Mystery & noir · 10 ideas

Ten mystery comic ideas.Take one. Make it yours.

A mystery comic plants its clue in a panel the reader passes the first time and goes back to the second. Each of these starts with the strange thing already in view: a logbook, a letter, a passenger who shouldn't be there.

Press start on any of them and it lands in the premise box of a new comic, where every word is yours to change. Then you pick a look, meet the cast, and Panel & Ink writes and draws the first issue.

No. 1
A retired lighthouse keeper reopens the light for one last winter and finds the logbook writing itself, one entry a night, about ships that haven't sailed yet.
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No. 2
A small-town mail carrier notices one house has received a letter every day for forty years — and nobody has ever lived there.
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No. 3
A night-shift taxi driver keeps picking up the same silent passenger, who always asks to go somewhere that closed decades ago.
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No. 4
A pawnshop owner buys a box of old photographs and finds herself in every one of them, getting older.
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No. 5
A hotel detective at a crumbling seaside resort has one week to solve a theft before the whole place is torn down.
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No. 6
Two rival crossword setters discover someone is hiding real crimes in their puzzles.
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No. 7
A lonely late-night radio host takes a call from a listener who describes tomorrow's news, word for word.
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No. 8
A museum night guard realises the portraits are moving — one frame at a time, toward the exit.
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No. 9
A detective who solves crimes by smell takes a case inside a perfume factory.
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No. 10
An elderly couple opens a detective agency from their retirement home, and their first client is the matron.
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Looks that suit it

Draw it in one of these.

Or in any of the twenty-eight. A comic picks one look on its second step, and every panel of every issue keeps it.

See all twenty-eight looks

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Ten mystery comic ideas.Take one. Make it yours.

Press start on any of them and it lands in the premise box of a new comic, where every word is yours to change. Then you pick a look, meet the cast, and Panel & Ink writes and draws the first issue.