Post-con Recovery seems to have sapped my blogging muscles, making it hard to get back to a normal routine here. Spending the better part of a day trying to install Adobe Creative Suite 4 on my computer didn't help, either. So my apologies that things have been slow. I do have some tales from the Comic-Con International to tell, starting (in non-chronological sequence) with what I did, first thing Saturday morn…
That was when we filled the largest hall upstairs, as usual, for the annual Quick Draw! This is the event I do where three speedy cartoonists create drawings right in front of a live audience, based on challenges hurled at them by Yours Truly. Among the "games" I've invented for this is one called Secret Words. I enlist some friend in the audience to be the contestant, occasionally against his will. I have these prepared cards, each of which contain three words that I think will be difficult to convey via drawings. One of the cards is shown to the cartoonists and to the audience. Only the contestant does not know what the three words are. He must guess them, one at a time, based on wordless sketches that the cartoonists create.
I hauled my buddy Len Wein up to play. Len had a devil of a time guessing the first one, which was BLANK. The cartoonists sketched their hearts out: Floyd Norman (this year's special guest Quick Draw! artist) drew a gun firing a question mark. Scott Shaw! (a regular) drew Mel Blanc. Sergio Aragonés (arguably the star of the show) drew a blank check and that's how Len finally got it. His other two words — HUMIDITY and FLOAT — went down a bit smoother.
Another frequent contestant is another buddy of mine, Peter David. Peter was sitting up front and to my surprise, Sergio announced that he had a one word challenge for Peter. He had a word that he wanted to try to convey to Peter via a drawing. Okay, fine. I got Peter up and had him turn his back to the screen as Sergio displayed the word. It turned out to be AVUNCULAR which, by the way, he did not spell correctly. The audience laughed at the notion that such an obscure word could be transmitted by a drawing.
The challenge began. Sergio drew a tiny leaf. Peter instantly guessed, "Avuncular!" And everyone howled at the fact that I had been hoaxed. They'd set it up in advance.
Fortunately, I was prepared for revenge. It had dawned on me a few days earlier that it might be funny, should the mood be apropos, to play a trick on one of our contestants. One of the word lists I'd prepped was no list at all. It just said, "THERE IS NO LIST. DRAW ANYTHING." I announced that we would now have Peter play the game and I showed the audience the "list" he would have to guess. The audience enjoyed that and they really enjoyed the look on Peter's face as the cartoonists drew random images with no connection to each other. To his credit, he figured out what was going on after a bit of stark horror, then expertly knocked off a "real" list that consisted of CHILI, INVISIBLE and SECRET.
Later on, we tried something new for Quick Draw! I got three cartoonists up from the audience — Bobby London, Stan Sakai and Dougie McCoy — and I had them…well, wait. I'll show you how it went in Today's Video Link, which oughta be the next thing posted here.
