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WHEELER, pt. 1 Crack the ******

This challenge can be found on the inside of the cover of issue 6.

The Hunt

We get a 3-by-6 table of numbers, and the hint "Count carefully...".

Immediately upon seeing this my mind went to a book cipher, which is a cipher where the encoding refers to positions inside of a shared book.

Logically, the first number in a row would reference a page, the second a text bubble / box or a case, and the third would be the index of the letter in that text.

I decided to start counting letters starting with 1, and not count spaces or punctuation.

I tried different methods:

• Starting with page 1 being the cover, and the second column being the text-bubble number
• Starting with page 1 being the first comic page and the second column being the text-bubble number
• Starting with page 0 being the first comic page, we get an impossible solution (second letter doesn't exist)
• Starting with page 0 being the first comic page and the other counts starting at 0
• Starting with page 1 being the first comic page and the number referencing the case

That last one is it! It was a long manual process but I found it a cool challenge and enjoyed it very much.