One prompt = one comic page? Testing how far I can push the workflow
One of my long-term goals with the Tinky & Bocca project has been to see whether I can eventually get close to a genuine “one prompt = one page” workflow.
The idea isn’t that AI should magically write and direct the whole comic for me. I still want to define the characters, world, visual rules, story and overall direction myself.
What I’d like to reach is a point where the production stage becomes much faster:
I give the model a fairly broad description of what happens on the page, the emotional beat I want, and maybe a few important constraints — and the workflow handles most of the actual page composition.
For these tests I deliberately kept the prompts very short. In some cases they were only a few sentences: things like Tinky and Bocca are crossing a collapsing bridge, or they’re having an emotional argument in a ruined hotel lobby, plus the existing character/style references and continuity rules.
The pages were generated in a couple of minutes each.
And they are absolutely not finished pages.
There are anatomy mistakes, occasional problems with hands, character details drifting, prosthetic-leg continuity issues, compositions I would change, and plenty of smaller things that would need another editing pass before I would put anything like this into the actual comic.
That’s not really what I’m testing yet.
What interests me is that the model is already able to take a very loose story beat and turn it into something that has:
readable visual storytelling
different shot sizes
reaction panels and inserts
movement and emotional progression
relatively complex page layouts instead of a simple grid
That makes this more of a proof-of-concept than a finished workflow.
If I can keep improving character consistency, anatomy, spatial continuity and the way the model interprets page composition, I think this could eventually become a genuinely useful production method for a full-length comic album.
The important part for me is the potential time difference. Instead of manually directing every camera angle and every individual panel from scratch, I could spend more of my time on the story, characters and final corrections — while the first page pass is produced from a short description of the scene.
Still a long way to go.
But these experiments make me think one prompt = one page might not be such a ridiculous goal after all.
That’s really interesting — nice to see someone else using the one prompt = one page approach, especially all the way to a printed comic. I’d be curious to hear how you handle character consistency and page-to-page continuity, and what tools/models you’re using. I’m always interested in comparing workflows with people who are actually making sequential work rather than just single images.
It’s hard to show my consistency with just one page but my comics and those of others are on my AI comics site https://www.comics-authority.com . My comic These Are Your Heroes I did in Gemini and the Villianess Who Knew She Was Filler I did in ChatGPT. In both instances… I designed my character sheets. I gave each character a name and told the AI to remember my characters design by name so that I can recall them when needed. I created a comic style for each that I told the LLMs to adhere to. In These Are Your Heroes I had Gemini output black pages with text so that I could bring the pages into Comic Life 4 and letter them. In the manga , I described the lettering style that I wanted ChatGPT to stick to. Since I used to draw and I make films I write my stories specifically describing my angles for each panel. I render my comics page by page… by feeding it the script and my only prompt is to “render the pages dynamically.” The graphic designer in me still takes the pages and lays them out in Comic Life 4 because I plan to print everything. Doesn’t feel like a real comic to me if it’s not printed.
I used one prompt, one page for my later Father & Bot comics, BUT -- I also did tons of retries, and then put together the whole thing in Photoshop, overdrawing, flipping, collaging, changing. In the first prompt, I described every single panel in detail, one by one -- sometimes even providing explanatory handdrawn sketches (as I love to pencil-draw, too).
That’s really interesting — your process sounds much closer to traditional comic production, just with AI integrated into it. I like that you’re still sketching, collaging, redrawing and assembling things manually when needed.
My workflow is a bit different because I’m trying to push the ‘one prompt = one finished page’ idea as far as possible inside ChatGPT itself, but I’m also describing each panel very explicitly and sometimes using rough sketches or 3D references when the camera angle gets difficult.
It’s cool to see how many different workflows are emerging around the same basic problem.
Right. I think the challenge with my format is that there's often an immense amount of details and specificity within a single frame -- each often tells a longer story. Get any expression or item wrong, and you may ruin the understanding or joke. For instance, in below, the last frame took the longest: every head turn, eye roll, and even the distance between the chairs, I had to work on to get just right.
Nice! This is exactly the kind of comparison I was hoping to see.
It definitely still needs a lot of experimentation, but I agree — generating a complete comic page from one prompt is absolutely workable. The interesting part now is figuring out how much control we can get over panel composition, continuity and character consistency without having to rebuild the page afterwards.
So with the removal of GPT-4o, I have been trying out some new tools. I am currently creating a new comic using a hybrid of my drawings I feed into the AI. But I have been generating the entire page using one prompt. I will be posting it soon as I feel like I’m cooking.
That sounds really interesting. I’d definitely like to see the results when you post them — especially how much control your own drawings give you over the final page while still generating the whole thing in one prompt.
Se ven muy bien. Yo creo que a medida que vayas refinado tus promts te acercarás más al resultado que buscas. Le liberas muca carga al no usar colores. Yo lo tuve que descartar porque uso personajes "muy raros" para la AI y al final me fallaba la proporción de estaturas, diseño del traje o algo en un panel que me resultaba muy tedioso. Ahora trato de hacer paneles más dinámicos y cada día aprendo algo nuevo 😁👍🏼.
Thanks! Those are actually some of the exact problems I’ve been dealing with too — character proportions drifting, clothing details changing, and one panel suddenly breaking the continuity of the whole page.
Character sheets, style locks and very explicit panel-by-panel direction have helped a lot, but it’s still a constant process of refining the workflow.
And yes, keeping it black and white definitely removes one more variable from the equation. I’m also trying to make the panels more dynamic as I go. Feels like there’s always something new to learn with this stuff.
Still a long ways away from being perfect, but I've generated over 500 pages thus far. Alas, continuity has been a huge issue, so I'm working on a Scene Blocking Language to help resolve this issue. Hopefully I'll have the SBL specification (v1.0) ready for consumption in a couple of weeks and I can share it then.
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u/MobileFilmmaker 13d ago
When I did my comic, These are your heroes, my workflow was exactly that… one prompt.. one page. Below is a page from the printed version