Solution: Manga
Answer: OLD WIVES
Written by Adib Surani; artwork by Janice Heng
If you've ever read manga in English, chances are you might have come across a warning similar to this on the left-most page:
If you've never read manga, then the aha might be a bit harder to come by, but you might also get suspicious of the way certain lines have been broken.
In any case, the key to this puzzle is that each page of the manga can read in two ways: left-to-right and right-to-left. The pages get successively more complicated to instruct the reader the right order in which to read the panels (which is roughly to treat a rectangular group of panels as a single block). Each page also has a different type of encoding, which is used to extract two distinct letters!
| Page | Encoding | Left-to-right | Right-to-left |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bridge | S (South) | W (West) |
| 2 | Braille | E (⠑) | I (⠊) |
| 3 | Periodic Table | V (Vanadium) | N (Nitrogen) |
| 4 | Clock → Semaphore | E (1.30pm) | D (6pm) |
| 5 | NATO Phonetics | R (Romeo) | O (Oscar) |
| 6 | SI Units | A (Ampere) | W (Watt) |
| 7 | Morse Code → Size | L (Large) | S (Small) |
The intermediate cluephrase at the end of this step is SEVERAL WINDOWS. Now, we also have an eighth page with 14 panels. This is exactly the number of letters we have, so naturally we would want to insert the letters one way and read it from the other.
We notice that the red panels spell out ANSWER when read right-to-left, which is a strong indication that we are doing the right thing. Reading the remaining panels (also right-to-left) then spells out the final answer OLD WIVES.
Special thanks to Janice Heng for taking my original proof-of-concept (nondescript stick figures with speech bubbles) to the next level with some amazing manga artwork.