Finding where ai actually breaks in comics.
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.