A generative collage press. Type any seed and the engine decides everything from it: the sheet it prints on, which press it runs (four-colour halftone, two-ink riso, tritone, black plate, out-of-register, scan glitch), the layout register, the tempo. Then it works in real time — a new fragment lands on the pile every few seconds, the paper breathes, and now and then something is torn off and leaves.
Sheet mode composes one bounded collage that keeps turning over. Endless mode opens an infinite canvas: the world is divided into cells, each cell is generated from the seed and its coordinates the moment it enters view, and the camera drifts along a seeded path. Drag to wander, wheel to zoom.
All 969 fragments are real scans of public-domain Golden Age comics from the Digital Comic Museum (via the Internet Archive): 520 harvested word balloons, 348 panels cut along their own borders, 27 ad pages, 54 coupons, 11 covers and 9 knockouts. Nothing is generated imagery. The tearing, the exposed paper fibre, the halftone screens and the misregistration happen live in the fragment shader, so every filter is a real re-printing of the scan.
Same seed → same composition (layout, stacking order, sizes, tears, press) on any machine. The timing of arrivals depends on when a sprite has finished downloading, so a slow connection shifts when things land, never where.
← the five finished collages · source ledger · Made by Marc Watkins with Claude (Fable 5.1) in Claude Code · CC BY 4.0