Hugo Comic Theme is a Hugo template that turns date-organized comic strip images into a browsable archive website with home, yearly, and monthly views. It is developed and maintained by Martin Rubli and hosted on GitLab, and it is free to use for any Hugo site.
What is Hugo Comic Theme?
Hugo Comic Theme is a theme for the Hugo static site generator that renders comic strips organized by date. It takes image files placed in a content/yyyy/mm/yyyy-mm-dd.ext directory structure and produces a set of archive pages: a home page with a jump list to each year and the most recent strips, a yearly view with a jump list to each month, and a monthly view. The theme is authored by Martin Rubli and its source lives on GitLab at mrubli/hugo-theme-comic.
Key Features
- Chronological archive views — The home page lists the latest strips and provides a jump list to each year; yearly pages add a jump list to every month; monthly pages show all strips from that month.
- Year selection menu — A menu lets visitors switch quickly between different years from anywhere on the site.
- Bulma-based styling — The theme's initial version is built on the Bulma CSS framework, giving a clean responsive layout without custom CSS writing.
- Minimal Hugo version — Testing shows the demo site works back to Hugo 0.116.0, so the theme is compatible with recent Hugo releases.
- Simple content structure — Comic image files go in date-based folders (
2024/01/2024-01-01.jpg), and each folder needs an empty_index.mdfile so Hugo processes it as a section. - Demo site with xkcd strips — A live demo at mrubli.gitlab.io/hugo-xkcd/ shows the theme populated with public xkcd comics, and the demo source is available on GitLab.
- Standard installation — Install by cloning the repository into the
themesdirectory and addingtheme: hugo-theme-comicto the site configuration.
Who is it for?
- Webcomic artists — Publish daily or periodic comic strips in a clean, date-sorted archive that readers can browse by month or year.
- Hugo users — Developers or site owners using Hugo who want a ready-made theme for image-heavy, chronological content without building layouts from scratch.
- Serialized storytellers — Anyone posting a visual diary, illustrated story, or other image series in a dated sequence needs a minimal gallery sorted by time.
What can you do with Hugo Comic Theme?
- Daily comic archive — Drop strip images into the year/month folder structure and the theme automatically generates home, yearly, and monthly listing pages.
- Back-catalog navigation — Readers can jump to a specific year or month from the home page or the year menu, making older comics easy to find.
- Demo project reference — Study the included demo site's source to see how to configure a Hugo project that uses this theme with content from sources like xkcd.
How does Hugo Comic Theme work?
After cloning the repository into your Hugo project's themes folder and enabling it in the config file, you place comic image files in content/ using a yyyy/mm/yyyy-mm-dd.ext directory structure. Each directory must contain an empty _index.md file so Hugo registers it as a section; the theme then builds the chronological archive views from that structure automatically.
FAQ
Is Hugo Comic Theme free to use?
Yes, the theme's source code is publicly available on GitLab and can be cloned, modified, and used on any Hugo site without payment.
Does Hugo Comic Theme change my site's font?
No, the theme does not change your Hugo site's default font to Comic Sans or any other font. It focuses solely on displaying comic strips in a date-based layout.
What versions of Hugo are supported?
The theme's configuration specifies a minimum version, and testing shows the demo site works back to Hugo 0.116.0, so recent Hugo releases are supported.
What file format do comic strips need to be?
Comic strip files are expected as images in a yyyy/mm/yyyy-mm-dd.ext structure; the .ext indicates the image format, such as .jpg. The theme does not dictate a specific image format beyond what Hugo can process.
Is there a demo of Hugo Comic Theme?
Yes, there is a live demo at mrubli.gitlab.io/hugo-xkcd/ populated with comic strips from xkcd.com, and the demo site's source code is available on GitLab.
