Brian and Ted Dewan made this game up when they were kids. Scott McCloud’s written about it in his last book, “Making Comics.” Now that I’ve dropped all those names, I’ll add that this latest piece is from a session playing Quanto with Brian, Scott, and Cecilia.
The way Quanto works is that one player names the comic and passes it to another player, who must fill the page with a story based on that title. You do a bunch of them all at once until you get sleepy. Originals tend to be pretty messy because you’re doing them fast to impress each other and make each other laugh. This one came out OK, so I redrew it and colored it. Note last year’s date.
This sounds like the process the pros used to make comics in the early 1940s USA. A comics shop would have a few drawing boards and each page went the rounds from penciller(s) to letterer(s) to inkers and backgrounders. The 15- and 16-year old pros, coming in after school, would do backgrounds. The top pros would do faces and hands.
Really it sounds like a lot of fun. Making it into a game is great.
This reminds me a bit of the way that the original Wide Mouth Frog was an idea chain from one person to the next. I see now that your WMF pages were a Quarto-style riff on whatever Kevin or I (or whoever else) did the night before.
No, Michael, I only learned about Quanto a couple years ago. Apparently I took to it pretty easily, but I wasn’t coming to “Wide Mouth” with any special training!