This is an experiment Tom Hart, Jason Little and I developed for the oubapo-america website back in 2002.
The idea was to create four ambiguous, generic panels and make them available for use as kind of clip-art comics panels. We encouraged people to print out as many copies as they wanted and recombine them, add dialogue and narration, sound effects, and so on.
We shared the challenge on our long-defunct website and got a few interesting contributions, some of which you can read below.
Several teachers I know have used the handout as a successful warm-up activity in writing and illustration classes.
I myself used these panels as the basis of my own comic, “The Running Man Story,” which appeared in an anthology called Blurred Vision in 2005. I liked it all right, but not quite enough to include in my collection of constrained comics, Six Treasures of the Spiral, from which I cut it at the very last minute.
Here are the four panels which you are welcome to screengrab or print out and play around with…
Feel free to use in a classroom, comics hangout, or for your own experimentation.
Here are a few examples of comics based on the Silent Running panels that people shared with us on oubapo-america.
In 2013 I further “gamified” the panels for a live performance I did with Oubapo as part of my residency in Angoulême. It was called the OubapoShow and we did several iterations between 2013 and 2015.
I did a blog post about this at the time, but here’s the recap: I decided to add more ingredients that could be used as prompts. Sticking with the number four, I had participants choose four different elements: a season, a shape, an emotion, a color. I distributed the panels and instructions in little envelopes, and later collected the finished panels and shared a few of them using an old-fashioned opaque projector.
Here are a few examples. Most are in French, of course (including my own, at the end), but one person did turn one in in English:
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