CSS Balloon
comiCSS story for September 15, 2025
This is a longer comic than usual, and I was planning on publishing it in a few weeks, but looking at the news cycle, I thought that just as well it could be published now.
If it is familiar, it’s because it is inspired on a comic strip from Pearls Before Swine (by Stephan Pastis), in which Pig floats away with a balloon after watching the news.
Pearls Before Swine is a great comic and I’ve used it as inspiration in the past. Having the component library makes it easier to create comics, and I decided to give it a try at this comic strip, which is one of my favorites.
The idea is the same but, as always, just a shadow of what the original conveys. Stephan makes it “positive”, while mine may look like the character is jumping from a window or something and have negative connotations.
Focusing more on the comic, I always like to include a note of color, in this case the balloon and open sky are perfect for the regular black and white of the panels and characters.
Also, this is a cartoon about CSS, so I had to include it somehow: blowing the balloon, it grows using scale (1, 1.1, 1.2…) and the character floats away with a translate: Infinity Infinity… which is technically wrong (in order to go up it would need to be Infinity -Infinity), but we are not going to be picky –not to mention that the Infinity keyword cannot be used by itself (at least not yet) and it would need something like calc(), min() or max() to work.
I hope you enjoy the comic as much as I enjoyed coding it.
Links
- Permalink: https://comicss.art/comics/209/
- Image link: https://comicss.art/comics/209/balloon.png
- Source code: https://comicss.art/comics/209/balloon.html
