Chapter 3 examines an absurd, tic-tac-toe-faced avatar created by Art Spiegelman, known as “OXO.” I argue that Spiegelman’s adoption of the “OXO” persona functions as a coded emblem of his process of coming to terms with traumatic loss. The figure of “OXO” and his tic-tac-toe-faced family first appeared in 1983, contemporaneously with Spiegelman’s work on Maus.  Conjugating comics with tic-tac-toe yields a new understanding of the comics grid itself as an alternating game of reading and looking: a game that undisciplines the grid and makes it playful. Moreover, perceived as a face, tic-tac-toe embodies the complexities of inherited identity, or an identity dictated by the play of external forces. OXO’s symbolic richness helps Spiegelman revisit his 1972 “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History,” the first comic he produced on his long road to Maus. This chapter presents an extended case study of a one-page “OXO” comic, “Lost,” in which the cartoonist reenters and reimagines both recent and distant memories of loss, in an ongoing and necessarily incomplete effort to master them.