Story Strip

Here’s the idea. Take a comic book, say ten pages with two or three panels a page, and lay every panel end to end in one long row. Then fold the whole thing down into a single flat line. Rub the line and the story stands up out of it, panel by panel. Keep rubbing toward the right and the line pulls the next part of the story into view, like unrolling a scroll.

Once a panel is up, it stays up, so you can read it, or read it aloud. That’s the part I care about most: telling a story to a kid, with the kid’s finger doing the unrolling. When a panel is all the way up, its talk bubble pops out. At the end, one button lays the whole story back down and takes you to the beginning.

The art here is a stand-in. It’s Jeff Johnson’s samurai, the same drawing three times, with three lines of dialogue I made up. A real story would have real panels, and anything Jeff draws in ink would work the same way.

It works with a mouse, a trackpad or a finger. On an iPad it feels the most like a book.

What I’d like to hear: does rubbing the story along feel like reading, or does it get in the way of reading? And would you want to read a whole comic like this?

Where this comes from

This grew out of Samurai Emerges, which folds one of Jeff’s drawings into a line. This version stretches that line out to hold a whole story. Jeff’s drawing is inked with solid blacks rather than single pen lines, so it rises using the Accordion: everything stretches straight up out of the line and nothing slides sideways, which keeps the ink from tangling.

As with the other line pieces, I built it with Claude, writing the code from scratch. The drawing is Jeff’s.