The ANSI art "telecomics" of the 1992 election(breakintochat.com) |
The ANSI art "telecomics" of the 1992 election(breakintochat.com) |
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.
2. Thank you for collecting and providing context :)
3. How come examples are in PNG? Is that the only format you have available, or is there a technical limitation or risk in making them available in original ASCII format?
(Seems pedantic, but I noticed because I'm at the airport -- The article loaded near instantly, but the actual art took a couple of minutes and still loading mid way through :)
So, for a blog post, PNG is the most robust way to display the art across browsers of all kind.
But you definitely can get the original ANSI files. Lokke packaged every 20 or so of his telecomics into "ALLMACKx.ZIP" archives for distribution. These were very similar to the artpacks that the underground ANSI art scene would eventually use. I uploaded the seven ALLMACK files I recovered and uploaded them to the 16colors ANSI art archive: https://16colo.rs/artist/don+lokke+jr
That's probably the best way (for now) to explore it as a collection or download the original files.
I do have some more Lokke telecomics I located that were not in ALLMACK archives, and so are not submitted to 16c yet. I may just package them up as a "MISC" pack and upload them.
If you have not seen it, the definitive ansi (and ascii) art archive, 16colors, is great https://16colo.rs/
Or try your hand with this online ansi art editor https://ansidraw.com/
- ASCII is a real ANSI standard, the 7-bit character set that we all know and love
- Microsoft, IBM and others extended this to many different 8-bit sets, each with its own “extended” characters in the 128-255 range, often including both graphic symbols and control codes
- one of the more popular ones, windows-1252, became informally known as ANSI because Microsoft hoped that this (and others) would become new ANSI standards (they didn’t)
- people on BBSes and then early websites used this encoding standard to create art using graphic symbols and colour codes that are not available in ASCII art
- due to the optimistic, but ultimately incorrect, naming of both charset and the supporting library, this became known as ANSI art
I don't think this term is exclusively American ... there were (and are) plenty of European and international ANSI artists. But I'm happy to be corrected.
I got into the distinction a little bit in Part 2 of this series: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2025/12/28/ansi-art-and-webco...
"ANSI art is considerably more flexible than ASCII art, because the particular character set it uses contains symbols intended for drawing, such as a wide variety of box-drawing characters and block characters that dither the foreground and background color. It also adds accented characters and math symbols that often find creative use among ANSI artists."
European here. Since 90s, ANSI art were always a thing. Maybe the question isn't if its "an American thing", maybe the question is if you are so well informed as you think?
I guess this may similar to how we usually call all tracker music "MODs", though in fact there are MOD, XM, S3M, IT...