The ANSI art "telecomics" of the 1992 election

This is the final part of a multi-part series.

In an alternate universe somewhere, nobody has heard of “webcomics.” Instead, there are thousands of “telecomics.”

Thirty years ago, Don Lokke Jr. hoped to make that universe a reality. In 1992, he coined the term “telecomics” to describe his new digital comic strips, drawn primarily in the ANSI art format and distributed online through bulletin board systems and services like GEnie.

A serial entrepreneur, Lokke was one of many people at that time trying to build businesses syndicating content to sysops. He gave away his premier series, Mack the Mouse, for free, but sold other telecomics and ANSI content on a subscription basis from his “Online Mall BBS.” He and others hoped they were on the cusp of establishing an entire online publishing industry.

His star character was Mack, a cynical gray mouse with prominent ears and buck teeth, venting weekly about the politicians in Washington D.C. Mack wasn’t a stylized superhero from the pages of a comic book, but a political commentator, closer in spirit to Mallard Fillmore (which Mack predated) or the editorial cartoons seen in newspapers.

Lokke launched Mack at the height of the 1992 presidential campaign, a pivotal moment in American history. Lokke initially positioned Mack as an outside observer, but after Democrat Bill Clinton’s inauguration as president, Mack’s commentary grew more overtly conservative.

Over the next two-and-a-half years, Lokke produced at least 225 installments of Mack, plus dozens more of his other ANSI telecomics. He attracted a few subscribers, but probably not enough.

By 1995, the great migration from bulletin boards 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.

Decades later, I unearthed 145 of them, including a collection of more than 130 Mack the Mouse comics that now can be seen on 16colors, the ANSI art archive. But this is likely just half of Lokke’s ANSI output. The rest of his telecomics remain missing, perhaps lost to time.

We began this series by considering an old claim that the ANSI comic Inspector Dangerfuck, released in 1993, was “the first known comic on the Internet.” That claim was wrong.

And though Lokke’s telecomics predate Inspector Dangerfuck by a year, they also aren’t old enough to be considered “the first” online comics.

Still, they’re worth digging into today.

Beyond giving us a chance to see a very different type of ANSI comic, Lokke’s work will also allow us to consider the business side of BBSing, and to reflect on U.S. politics of the early 1990s.

Lokke died in 2017 in Richardson, Texas. I tried but was unable to contact his family, so this story draws extensively on contemporary textfiles, e-magazines and other records.

Dismayed and disillusioned

BBSers loved to argue about news and politics on messageboards. These discussions could get heated, becoming full-blown “flame wars.”

Yet the topic didn’t come up as often in ANSI art, which was far more likely to draw from pop culture or the theme of a particular bulletin board system.

That’s not to say politics never found expression in ANSI art.

Take the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, for example. The quick success of this U.S.-led effort to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation resulted in a profusion of war art, mostly patriotic or anti-Iraq in sentiment.

But as far as I can tell, nobody in the BBS world was producing anything quite like Lokke envisioned: weekly strips commenting on current events.

The topsy-turvy presidential election of 1992 was perhaps the perfect moment to try it.

Early on, President George H. W. Bush had seemed certain to be re-elected, bolstered by sky-high approval ratings after the Gulf War. But those ratings didn’t last, pulled down by anger over increasing taxes and fears about the worsening federal deficit. This created an opening for third-party candidate Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire who made a fortune in the tech industry.

Perot probably appealed to Lokke, a 36-year-old small-business owner, one of many Americans dismayed by the economy and disillusioned by politicians of both parties.

“We’re not in a recession!” Lokke’s “Mack” character would scoff in a later comic. “My friends don’t have jobs, my bank failed, they repossessed my car and I am imagining things?”

Lokke had been involved in advertising and publishing since 1978, when he graduated from Texas Tech University. He ran a full-service print shop in the garage of his home in Plano, Texas, where he helped produce publications for small clients, like “Stormtrack,” a bimonthly newsletter delivered to a few hundred storm chasers around the country.

He felt the economic pinch, and saving a buck could be almost as important as earning one. The electric bills for Lokke’s house and his shop could cost up to $700 per month in Texas’ summer heat. So he became an early adopter of renewable energy, installing a heat pump and smoke-tinting his windows.

With his background, Lokke could write convincingly in the voice of disaffected middle-class Americans.

His “Mack” character was an everyman and an outsider, a mouse protesting the outrageous behavior of the “rats” who were running Washington D.C.

A key political moment

Lokke had good reason to think Mack the Mouse and his other political telecomics might appeal broadly to sysops.

After all, the BBS world had a strong libertarian streak, perhaps best exemplified by Jack Rickard, the publisher of Boardwatch Magazine. Rickard was a staunch advocate of the transformation of BBSing from a hobby to an industry.

Like many online, Rickard greatly admired Perot, going so far as to put him on Boardwatch’s cover in May 1992. Rickard praised Perot for building a high-tech computer company, and lauded his vision of a future “electronic democracy” where millions of people would engage in massive town hall meetings by television and telephone.

Lokke had just begun to experiment with drawing political telecomics that summer, when the presidential race was upended.

In mid-July, facing an exodus of campaign advisers, Perot suddenly withdrew from the presidential race. Lokke, Rickard, and others must have been disappointed. Lokke seems not to have worked on his telecomics for several months.

St. Louis-based ANSI artist Dave Hartmann memorialized the event with a fun caricature featuring Perot’s face on a milk carton beside the headline “Have you seen this man?”

But at the last minute, Perot mounted a comeback, re-entering the race on Oct. 1, 1992.

A few weeks later, Lokke launched Mack the Mouse. He couldn’t have picked a more interesting political moment.

Building a library

Lokke was at a disadvantage when started his content syndication business. As discussed in Part 4 of this series, the top “public domain” ANSI artists had large back-catalogs of ANSI art they had drawn over several years. Lokke did not.

So, after the debut of Mack the Mouse in October 1992, Lokke drew at a frantic pace to build up his library, producing 40 installments in the first five weeks.

He wrote most of these early strips with generic political commentary. Keeping the strips vague gave them a longer shelf life.

He also went heavy on anthropomorphism, usually casting the general public as “mice,” and politicians and lobbyists as the “cats” or “rats” preying on or taking advantage of them.

Take Mack the Mouse No. 8, for example:

The cat-and-mouse analogy here is ambiguous enough to invite several interpretations, but to me “BUY MOUSE PRODUCTS!” sounds like the “Buy American!” rhetoric of that time. Mack is criticizing state and local governments for giving incentives to foreign “cat” firms, such as Japanese automakers, to build and operate factories in the U.S. Sure, they create jobs, he argues, but those jobs don’t pay well, and the profits end up overseas.

Still, a few early strips were speci