I am probably going to wind down using Wplace. It was fun to mess around with for a few days, flex my pixel art muscles, see what other people are drawing, see how the canvas evolves, but it’s very much a flash in the pan thing that most people are going to move on again from quickly, myself included. I have dotted down a few more things on the map, this time putting some larger pieces of other people’s art in a few places rather than my own pixel designs.

I put down the Pico-8 logo and a few characters near the Pico Pico Café in Kichijōji, Tokyo. This is a busy area and it has quickly been drawn over again, but all of this is ephemeral.

One of my past brief obsessions was St. Bride’s a strange mock-Victorian girl’s school holiday destination in Ailt an Chorráin, Donegal that in the 1980s promised a total disconnect from modern society and modern technology. They advertised that they had no electricity and did not believe in such things and also published a series of text adventure games for the ZX Spectrum. That is a rabbit to save for a future post, perhaps. I planted a shrunk-down recreation of the title screen of the game The Secret of St. Bride’s in the village where the school was based.

I started using the Blue Marble user script for these which helped with planning out size and position for these larger drawings a lot, as well as speeding up the actual drawing. I dropped a little art of Transy east of Bournemouth. It’s modified from a comic panel but this is the art from this lot that I can probably take the most credit as being “mine”.

I also draw the character select art for Snolf that I originally commissioned from Mars Gainsboro and decided to arbitrary place them on the Isle of Skye Golf Club.

Finally, I also contributed my pixels to my friend Ruby’s big rendition of the art for the P-Model album In a Model Room in Tsukuba, a hotbed for artwork of Susumu Hirasawa. She contributed to helping draw my art a lot as well.

The Computer Wore Pigtails is a series than ran in the British girls’ comic Mandy in 1967. It features Transy–“the first computer to look and act like a twelve-year-old schoolgirl” and–who is also extremely trans. Her name is Transy, like.

I first learned about it through Sophie Jane linking to the Bournemouth University UK Comic Database which has scans of three issues featuring the series: issue #42, issue #43 and issue #45.

Enraptured by the series I posted about it on Cohost where Kore was inspired to seek out more issues of Mandy and acquired several issues, two of which had new Transy stories, which she scanned and uploaded to the Internet Archive: issue #44 and issue #46. I used Scan Tailor to make a printer-friendly version of Kore’s scans.

According to Girls Comics of Yesterday it was later reprinted as Electra the Sister with the Transistors.

Art