So I was digging through the attic boxes last Tuesday – you know, the dusty ones piled behind the Christmas decorations? Had this weird idea bouncing around: what if I could stitch together those old newspaper comic strips I've been hoarding since college? Like a super-long timeline. The New York Times Sunday funnies especially. Seemed straightforward. Oh boy.
Step one, gather the goods. Dragged down every single shoebox marked "comics" from the attic. Dust bunnies flew everywhere. Found strips from like 2005 onward, mostly Calvin and Hobbes, Foxtrot, and yeah, lots of Garfield. Mondays aren't complete without Garfield hating Mondays, right?
Next up, figuring out how the heck to actually make a single, stupidly long image. Tried just taping them together with scotch tape. Looked awful. Creases everywhere, corners peeling off immediately. Gave up after about two feet. Total mess.
Switched tactics. Thought maybe my ancient flatbed scanner could help. Dug it out. Spent hours scanning Sunday strips one… by… one. The scanner was painfully slow. Started one Sunday, came back the next Sunday and it was still humming along. Tried feeding them through automatically. It ate one corner of a classic Far Side panel. Tore it right off. Wanted to scream.
Okay, digital route failed. Maybe photos? Laid them all out on the living room floor next to each other, overlapping slightly. Took my phone and started snapping pics along the line, trying to keep the camera steady. Ended up with like fifty photos. Staring at my laptop screen later trying to stitch them together in this free photo editor… oh geez. The angles were all wrong. Some panels were blurry from my shaky hand. Colors clashed weirdly between shots. Tried lining them up manually – took hours. Looked like a crooked Frankenstein comic strip. Awful.
Finally, dumb luck. Remembered that cheap scanner phone app my kid showed me for school stuff – the one that auto-crops and stitches pages? Thought, what the heck. Started snapping individual panels instead of long lines. Clear, flat shots. Then let the app do its "magic" stitching thing. Held my breath.
Worked way better than my floor photo shoot disaster. Still some weird overlaps and blurry bits where the app got confused about the gutter space between panels, and the resolution drops a bit. But dang, I finally saw the thing: this enormous digital scroll of comics. Scrolled down my laptop screen for ages.
Honestly? The final result is kinda rough. Imperfect colors here, a slightly tilted panel there. But seeing "Hobbes" pounce on Calvin flow right into a classic Peanuts football gag… decades compressed onto my screen? That was worth the dusty attic, the ripped Far Side, and hours of fiddling. Dumb, messy, but somehow really cool. Would I recommend this chaos? Probably not unless you're slightly crazy like me. But yeah, got my longtime strip. Mostly.
