Kirkman14

Fire Escape was famous in St. Louis, Missouri, for her meticulous work as curator of "Fire Escape's St. Louis BBS Directory," the authoritative monthly list of bulletin boards in the 314 area code. Even Boardwatch Magazine recognized Fire Escape's directory as "one of the most accurate and detailed bulletin board lists in the world."

And Fire Escape was one of many sysops around the world who often repurposed older so-called "public domain" ANSI art to enliven her bulletin board.

This blog post traces the origins of several welcome screens from Fire Escape's BBS, as well as alternate versions made by other people. It shows that adapting old ANSI art was a widespread practice on the BBS scene, and it wasn't limited to sysops or programmers -- even ANSI artists sometimes reused their own work.

At the height of the 1992 presidential election, Don Lokke Jr. began publishing ANSI art political cartoons.

He called his digital comic strips "telecomics," and he used them to channel the skepticism and anger felt by everyday Americans about broken political promises and the looming economic recession.

Lokke would draw nearly 300 telecomics by 1995 as part of his business syndicating and selling unique online content to the sysops of bulletin board systems.

By then the great migration from BBSes to the World Wide Web was well underway. Lokke jumped ship, too, and moved his businesses to the web. His ANSI telecomics were soon forgotten, and many of them were lost.

Decades later, I unearthed 145 of them.

This is my in-depth profile of Lokke's work. It's a unique look back in time.

Thanks so much, and I hope you enjoy the blog series. I'm still working on Part 4, but I'm very happy with how the first three turned out.

I don't know if you'd be willing, but I would greatly appreciate it if you would add some of these thoughts as a comment to Part 2 of the blog series!

There's an extended quote from Eerie at the end of this story where he addresses this (in the context of where/if ANSI comics fit into the history of webcomics).

Same here. I was an active BBSer as a teen throughout the 1990s, but was never part of the underground artscene.

The 2006 book "A History of Webcomics" asserted that "Inspector Dangerfuck" -- created by ANSI artist Eerie -- was "the first known comic on the Internet."

The book offered no dates, no details, and no sources. But these red flags didn't deter later editors, bloggers, and content creators from repeating versions of this statement.

To be clear, the assertion was wrong. Eerie drew "Inspector Dangerfuck" pieces in 1994, and there had been much earlier online comics.

Still, the assertion raises a lot of interesting questions: What is ANSI art? Who was Eerie? What was "Inspector Dangerfuck?" Was it even a comic? Were there other ANSI art comics?

I've written a multi-part series tackling these questions and diving deep into the history of an often-overlooked subculture.

You're very welcome! I've been studying his work for many years. It may not have succeeded financially, but you have to admire his passion in each of his projects.