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
Page of Wands![]() |
Ace of Pentacles![]() |
5 of Wands![]() |
4 of Wands![]() |
Knight of Swords![]() |
10 of Pentacles![]() |
Page of Pentacles![]() |
The Swamp![]() |
10 of Swords![]() |
Card 1: Page of Wands
If you're going to use a pool stick, first be sure that you aren't one of the balls.
Card 2: Ace of Pentacles
A fencing mask on a skeleton with a cadeceus over a black sun before fire. Refer to the symbolic meaning of each to find the answers you seek.
Card 3: 5 of Wands
The means may be grotesque, but if they get you what you want you'd do well to use them.
Card 4: 4 of Wands
If you lost the means to do what you will, try retracing your steps. You had them before, you should be able to find them again. Unless they fell into the sewer, that would totally suck.
Card 5: Knight of Swords
The guillotine is the most effective method of killing ever invented. You can poison or shock or stab or shoot people but nothing is so certain to cause death as severing their head. Amazing how fast the world forgot that.
Card 6: 10 of Pentacles
The tree of life doesn't play out flawlessly like it does in the diagrams. It's actually far more distorted than that. Don't mistake the map for the territory and follow books blindly.
Card 7: Page of Pentacles
An homage to Arthur Edward Waite, Aleister Crowley and George Sprague, the three revolutionary authors of Tarot systems that inspired this deck. Also, a very bad pun, apologies.
Life demands study, not worship. Study your problems, don't just pray for them to go away.
Card 8: The Swamp
8:00 – Card 1
AKA Temperance in the traditional Tarot. Male, Earth, Scorpio.
Stagnation, nothing moves, nothing changes. Barriers block every effort to improve or change, not that rock has anywhere to go. The elements and life move around it, grow from it, decay upon it, but it goes nowhere.
Card 9: 10 of Swords
Classic iconography. Classic significance: Absolute destruction.