Caption, Oxford's annual small-press comics convention, was held in the Oxford Union Society, Oxford, England on the 18th and 19th of August 2001.

The giant-sized special romance workshop race*

*or whatever it was that I called it.

Ah, love in the air. A room full of people eager to get seriously romantic. Three lampshades, three wigs, ten plastic beer glasses. A romance comic in four hours? No problem!

The principle is not unlike that head-body-legs game you played as a kid. You take each stage of a romance comic and draw something into each stage. Stage? Well, perhaps storeme is a better term. No? Well, you have a story, right, and it's made of a serious of separately identifiable moments; plot twists, significant scenes, dramatic moments, whatever. You break down you story, you pull out these moments, and bingo! You have the recipe for storytelling. Well, actually, you don't. It's just a system for looking at storytelling. For reference, it's called structuralism, and as a way of understanding the basic nature of writing, it sucks. However, as a basis for cartooning workshops, it rocks.

So, previous to the workshop, I'd pulled the essential romance comic into nine stages. I added a tenth, for fun. I called on the spirit of Clive Anderson and took suggestions from the floor for each stage, explaining their significance and relevance to the basic principles of romance as I went along. Cartoonists are so romantic. Who else would suggest being set against each other in a bare-knuckle boxing match as the ideal situation in which love might blossom, or throwing rocks at them from behind a hedge as the perfect method for attracting your beloved's attention? How would you take your mind off being crossed in love? Plan world domination, of course; and handling rejection is no problem when you're ready to kill and pickle in the name of love.

And then I split them into three random groups, divided up the wigs and lampshades, and drew from the suggestions provided earlier a ten-stage romance for each to turn into a comic. One group was provided with Lindsay-and-her-digital-camera and Niall-and-his-laptop. One group got a heap of sticky labels, a polariod Joycam, and three packs of film. The third group got the amazing Mr Andy Roberts, a heap of A3 paper, pens and pencils.

All together now, on your marks, get set, and FALL IN LOVE!

Here's what they did, in just a few hours, with only ten script-fragments to rest their stories on. [The strips will load into a new window; close the window to return to this page. Don't forget to use your scroll bars.]