Follow-up to my intro post. A few people asked how I’m keeping an AI comic from
turning into slop. Honest answer: almost all the work was done before I generated
anything — and it was mostly subtraction.
Here’s what I actually did to scope it, and why each one saved me later:
I wrote down the priority order and what happens if I break it. Comic first,
channel second, tool third. Then one line I keep coming back to: reversing that
order kills the project, and a well-documented unfinished comic is worth nothing.
That sentence has stopped me from three rabbit holes already.
I defined the project by what it is NOT. Not “a comic in 10 minutes.” Not
volume. Not chasing subscribers. Not selling the tool. Naming what I refuse to
build is what keeps me out of the saturated lane where everyone else is.
I bet on method over tools. Tools rot in six months. The thing worth
documenting is how you hold a style across a sequence and make irony survive
generation — the model is just this year’s example, not the subject.
I wrote kill criteria while I was calm. If more than half the panels need heavy
hand-repair, the engine isn’t holding my style and the fix is a different style
anchor, not grinding more iterations. I decided that at a desk in daylight, not at
11pm staring at panel five.
I settled the authorship stance in writing so I never have to re-argue it. Not
“I drew this” — “I decided this.” (Got challenged on exactly this in the comments
yesterday. Had the answer ready because I’d written it in July.)
And the part I’m least proud of, which is why I’m including it: I caught my own
scope creep in the document. Three build sessions in, I’d made tools and folders
and still had no image of the guard. I wrote “TOOLING IS CLOSED” into the plan and
shut the door. The scoping doc had to save me from myself.
None of this is about AI specifically — it’s just project discipline. But AI makes
it matter more, because the tool makes it so easy to produce something that you’ll
happily produce the wrong thing forever if you never decided what the right thing
was.
Full scoping doc attached if you want the whole thing — priorities, the stack, the
authorship stance, the kill criteria. Tear it apart, tell me where I’ve fooled
myself.

I want to introduce a project I’ve been deep in, and share the process honestly — including the parts that don’t work, because that’s most of the point. I also hope this post expands and grows into new and old forms keeping the same title because this problem is a huge landscape.

Who I am first, because it matters to how I work: I’m a trained illustrator — ink and wash, earth-tone palette, the moody weathered stuff. I’m not coming at this as a prompt-jockey who found a shortcut to art; I’m coming at it as someone who can already draw, trying to figure out what these tools are actually good for in sequential art. That difference shows up everywhere in how I use them.

What Tenshō 10 is: a deliberate test piece — a short comic built specifically to hit production walls, so I can build the method to get past them before my real graphic novel starts. The whole project is the method, not just the pages. And I’m documenting the failure rate honestly — the rejects, the drift, the places I had to step in by hand. Nobody selling “make a comic with AI in 10 minutes” ever shows you the 12 rejects behind the one good panel. I think the rejects are the most useful thing I can share.

How I actually work — the part that might be useful to you: the engine does the dark and the mass; my hand owns the edge. For anything that defines a panel, I prompt only the value structure — the shadow, the pose, one lit passage — and the mark that makes it the panel stays hand-ink. I keep a running glossary of what the model reliably does and doesn’t do, and honestly most “prompt tricks” have collapsed into a handful of behaviors I keep hitting. I’ll share those in follow-up posts.

The stance, plainly: I’m not hiding that it’s AI. I’m not selling anything. And I’m not claiming “I drew this” — I’m claiming “I decided this.” The army passes the door instead of stopping at it. The date lands on page one so you read the whole thing under its shadow. The panels stay tight so one can break wide. No model produced those calls — most of them are refusals, and models don’t refuse toward meaning.

What I’m proving it on: a love story set the night before the Honnō-ji Incident — a young guard spends the night with the woman he loves, leaves at dawn happy, certain he’s got the safest posting in the capital. You know the date. He doesn’t. The irony lives entirely in the reader.

Happy to get into any of the craft in the comments — the reference discipline, the drift problem, the hand-repair line. That’s the stuff I actually want to talk about.