Ongoing · All ages · Right to left · Astoria, OR
Low Tide Radio
Nene Ocampo is sixteen and would rather be anywhere than Astoria. Her grandfather has the keys to a shut-down AM station above the boat yard, two hundred watts of transmitter and nobody to talk to. What they put on the air at six every morning turns into the thing the town sets its clocks and its tides by.
Chapter 19 is being drawn. Buffer: 11 pages. Every number above is counted from the archive below, not typed next to it.
Three ways in · none of them wrong
Where to start.
A four-year archive is a wall, and “start at page one” is only the right answer for some of the people asking. These are in the order I actually recommend them.
- Door 1 · 34 pages · right to left
Start at the beginning
Thirty-four pages, and the whole premise is set up by page nine. The right answer if you read comics from page one on principle — most people do, and it works.
- Door 2 · 28 pages · right to left
Jump on at chapter 6
The arc opener. It was written to be readable cold: the station is running, the cast is introduced by doing things rather than by being introduced, and nothing before it is load-bearing. This is what I tell people who bounced off a four-year archive.
- Door 3 · 24 pages · left to right
Read the one-shot first
Twenty-four pages, self-contained, left to right. Costs you fifteen minutes and tells you whether you like the drawing and the pace, which is the actual question you are asking.
19 chapters · 490 pages · 3 arcs and a side story
The archive.
Free, complete, and it stays up. Rows marked start here are the three doors above. Rows marked note carry a content note, which is written out in the row rather than hidden behind the click.
Signal Check
Chapters 1–5 · 2022–2023| Chapter | Posted | Pages | Reads | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 Static start here Nene is handed a key ring and a building with a hole in the roof. | 34 · a spread | Right to left | — | |
| #2 The Tower on Cannery Hill Two hundred feet of guyed mast, and the reason the licence never lapsed. | 22 | Right to left | — | |
| #3 Two Hundred Watts What that number covers at night, and what it does not. | 20 | Right to left | — | |
| #4 Lolo’s Tape Box Forty reels labelled in a hand Nene can read and a language she cannot. | 26 · a spread | Right to left | — | |
| #5 First Broadcast Six in the morning. Tide table, weather, one song. Four people hear it. | 30 · 2 spreads | Right to left | — |
Dead Air
Chapters 6–11 · 2023–2024| Chapter | Posted | Pages | Reads | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #6 Dead Air start here The arc opener, and the chapter that catches a new reader up without a recap page. | 28 | Right to left | — | |
| #7 The Six O’Clock Tide A crab boat starts planning its morning around the broadcast. | 22 | Right to left | — | |
| #8 Sponsors The hardware store offers forty dollars a month and an opinion. | 18 | Right to left | — | |
| #9 A Letter From Neah Bay Somebody 120 miles north is listening on a skip signal after dark. | 24 | Right to left | — | |
| #10 Interference A new LED sign at the marina wipes out the band from four blocks away. | 26 · a spread | Right to left | — | |
| #11 Sign-Off The arc ends with the station running and one of its two people not in it. | 32 · 2 spreads | Right to left | A hospital stay, on and off page. |
Storm Watch
Chapters 12–18 · 2024–| Chapter | Posted | Pages | Reads | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #12 Storm Watch Back after seven months, and the show has to be rebuilt from a cold start. | 28 | Right to left | — | |
| #13 Small Craft Advisory A November bar crossing, read out live because nobody else will. | 24 | Right to left | Peril at sea. Nobody drowns. | |
| #14 The Bar at the Mouth Why the Columbia bar is the reason a two-hundred-watt station still matters. | 26 · a spread | Right to left | — | |
| #15 Relay A second aerial on the ridge, put up by six people and a borrowed truck. | 22 | Right to left | — | |
| #16 Night Programme Nene takes the ten o’clock hour, alone, and finds out who is awake. | 28 · a spread | Right to left | — | |
| #17 What the Tide Line Keeps Winter, and the first chapter drawn entirely in the new room over the chandlery. | 30 · a spread | Right to left | — | |
| #18 Six in the Morning, Still The most recent chapter. Chapter 19 is on the drawing board. | 26 · a spread | Right to left | — |
Side stories
Standalone · reads on its own| Chapter | Posted | Pages | Reads | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Side The Nine O’Clock Bell start here A standalone about the harbour bell and the man who rang it for thirty years. Drawn left to right for a print anthology, and it reads on its own — no chapter before it is needed. | 24 | Left to right | — |
What posted · not what was promised
The record.
Every comic site says "updates weekly". This one says what actually posted, because a schedule is a promise and an archive is a record, and a reader deciding whether to start a four-year comic is asking about the record.
| Year | Chapters | Pages | Longest gap | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 3 | 76 | 7 weeks | Started on a twelve-page buffer, which lasted until December. Weekly pages, three weeks late by Christmas. |
| 2023 | 7 | 174 | 11 weeks | The steadiest year, and the first one anybody outside Astoria read. Two arcs running, buffer rebuilt twice, nothing later than the gap in the column to the left. |
| 2024 | 4 | 108 | 18 weeks | The gap year. Nothing new was drawn between February and September — a move and a wrist injury, said on the day rather than in September. The one-shot that posted in June had been finished before the hiatus and was held back for exactly this. |
| 2025 | 3 | 76 | 16 weeks | Back on a slower and truer cadence — a chapter every three to four months instead of a page a week. Fewer updates, and none of them missed. |
| 2026 | 2 | 56 | 19 weeks | Two chapters posted and a third being drawn. Four to five months apart is the true rate of one person drawing pages, and saying so is the point of this table. |
Three mirrors · one of them keeps the spreads
Read it elsewhere.
Two of those three re-cut the pages into a vertical strip, and a double-page spread does not survive that cut — it becomes two half-drawings. Nine chapters here contain one. That is the whole reason this archive still exists next to platforms with a hundred times its traffic.
- Webtoon Canvas →
Re-cut into vertical scroll, one chapter per episode. Where most new readers actually arrive.
- Tapas →
Same vertical-scroll cut, posted a week behind. Comments there get read; comments here get read faster.
- GlobalComix →
Page-based and right to left, so the spreads survive. The closest mirror to this site.
RSS feed — every chapter, newest first. No account, no algorithm, and it is how most of the people who have read all 490 pages found out about each one.
“I got here from the vertical-scroll version and had to come back, because chapter 5 has a two-page spread in it and over there it is two pictures of half a boat.”
Reader email, 2025
Mira Tolentino · Drawn in Astoria, Oregon · right to left · all ages
How it is made.
- Right to left, because that is how it is drawn
- Panel order, page turns and every reveal are built for a right-hand page turn. Flipping the art to read left to right mirrors every face and every drawn word, so the site turns the pages instead. The one-shot is the exception and it is marked on its row.
- Screentone, not grey fills
- Dot tone at 60 lpi, 10% to 40%. It is the reason the pages hold up printed at B6 and the reason they need a real page view rather than a strip that rescales them.
- Pages, not episodes
- The unit is a printed page with a fixed trim, so a chapter is a page count and not a scroll length. Every number in this archive is a page count for that reason.
- A buffer, always
- Eleven pages ahead as of this week. The buffer is what turns a wrist injury into a slower month instead of a seven-month gap, which is a lesson from 2024 and not a theory.
Questions readers actually send.
- Do I have to start at chapter 1?
- No, and most people should not. Chapter 6 opens an arc and was written to be read cold; the one-shot is standalone and takes fifteen minutes. Chapter 1 is the best experience and the highest cost, which is exactly the trade-off the three doors above are there to make visible.
- Which way do the pages read?
- Right to left, Japanese order, on every chapter except The Nine O’Clock Bell, which was drawn left to right for a print anthology. The reading direction is on every row of the archive before you click, and on every chapter page as a note above the sheets.
- Is it finished?
- No. Chapter 18 posted in June 2026 and chapter 19 is being drawn, with eleven pages of buffer. The record below says what posted every year since 2022, including the seven months in 2024 when nothing new was drawn.
- Is it suitable for younger readers?
- All ages. Two chapters carry a content note on their row — a hospital stay in chapter 11 and peril at sea in chapter 13 — and neither is graphic. Nothing else in the archive needs one.
- Why read here instead of on Webtoon?
- Only for the spreads. Nine chapters contain a double-page spread, and a vertical-scroll mirror cuts each one into two half-drawings. If you are reading on a phone in a queue, the mirror is fine and I would rather you read it there than not at all.
- Are those the real pages?
- No — this is a website template, and what each chapter page renders is the panel layout of every page at the real count, with the real spreads marked. That is the thumbnail stage a comic is built from — the ‘name’, as it is called — and it is what you replace with your own artwork. Nobody buying a template wants somebody else’s comic in it.
Low Tide Radio is a fictional comic invented for this template. Every chapter page renders its pages as panel layouts rather than artwork — drop your own images in and the archive, the pager and the counts all keep working, because every number on this site is computed from one list in src/data/config.ts.