel, our next tour stop in January of ‘97, also was kind enough to accept tracked music in their release. And then, and then, and then… arrangements fell through, and we drifted for three months with no guest outlet for our creations. Keep working on them, I cried, I’ll find a worthy home for them! And I did: the tour ended with two great appearances in two great artgroups, Fire and Dark. (The Blender competition was at this moment also a welcome release valve as well as a font of inspiration.)
But Fire did not want to bloat their pack’s filesize with tracked music, which was at this point a painful pent-up burden, and we weren’t in a position to dictate terms to them. So, as you saw, some were shunted aside to a Sonic Equinox release; the rest were earmarked for the upcoming Dark pack. FIRE0497 launched with our “everything else”, and we were intriguingly integrating with Dark when the news dropped: Fire was going to use our music, a month following our tourstop with them, to help flesh out the inaugural release of their new, long-planned music division, “Radiance”. And yea, there a truly shizoid collection was unleashed. On the one hand, you had three months’ of Mistigris musician compositions – “art for art’s sake”, as it were (especially Jake Blues’ epic unparalleled >10-minute Akira-taiko tribute Neo Tokyo Dawning), but still basically scene music by creators for whom music was their primary outlet. And then, there in the other corner, was a deliberately abrasive collection of music tracks predominantly by creative types best known as ANSI artists. In fact, I don’t know if any of them ever released tracker music in the artscene ever again following this lopsided debut – promotional art (pictured here) and fruitless labour on music-playing executables to the contrary, this remained Radiance’s only release. Fire’s side provided what could be considered compelling compositions – bolder, more iconoclastic ones than we dished up – but unlike the rest of the tour-stops, this is one occasion where the different groups’ contributions would probably have been better received independent from each other.
Dark was genuinely disappointed at the lost opportunity to showcase Neo Tokyo Rising, but probably sighed in relief at dodging the bullet of being confronted with having to deal with the sum of a season’s worth of Mistigris songs and not just the two we’d come up with in the meantime. And that is the story of how Mistigris released music in three different collections in the month of May 1997 – none of them Mist packs!
For the eighth day of Mistigris May Music Madness, I dug up this collection – because, in accordance with the old “too artscene for the demoscene archives, too demoscene for the artscene archives”, the collection had fallen between the cracks and disappeared from the historical record. I no longer had the archive, but I had managed to hang on to the individual tracks (tracker wisdom: don’t throw out that song! I might be able to use its samples sometime!) which, through the magic of analysing file timestamps, I managed to isolate. I feared I’d have to reconstruct its vital packaging, the infofile and FILE_ID.DIZ, but after some prodding, Nail of Fire delivered a (corrupted) copy of the original disk from the filebase of his decomissioned BBS. Between the two of us, we managed to Frankenstein the original archive back together, for better (additional context from an Ay Lektriq interview in the infofile) or worse (the original FILE_ID.DIZ, repeating the worst part of the Fire tour pack). For the first time in years, you can once again enjoy the sounds of RAD_DSK1 (well, maybe not the Fire stuff – you can experience those fauvist sounds 8) in-browser over at pc.textmod.es
For Mistigris May Music Madness: Day 6, we re-released the next Sonic Equinox collection, SE_D0597, whose songs can be heard (and whose executables can be run) in-browser at pc.textmod.es!
In addition to musical duties from an extended roster of member composers Esquire, Freaq, Jake Blues and Onyx, this collection also included a slate of songs from Mistigris musicians (Cthulu, Fritz, Crystal Meth, Handiboy, Melodia and Neophyte) venting from their stockpile of tracks accumulated during Blenders and the Mistigris World Tour, making this somewhat of an unofficial World Tour stop during that 1997 spree. Also it contains a new application generator (your window of opportunity to apply has regretfully likely closed) and Techno Retrace’s swell loader for Daemon’s Gate BBS. All that PLUS promo art for Super Bubble Mania, the Pang (Buster Brothers) clone by SE’s gamedev spinoff Delphic Oracle.
You can’t tell, but the music-playing exeutable infofile in this collection ends with an interview of group leader Eto by Onyx, but due to the executable’s glitchy behavior it is difficult to steer the scrolling infofile there.
Is it possible we have only one Sonic Equinox musicdisk remaining to cover? Stay tuned!
