I read a lot of webcomics. Some of my favorites have had huge style changes over their run, like QC and GGAR. Others, the artist was already pretty set on a format and style (Between Failures, Dumbing of Age).

I’m also a huge nerd, specifically about images. So I thought it might be interesting to merge the two, and answer a question at the same time: What does a comic strip look like in a single image?

QC (2003 - Present): Over 4,000 strips combined.

QC (2003 - Present): Over 4,000 strips combined.

^ This, in one visualization!

Savvy readers may be able to do some interesting analysis here. This image is about 4.2k pixels wide, over 17 years of comics. You can see the rise and fall of the blue apartment, coffee of doom, and all sorts of other interesting stuff. Even without any context, it’s pretty neat.

This visualization is one view of larger dimensional space. There are many others, but this is the one I liked the best for the images I tried. To do this, I downloaded each image, converted to Lab space, and ran k-means over the results. I don’t really want to write too much about process, so if you want to look at my code it’s here. I was partially inspired by this site

What I do want to look at is other webcomics! Here are the results for some of the others mentioned in the intro.

Dumbing of Age. This comic has had new strips nearly every day since 2010.

Dumbing of Age. This comic has had new strips nearly every day since 2010.

Between Failures. The switch from black + white to color is very distinctive.

Between Failures. The switch from black + white to color is very distinctive.

Are there other webcomics that would look cool this way? Let me know!