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Comix Orgy: Cartoonists Taking Turns
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Comix Orgy: An Introduction

Comix Orgy is a strange comix beast. Part surrealist comix art experiment and part coffee shop game, Comix Orgy has been an important ritual for me and many of my artist pals. The premise is simple. Get a bunch of creative buddies together with drawing utensils and paper. Each person draws a comix panel and then passes their page to someone else to draw the next panel and so on until the pages are filled or everyone feels that each story is at a good stopping point. You don’t even have to draw well, the point is to just have fun with it. This quickly goes on for hours til about 3:00 a.m. when you all deliriously giggle at the bizarre mishmash of different drawing styles and irreverent humor that you all birthed into the world.

The origins of this comix "game" are unclear. I know that Robert Crumb and other contributors to Zap Comix did this kind of work back in the 1970's. I imagine it to be an mutant offshoot of the Surrealist Exquisite Corpse game from the 1920’s. The recent Narrative Corpse, edited by Art Spiegelman, is the first published collection of comix in this style I can think of.

This style of comix seems to be growing in popularity all over North America. In the process of building this site, I was contacted by Canadian cartoonist Salgood Sam who alerted me to all the "
comix jams" currently going on all over the world. Regardless of it’s origins, this kind of stupid fun seems to be something that many cartoonists will do when they get together with pen, paper, pals and coffee.

Comix Orgy is meant to be spontaneous, imaginative, confusing, stupid, absurd, sloppy, playful, nasty and very funny. All driven by late nights with caffeinated friends. The goal isn’t to draw the best panel, but constantly move the story forward in unexpected humorous ways, sometimes even trying to screw the next person by leaving the last panel in a difficult situation to resolve. These pages are some of the best work out of 70+ pages I've accumulated over the last four years and I want to thank all the artists who stayed up late with me working on them. I hope these comix are amusing to a broader audience than just the group who created them, because at times they’ve generated uncontrollable laughter and horror in many of the people involved. Enjoy.

Todd Ramsell
February 2002