Dan Harkless' "Who was Quintus Curtius Snodgrass?"

Date:  

November 29, 1990

Tool:  

Mac Paint on an Apple Macintosh Plus running System 6

Info:  

Lab 9 for my ICS 21 class at UCI was to write a program to count word length frequencies, and then use it on multiple samples of the writing of Mark Twain, plus some writing by a "Quintus Curtius Snodgrass", which some theorized was another of Samuel Clemens' pen names. From my report:

Some historians say that Twain was a Confederate deserter, while others say that his loyalties were unswaying and that he could never do anything such as desert his fellow men in blue. One important piece of evidence suggesting that he may have played an [sic] large role in the Southern military is a series of ten letters which appeared in the New Orleans Daily Crescent during 1861. These letters supposedly chronicled the adventures of the author, one Quintus Curtius Snodgrass, in the Louisiana militia. Historians generally agree that the events described in the letters did happen, but not surprisingly, there is no record of a Quintus Curtius Snodgrass.

After running the program on the texts, we were to do statistical analysis on the data and write a report on whether we thought Snodgrass was Twain. (For the record, I decided he was not.) We didn't have to do anything special for the cover sheet of the report, but I decided to draw the above picture. I was obviously influenced by the "Who is Darkman?" campaign for Darkman, which had come out a few months earlier. I am not a born visual artist (or at least not a draftsman, in the Disney artist sense of the word), so the proportions are off, as in most/all of my human drawings (here, the legs are too big and/or head is too small), but I guess it still looks OK.

In my initial pencil draft, I had the following captions written diagonally in the four corners surrounding the shadowy figure:

Mark Twain?

A wannabe?

A darn good author in his own right?

Could it be... Satan?!?

Keep in mind this was 1990, during the height of popularity of Dana Carvey's Church Lady routine. In any case, I apparently decided to do without the postulates in the finished version. I'm pretty sure Mac Paint didn't have the ability to put text on a diagonal.

BTW, there are a few pixels inside the 's' in "Quintus" that didn't get caught by the flood fill. I left them like that intentionally, however. With them filled in, I found that the visual integrity of the caption breaks down — the parts to the left and right of the figure sort of get ignored by the eye. Weird.