Guided view
The opening story is one comic page, and scrolling moves the camera from panel to panel in reading order, the way a comics app reads a page.
Panel Forge
A comic shop on Madison Avenue in Lakewood, built as one comic issue.
A concept build. I invented the business and built its site.
Read in panel order.
Hold for pickup
On the New this Wednesday rack, holding an issue slides a Mylar bag over the cover. Held issues follow you from page to page in a hold list.
The gate
At ten on Wednesday the shop gate rolls up, and one hand-set sound effect breaks out of its panel.
This Wednesday, on a phone.
This is the same homepage on a phone, top to bottom. I lay out the phone version on its own, so nothing is shrunk to fit.
A shop that reads like an issue.
Panel Forge is invented: a comic shop on Madison Avenue in Lakewood, run by a former inker who still draws every sign in the store. New books go up every Wednesday at ten.
Its customers already read comics, so the site reads like one: a cover, a story told in panels, a rack of new books, a letters page for the questions, and a footer set like the fine print inside a comic’s cover.
Your Wednesday comics, already pulled.
Bowlby One sets the masthead, the headlines and the sound effects, and Shantell Sans sets everything lettered, the way a letterer fills a balloon. The colors are gutter black, newsprint, brick red, process yellow and cyan, with the color plates printed a hair off-register.
