XXOO

I was sorting through my flat file and came across this mostly-inked page from a short project I set aside a few years ago. There’s an oubapian constraint which is pretty obvious I think. More about it after the jump.
The idea of the story, which was going to be 5 or 6 pages, was to use a Tic tac toe board as the basis of a 9-panel grid and then to use a series of real or made-up games to act as story starters: each panel which had an X or O would need to feature that shape prominently. In this case the marks became leitmotifs for a male and female characters. (In fact, I do have a friend who has an O tattooed on her arm. I can’t remember if she told me once about meeting a guy with an X or if I made that up.) If a box remained empty I couldn’t draw them. The idea was to do a story of a brief barroom romance in a series of one page “games”—the one you see here is a draw (the game itself is sketched on the napkin in the last panel.)
In the end I didn’t find the story engaging enough to continue but I was happy with how the drawings were coming along.
Recently I was talking to Tom Hart about constrained jam comics structures and we decided we would try a tic tac toe jam comic where you have a 9 panel grid, each artist is assigned X or O and you “play” the game by drawing a panel featuring your mark somehow. I guess if there are blank boxes at the end we would work together to link up the panels into some semblance of narrative. But then Tom had a baby and now I’m expecting a second one, so I’m not sure when we’re going to get around to it.