Tic Tac Toe as a Creative Tool
Making comics out of Xs and Os
Happy New Year!
I know it’s getting late to say that but I’ve been taking my time getting started on new projects for 2025. I hope you all had a relaxing break and are steeling yourselves for the year to come.
I’ll be sharing new comics and new constraints here in the coming months, like the one after the Subscribe button.
I’ll also be giving a new year’s push to my new book Six Treasures of the Spiral: Comics Formed Under Pressure, which lost some momentum in all the holiday hubbub.
I’ve done a few more interviews which will be out soon and one which dropped in December on YouTube, a return conversation with Jason DeHart for his podcast Words, Images, & Worlds. Watch it here.
Tic Tac Toe Jam
The “Tic Tac Toe Jam” comic is a collaborative storytelling game I invented. The idea is fairly simple: one cartoonist is X the other is O. You lay out a 9-panel tic tac toe grid on a page and “play” tic tac toe, only instead of simply putting an X you need to draw a comics panel that incorporates the X in some creative way. The game proceeds alternating players until the comic is finished. (Keeping track of who wins is optional.)
One day back in 2010, when we were both still living in New York City, I invited Tom Hart, my frequent partner in crime, to meet up with me at a (long gone) café before teaching a class at SVA to give it a try.
Tom Xs and Os…
…while Matt Os and Xs
We worked on two pages simultaneously that we swapped back and forth, working in pencil. Once the “game” was over there were leftover empty panels which we filled in while still observing our chosen shape, X or O. Then we each took one home to ink.
In the comic above I started with the top right panel: I drew a bald guy because that seemed O-like and had him say “”Oh” as he opened and read a letter–that seemed like a story starter. Tom did the next panel and made an X out of a stack of envelopes, deciding they were summonses. We talked back and forth as we worked but didn’t always know what the other had in mind. So when he wrote “24 weeks” I couldn’t for the life of me figure out the reference. I decided that six more would make 30 which is XXX–a winning game in tic tac toe. It turns out he was thinking of X being the 24th letter of the alphabet. And so it goes.
With the bald guy and all those X’s Tom found it irresistible not to end up filling this strip with X-Men references, though we barely even know the characters (yes, we know Johnny Storm isn’t really one of them).
What appeals to me about the idea is that the constraint works at a few different levels: there’s visual play and word play and there’s also an unusual storytelling challenge since you’re not telling a story in a linear fashion, instead you’re jumping from panel to panel, alternating with someone else, and trying to mold it all into some kind of coherent narrative.
In the end, what felt like a bit of a silly game resulted in a couple of weird, not-bad comics and we had a lot of fun doing it and talking about the process.
And in fact, when I started showing our pages around and talking about it with comics students and peers, they got really excited about it. A bunch of teams ended up getting together and making their own Tic Tac Toe Jams, like this one by Alexandra Beguez and Kim Ku, who were both students of ours in SVA’s Continuing Education program at the time:
I was sent enough interesting pages that I published a minicomic in 2012 collecting them all in one place.
[A version of this post first appeared on my blog in 2010.]
Give It a Try!
If you want to try a Tic Tac Toe Jam with a friend, a good way to approach it is to do the game in pencil on bristol board or in a decent sketchbook, giving each other 10-15 minutes per panel.
When you finish the “game” part you will have a few blank panels left. You can keep taking turns until the comics page is finished and the comic makes some kind of sense. A variation might be to collaborate or work individually on these panels and try to smooth out the story or gag a bit.
Then take the comic home and ink it. One person can do the inking or you can ink each other’s pencils. When Tom and I did the inaugural session, we worked on two pages simultaneously that we swapped back and forth, then we each took one home to ink.
As usual, you can adapt this idea to other media as well: drawings, story or poem prompts, choreography…?
If you make a Tic Tac Toe Jam of some sort, please share it with me here!
The comic featured above as well as another collaboration between me and Tom appear in my collection of constrained comics, Six Treasures of the Spiral: Comics Formed Under Pressure, now in stores!!
Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and called it “an instant classic.” (Read the whole review here.)
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I hope you’ll share this post if you enjoyed it and feel free to leave a comment. See you soon.
Oh! I used this as a theater game in middle school improv class and it was _very_ satisfying. We lauuughhhed. :)
I'll try and send you a picture of the white board -- good stuff!
This was TERRIFIC AMOUNTS OF FUN.