Smallest comic strip

Created by German-based cartoonist Claudia Puhlfürst, “Juana Knits the Planet” is a comic strip microfabricated on a single strand of human hair by American Andrew Zonenberg using a piece of equipment called a FEI Versa 3-D Focused Ion Beam (FIB) system. The strip, which depicts a woman creating a world through science, manipulating DNA and coding on computers, is composed of 12 panels, each of which measures 25 Micrometres (µm) by 25 Micrometres (µm). The strip was unveiled in May 2014 to help promote the open-source science and hacking conference EHSM (the Exceptional Hardware and Software Meeting) held in Hamburg on 27–29 June 2014. The strip can only be viewed using electron microscope techniques, such as those employed in Focused Ion Beam equipment. Such equipment can be used to both produce images of very small objects (using transmission electron microscopy) and to cut them, by blasting the object with a fine beam of gallium ions. Because beams of gallium ions can cut objects to the nanometre level – 1,000 times smaller than a macrometre and finer than any laser – there is still scope for someone to make an even smaller comic strip. The strip is 12 panels long, coming in a row of three panels on a second row of nine panels. Each panel is 25 Micrometres (µm) by 25 Micrometres (µm). This format and size was chosen so that viewers could see the width of the hair used as the canvas for the strip.

So the total length of the drawn strip is 300 Micrometres (µm), but including the gutters (the space between the panels) and accounting for its unusual layout, the strip is 55 Micrometres (µm) tall by 225 Micrometres long (µm).

A Micrometre (µm) is an SI unit of length. 1 Micrometre = 1 Micrometer (US Spelling) = 1 Micron (µ) - a colloquial term that is also used, but is discouraged in scientific literature.

The average human hair is 80 micrometres (µm) wide.

According to Andrew Zonenberg, the PhD student who cut the strip: "The ion beam functions almost like a microscopic sandblaster; as each ion hits the specimen it may dislodge an atom from the surface. By aiming the beam at different parts of the sample it's possible to make extremely precise, nanoscale cuts."

The plan was "to engrave a comic strip depicting the various themes of the conference into a human hair... I cut a short piece of hair from my girlfriend's head and went up to campus."

"It took a few attempts to get good, clean cuts as the hair was so soft compared to the materials I usually work with such as silicon, aluminium and glass. It was very easy to totally destroy the surrounding area.

"After an hour or so of tinkering I got things adjusted right and the remainder of the engraving took only around 30 minutes.

"Each panel of the comic is 25 microns square, the smallest lines are around 200 nanometers wide - fairly big by nanotech standards.

"While the Versa is capable of making substantially finer cuts, a few nm under ideal conditions, I wanted the comic to be large enough that the entire diameter of the hair could still be seen to put the size in perspective."