Getting ready to move from Cheap & Cheerful to a Properly Tuned Comic Sorter

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:30:00 +0000

From Cheap & Cheerful to Proper Harness: A Journey Building a Comic Panel Detector

I love reading comics. I buy a ton of them, and enjoy digital comics. Often I only have my phone on me, and it’s really the worst for reading comics. I find it so annoying trying to zoom in on panels, rotate my phone, etc.

With GenAI (Gemini, my tool of choice), I’m always trying to think of new personal problems to solve. SmartyComics started as a “cheap and cheerful” experiment to see if a local script, whipped up with a pretrained YOLO model and some quick bounding box math, could preprocess standard comic archives (.cbz) to deliver a Comixology-grade Guided View experience - essentially, instead of flipping through pages, can I flip through panels?

Smarty on Steve Suppe

Getting ready to move from Cheap & Cheerful to a Properly Tuned Comic Sorter

From Cheap & Cheerful to Proper Harness: A Journey Building a Comic Panel Detector