Before Webcomics: Selling Political Cartoons On BBSes In 1992

Slashdot reader Kirkman14 writes: A year before the Web opened to the public, Texas entrepreneur Don Lokke was trying to syndicate weekly political cartoons to bulletin board systems. His "telecomics," as he called them, represent an overlooked early experiment in online comics.

Lokke launched his main series, "Mack the Mouse" at the height of the 1992 Clinton-Bush-Perot presidential race. His mouse protagonist voiced the frustrations felt by everyday Americans about rising taxes and the recession.

Lokke gave away "Mack" for free, but sold subscriptions to his other telecomics, betting sysops would pay for exclusive content. The timing wasn't crazy: enthusiasm for BBSes as an industry was surging, with conferences like ONE BBSCON promoting "BBSing for profit."

But the Web soon deflated those hopes, and Lokke left BBSes behind in 1995. Decades later, about half of his nearly 300 telecomics were recovered and preserved on 16colors.

I took a quick look

[93 Escort Wagon]

I think I understand why he never got anywhere with these. And no, it wasn't because of the web...

Re:I took a quick look

[Randseed]

Good lord. I can see how back in the BBS days these might have fit in, but nobody is ever going to pay for this.

Re:

[Kirkman14]

There was a scarcity of unique visual content back then, unlike today where we're awash in it. Sysops were willing to pay for unique games, doors and other regularly refreshed content that would give their users reasons to keep calling. For a few sysops, these telecomics fit the bill, but yeah, it wasn't many.

Re:

[Baloo Uriza]

That one failing sysop that chases everyone away for posting things he's not interested in, then blames the users for not being a bunch of bland suburbanites who blames their poverty on rich people not getting enough tax breaks.

Re:

[Baloo Uriza]

It's like Doonesbury for people stupid enough to believe Charlie Kirk or Rush Limbaugh, but furry for some reason.

Re: I took a quick look

[TJHook3r]

Normally I love tech history but this comic strip deserves to be consigned to the recycling bin

Re:

[Kirkman14]

If we want to understand our current moment, and how we came to it, I think it's pretty important to look back at stuff like this, not erase or ignore it. Bulletin boards were then (and still are now) complicated places where many viewpoints collided.

Remember ANSI?

[TwistedGreen]

It's hard to do much with a single panel and only a few hundred pixels, but political cartoons? That's a pretty low bar... Usually you can at least draw silly caricatures of politicians, but this is just a mouse with some lame punditry. That's not even very impressive ANSI art.

Reminds me of this old fossil: https://www.penny-arcade.com/c... [penny-arcade.com]

PETSCII for me

[SpiceWare]

Commodore BBS Sysop here, I wrote and ran The Dragon's Lair in Corpus Christi, and later Houston when I moved here for college. It originally ran on my VIC-20. I migrated my software to the C= 64 and C= 128 when I acquired those computers. We had PETSCII movies such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles [youtube.com].

I also wrote MusicTerm, a custom terminal program that added features like 3-voice music, font control, sprite control, ability to play online games using your joystick, etc. If you're interested to learn more I

Re:

[Kirkman14]

Awesome! I have a collection of ATASCII animations (such as the Bruce Lee one) available for online viewing at "AtasciiTube": https://breakintochat.com/coll... [breakintochat.com]