A black-and-white illustrated comic panel rendered in WebGL showing a cartoon sheep character, with animated elements and mouse-reactive objects that give the hand-drawn scene a sense of depth and life.
Ponpon Mania is an interactive webcomic about a megalomaniac sheep who dreams of becoming a DJ. That sentence alone should be enough to make you click, but the real hook is how it feels. The whole thing runs in WebGL, and yet it reads like a hand-drawn comic that somehow learned to breathe. The visual language is mostly black and white, with color bleeding in only when Ponpon slips into his DJ fantasies. It's a small, deliberate choice that does more narrative work than most shader effects ever manage.
The project is a collaboration between Justine Soulié, who did the illustration and art direction, and Patrick Heng, a Paris-based creative developer with stints at Active Theory and Merci-Michel on his résumé. They co-wrote the story and split the making: Justine designed every character and scene in Illustrator, then Patrick pulled those layers apart, packed them into texture atlases, and reassembled them as WebGL scenes driven by GSAP timelines. Page transitions blend two full scenes through a custom shader in real time, with GSAP tweening the mix value. The navigation is modeled after a music player, chapters as albums, panels as tracks, which is the kind of structural joke that only works when the execution is this tight.
What makes it technically interesting is the WebGL's full rendering pipeline to serve a 2D comic aesthetic without ever letting the tech upstage the drawing. If you want to dig deeper, the Codrops case study and Awwwards write-up walk through the pipeline from sketch to shader. You can also support the project on Ko-fi, where they're working toward a print edition and new chapters. Go read a comic about a sheep. You've earned it.
- Live Demo: https://ponpon-mania.com
- Author(s):