Gutterwork No. 1
All-new · all-torn · all public domain

Gutterwork

STILL10¢SEPT 2026
Approved by the
Gutter
Authority
Collages cut from the Digital Comic Museum!
Five torn-paper collages cut entirely from Golden Age comics — story pages, harvested word balloons, coupons, house ads and the four ink plates of one cover — re-printed on a single halftone press and layered so every rip shows the story beneath!
Read the collages Run the Seed press Build your own
12 books1,103 panels2,594 balloonsone press · seed 1959CC BY 4.0

The five collages

Click one to peel its strata

Gutterwork Seed

The generative press
Gutterwork Seed — a generated sheet: torn comic fragments on a halftone-gradient ground
Type any word. The engine decides the sheet, the press, the layout and the tempo — then a new fragment lands every few seconds, the paper breathes, and now and then something is torn off and leaves.
  • Eight presses — four-colour halftone, two-ink riso, tritone, black plate, out of register, scan glitch, solarised, plain.
  • Seven sheets — newsprint, kraft, ink black, poster colours, a torn split field, a halftone gradient, riso stock.
  • Endless mode — an infinite canvas of seeded cells with a drifting camera. Drag to wander, wheel to zoom.
Open the press →Endless canvas

Gutterwork Studio

Build your own · export for print
1,700+ CUT PIECES. ONE SHEET. YOUR SCISSORS.

Drag complete story pages, panels cut along their own borders, word balloons, coupons, ads, covers and knockouts from twenty-one public-domain books onto a true print-size sheet. Choose how each piece was cut — torn, ripped, pinked, clean, frayed — and how violently. Pick the stock and the press. Then export the whole sheet at 300 dpi: the tears and the halftone are re-computed at print resolution, never upscaled.

  • Letter, Tabloid, A4, A3, square and comic-book sheets.
  • Undo/redo, layers, duplicate, flip, black-plate-only, opacity, re-tear.
  • Lettering and ransom notes — set your own words in comic faces, or spell them in real printed initials cut from British Library book scans via BL Type.
  • Print preview with borders — keyline, mat, comic ink border or frame — and a wall mock-up; export PNG, JPEG or a true-size PDF with bleed and crop marks at up to 600 dpi.
  • Save and reopen projects as JSON; your sheet autosaves in the browser.
Open the studio →
Gutterwork Studio — the editor with a Letter sheet, the asset drawer and the inspector

The philosophy

A movement called Gutterwork

How it was cut

Source. Twelve public-domain books (Fawcett, Fox, Ace, Avon, Fiction House, Norlen) found through the Internet Archive's search API from the Digital Comic Museum's volunteer scans. One 1967 book was pulled and then excluded as not safely public domain.
Harvest. Two measurements written for this material: the panel cut, which finds the paper gutters between ruled borders and cuts each panel along the artist's own line; and the balloon harvest, which finds every region of unprinted paper enclosed by ink and carrying lettering — 2,594 balloons from 470 pages.
Cut. Story pages torn with a fractal rip that removes a chunk and exposes white fibre along the edge; covers ripped rough; ads pinked and coupons cut clean along their own dotted lines; hands, a mouth and lettering lifted as silhouettes and frayed.
Re-print. Every fragment is levelled, then run through one press: CMYK separation, a coarse halftone at the classic screen angles, the colour plates slipped a fraction off the black line, the inks multiplied onto warm newsprint, one seeded grain.
Assemble. A filter-free SVG per piece; top-level groups carry data-layer names, which is what the peel controls read. Seed and Studio run the same press live in GLSL.
Why the gutter? A comic asks its reader to look past its apparatus — the border, the balloon tail, the “continued on next page”, the coupon. These pieces tear the page so the apparatus becomes the picture. Décollage, worked in the register of the news-stand.

Why these books. The Digital Comic Museum keeps only titles whose US copyright was never renewed, so whole publications — stories, ads, indicia, letters pages — are free to cut. No character a reader could name appears here on purpose; the anonymous page tears more honestly.

Files. Each piece: .svg (peelable) and .png (2400 px). Plus philosophy.md, attributions.md and the build folder.

Sources — the ledger

Every row is a Golden Age comic book scanned by Digital Comic Museum volunteers and mirrored on the Internet Archive; all are US public domain (copyright not renewed, DCM-vetted). The full ledger, with the two books pulled and excluded, is attributions.md.