Six Ways to Open a Panel

This is a test bench for Xmas Gift Tour. Same three paintings, same story, same talk balloons. What changes is how each scene comes into being as your finger runs along the line. There are six ways to try:

• Rise. The original. Each slice of the picture stretches up off the line as you pass.
• Unfold. Each panel is hinged at its left edge and opens sideways behind your finger, like a folding screen.
• Stage crew. The pieces arrive one at a time, whole, in the order I built them in Illustrator: sky first, then the land, then the drawing on top, each one dropping into place with a little bounce.
• Studio. The way a comic actually gets made. A pale blue-pencil rough sketches in just ahead of your finger, the black ink follows, then the color, then the lettering.
• Press. The way a comic used to get printed. The color goes down first in dots, a little out of register, then swells into flat color and slides into place, and the black plate stamps down on top.
• Collage. Every piece starts as a small scrap of paper tossed near the bottom of the panel, and slides and turns into its spot as your finger arrives.

The other two rows of buttons are about teaching a first-time visitor what to do: a ghost finger that demonstrates, a few words, or nothing at all, and how dark the line should be.

And it talks, if you let it. Press Sound above the strip and the captions are read by a narrator, the characters speak their lines (the goat in a very low voice, the whispers barely above a whisper), the bicycle bell rings, the snorkel bubbles, and the wind blows through the funnel branch. The words wait for the voices, so it reads like someone reading to you. The voices are your device’s own, so they’ll sound different on a phone than on a laptop.

What I’d like to hear: which one would you want to read a whole comic with? And which one is the most fun for about ten seconds, and then not?

Where this comes from

These came out of trying to make bordered panels feel built rather than stretched. The samurai can stretch and lean because his strokes float free; a panel with a border just looks broken when you squeeze it. So most of these keep the drawing whole and change the order things arrive in. Studio and Press borrow from how comics were really made and printed. As with the other line pieces, I built it with Claude, writing the code from scratch.