Creating a "slinky" with a fully keyable rig

You remember slinky, the coil toy?

That's what my client wants me to create in AE, in 2d obviously but it needs to be fully animatable and it won't be "walking" down the stairs.

I have 2 theories. The first is just creating a hi-res slinky graphic in Photosop or Illustrator and using the Puppet tool to rig it with control points at each end and one in the middle. Might work, right? It's just that the coils' thickness would stretch and squeeze and they would not rotate to touch each other when compressed. The second idea is to have a path rigged with Create Nulls from Paths. That would make the animation really easy but then there is the creation of the coil pattern, particularly in a way that actually works like the slinky.

Any ideas? Is there some weird way to do this with a stroke? No? How about a script/plugin? Rigging a few coils would be ok but 100? 200?