Here’s Román Cortés’ Homer, animated to show the structure. I haven’t done anything to Román’s amazing work other than to annotate the divs with ids and add a bit of jQuery to show them in sequence so that you can see the characters being added one at a time.

o o o o ( O O O \ L ( O O O O O \ L ( O | | \ \ | | \ \ \ \ ( ( 8 o o o ( ( 8 o o o o ) ) b o O o o o o o o ) b o O o o o o o o o o o / / / • • • • • _ _ _ • • • C C O ( -

Click your choice of fast or slow animation:

Animate fast Animate slow

Román also made a George Bush.

PS: if this doesn’t look right for you, it may be that you are on Linux and don’t have the Verdana font. You can install it from the msttcorefonts package.