Today on Mistigram, another kingly piece of ANSI art from a familiar face in these parts, Quip, the dynamo whose ceaseless revolutions generated impetus for Mistigris nearly singlehandedly for the final year and a half of its “Classic” period. You’ve seen him mint logos by the ton, and no less so here, with a great green glowy oozing ANSI art font that just happens to be the mere preface to a consummate rendition of that most artscene of subjects, a comic book babe. (In its original incarnation, the piece continued along with a closing logo for the Mistigris WHQ BBS The Jade Monkey, but due to the proportion restraints imposed by Instagram for this particular series, we have cropped it. But go on and see for yourself, if you care that much! It appeared in full in the August 1997 Mist artpack.)
Today on Mistigram, this humble Fone Bone ANSI by Babyface, which lingered through the whole dagblamed Mistigris World Tour of 1997 in an incomplete state until the heroic Quip rose to the occasion and finished it off with an abstract background (and a logo by Kleenex of Dark, omitted here) for release in March 1998, at which point it’d been in limbo for probably at least a year. Art: sometimes it needs to simmer on the back burner for a while! Now… who wants to take on Happyfish’s unfinished suite of Star Control 2 ANSIs?
Today on Mistigram – sometimes… usually the further you get from the mid-‘90s… you need a textmode logo and you just can’t find one. This was, believe it or not, a factor in the indeterminate delay of M-9808 (finally released in 2015, after waiting for 17 years – surely, enough time for a new textmode artist to be born and come of age to fulfil the demand!) But if you’re feeling more pragmatic and less… doomed… you can usually find an underutilized logo that can be spruced up and re-issued to people who genuinely haven’t seen it before. So when I was running a little short on official artgroup iconography for our MIST2000 collection of loose ends from the turn of the century, I sought out this relic from happier times – a month that we had so very many worthwhile FILE_ID.DIZ submissions we just stacked them all up in the infofile. This one is by Quip, and it’s respectable enough!
Today on Mistigram, this RIPscrip vector art Mist logo drawn by Quip and released in our February 1998 artpack. Purple haze or fleshy brain mass?
Today’s Mistigram Mist logo is an ANSI art one from the desk of Quip – surely our most prolific forger of Mist logos – originally appearing (in the infofiles) in our August 1997 artpack.
Today on Mistigram, an ANSI art Mist logo by Quip that stood patiently on the sidelines for years and years until finally seeing the day of light along with a great deal of shelved art in the MIST2000 collection released in early 2016.
Today on Mistigram, a cartoonish mad scientist from the desk of Quip, who drew this ANSI art not-a-Mist-promo (actually it advertises the BBS Geeksta’s Paradise, but the logo at the bottom got cut off). It was first released in January of 1998, but later saw thematic re-use in the photo announcement (99 weeks ago!) of our 2014 revival, along with: the unique Mistigris coffee mug Etana made me for a turn-of-the-century birthday party, the volume of Poetry Comics, the physical-ANSI-art Duplo, and the USB floppy disc drive containing a copy of the limited-edition 10th-anniversary TABdisks from way back in 2003.
Today on Mistigram, this chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table – sorry, of fellow traveler computer artgroups Mistigris, Twilight and iCE, all of whose artists made contributions to this larger BBS ad for Clockwork London that you simply can’t see here in a single Instagram window. Most of it was drawn by the elegantly effortless Kitiara, shedding ANSI art like ripe fruit from a tree, but the thing tying it together was ths logo up top by our man Quip.
Juuuust below where this excerpt cuts off, you maybe could originally find a rhyming lit jointly written on the subject by myself and Lady Blue, a conspicuous omission from our reunited crew of the presentday. While I’m airing everyone else’s embarrassing juvenilia, it’s only fair that some of the dirt I dig up is my own:
Along the spreading fog banks
down beside the River Thames
stands a model of precision
no one questions or condemns.
Amid the gargoyles' grimaces
its face shines in the night;
Precise reliability
among a pie of spite.
Undaunted by reality;
not marred by trivial need.
Relentless in its purpose -
never sows a barren seed.
A beacon of eternity,
stalwart against the dark
in accuracy paragon -
it's always on the mark.
The cycles of the city
match this undisputed rhythm.
Its movements push the hands' extremes
but never come to schism.
It counts a beat unstoppable;
its cant can't be undone.
The tattoo is the pulse of life,
from the heart of Clockwork London.
On Mistigram today, this ANSI art Mist logo by Quip from an infofile in February of 1998! Though the colouration makes it akin to a tropical coral reef, the drifting shapes of the letters suggest that they’re composed of smoke or some vapour (mist?)
It’s a good one.
This year we found that we had a previously unreleased arrangement of the national anthem gathering dust, “O Canada” put together in Scream Tracker by Onyx of Mist and Sonic Equinox, also from way back in 1997. But because free video sharing arrangements are less suspect than audio sharing ones in 2016, we decided to throw together some quick visuals to accompany the audio.
The ANSI art maple leaf is by Quip, and you may recall it from last year’s roundup; we have lent it some ongoing visual appeal by colour-cycling it with the legendary GLOW3.EXE utility – credited to members of ACiD and iCE, but not conclusively belonging to either. Finally, there is a grand finale poached from a 1995 intro by Melkor.
Now the well is good and truly dry, so I have no idea what we’ll do for Canada Day 2017. Maybe… create new art? (shocked gasp) In the meantime, we’ll continue celebrating nostalgic outmoded notions like MS-DOS, modems and nation-states.
