Comic Strip Spread
Difficulty: Easy
Note: This spread works best with decks like the Diary of a Broken Soul or Surrealist Tarot because they display scenes rather than pips and do not use reversals.
The Comic Strip Spread is a simple nine-card chronological spread that looks like a page of a comic book. This method should be used to get a glimpse of the future as it would pan out naturally. It may be insightful to use this spread in coordination with biorhythms. The spread is easy to read as a storyboard, just like a comic strip.
The main subject is apparent in the first card, while the story plays out through the following tarot cards.
It is important to pay particular attention to the cards and the relationships with their neighbours. Notice which directions the cards are facing, and how they interact.
Your Comic Strip Reading
The Sorceress![]() |
Balance![]() |
9 of Swords![]() |
6 of Swords![]() |
Queen of Cups![]() |
5 of Swords![]() |
5 of Pentacles![]() |
The Devils![]() |
10 of Swords![]() |

Card 1: The Sorceress
12:00 – Card 11
AKA The Priestess in traditional Tarot. Female, Fire, Leo.
The master of events, the shaper of destiny, the will in action. The opposite of the fool, the Sorceress is active, in control. Aware instead of ignorant, wise instead of apathetic. A goddess, for the only gods that exist are men and women who make deities of themselves.

Card 2: Balance
AKA Justice in traditional Tarot.
Not the scales of a common religious moralist and no longer a cardinal virtue, but the raw, heartless justice of nature.

Card 3: 9 of Swords
Drawn on July 4th to the sound of fireworks. Weapons and explosives are now components of ritual as often as components of battle. I suppose they always were.

Card 4: 6 of Swords
Something has to make the rain come down. It got up there but once there's enough of it, it falls back to Earth. It's not enough just to let it happen, if you want to understand you have to observe.

Card 5: Queen of Cups
Queen Bees begin developing in specially constructed cells within the hive. They are often oriented differently from other cells in the honeycomb, and are filled with Royal Jelly, a substance which determines the physiology of the queen to be.

Card 6: 5 of Swords
An homage to Bosch and Bruegel, and a card symbolic of victory to the well-armed and pain to the unprepared or unwilling to defend.

Card 7: 5 of Pentacles
Air conditioning is not a luxury, it's one of the most important things humankind ever invented. Comfort too is not to be taken lightly, if you aren't comfortable you can't enjoy what's before you, and if you can't enjoy what you've got, what's the point in living?

Card 8: The Devils
11:00 – Card 9
AKA The Devil in traditional Tarot. Female, Fire, Capricorn.
Predators, perpetrators, the strong over the weak. They are movers and manipulators of fate, but always at each other’s throats. Time devours its own children and this is the card of that act, for time itself is only a continuum, it's really time's children that devour each other.

Card 9: 10 of Swords
Classic iconography. Classic significance: Absolute destruction.