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.
The first scanner was made in 1957, using that to scan a Peanuts comic would be some form of "digital comic image" but not a webcomic as we consider it.
I do also thing there's something the kids would call a "meme" that these might be closer to; a comic does NOT have to have a narrative or overarching story (though they often seem to devolve to that) - if the only Far Side comic to exist was Cow Tools it'd still clearly be a comic.
Will Eisner and Scott McCloud say that what distinguishes comics from cartoons and other forms is that they are sequential. McCloud's definition specifically exclude single-panels like "The Far Side" or "The Family Circus". In his view they are cartoons, not comics.
However, other people have pushed back on this particular limitation of his definition.
But then you have newspaper comics - some of which are things like Prince Valiant which are just comic books over time, and then there are the "one joke per day" comics which sometimes have multiple panels, sometimes not.
As with many things, trying to tie it down often reveals that it's not really possible - various "string of one-off" comics (even including The Far Side), political cartoons, etc end up having "recurring characters" that end up with a mythos.
For most people, "digital Far Side" would be a webcomic, because it's something that would live on the comics page in the newspaper.
Wiki says the first one on the WWW was a year earlier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_early_webcomics#Timeli...
ANSI art web archive https://16colo.rs/
Also on instagram https://www.instagram.com/sixteen_colors/?hl=en
Some OGs are still producing really high quality, innovative art even today.
One of the things that seems like it ought to be obvious, but nonetheless strikes me about this stuff is - you really do have to be a good artist, period, to make headway even in incredibly limited (by today’s standards) mediums like early ANSI. You have to be good at the composition aspect and the execution aspect, and aside from teaming up with someone who has a complementary speciality, there’s almost no way around that (so far.)