Each year at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, I get to preside over a game that people love. It's called Quick Draw!, and no matter how big a room they give us, we always seem to fill it.
Up front each year are three cartoonists seated at projectors that enable everyone in the house to see whatever they draw. One cartoonist is always Sergio Aragonés, my long-time collaborator and the man some call the Fastest Cartoonist on the planet. Another is always Scott Shaw!, my long-time friend and occasional collaborator and a man who does the impossible by keeping up with Sergio. The third slot rotates from year to year. At the most recent con, it was filled — and filled well — by Mike Kazaleh, an animator and comic book artist who proved he was good enough to play alongside Sergio and Scott.
I am out in the audience with a cordless microphone, getting suggestions and running little games that challenge the cartoonists to think on their feet, only with a pen. It's been described as Whose Line Is It Anyway? but with cartoonists. If you've seen it, you know how funny and amazing it all can be. If you haven't seen it…well, we have a little sampler here for you. Someone, quite without my permission, put two video clips up on YouTube of the one a few weeks ago. The video is shaky and the audio isn't grand — you'll hear people seated near the camera better than you hear me running the proceedings — but it may give you a bit of an idea of how it all works.
In the first clip, we're playing Secret Words, which is one of the improv-cartooning games I invented. I select someone out of the audience. In this case, it's the noted author Len Wein, who was there because I asked him to be. We show three words to the cartoonists and to the audience. Everyone in the place knows the three words but Len. The cartoonists then have to do drawings that will cause Len to guess what the words are, one at a time.
Here's the clip, which runs a bit over five minutes. I'm the one playing Game Show Host. Sergio is drawing on the large screen at left. Scott is drawing on the middle screen. Mike is on the screen at far right. Len is the guy guessing. Let's all click and watch…
…and that's how you play Secret Words. Now, this next game runs a lot longer. It's called Sergio Scenario and in it, I keep throwing ideas at Sergio and he must add each one to a drawing. The idea is to try and stump him…which I've yet to accomplish in more than a dozen attempts. The scene keeps getting more and more complicated and he somehow finds a way to include each new element, no matter how outrageous. This clip runs a little over thirteen minutes and it starts after we'd already done about five minutes. It started with me asking Sergio to draw our character, Groo the Wanderer, attacking someone…and then I had him add some bank robbers…and then I said to make it a blood bank, so he drew Dracula into the tableau…and you'll see how it grew from there. If you ever get to a convention where we're doing this, come see it in person because it's even more amazing than this clip would have you believe.