u/Jussi_Mulari

I’ve started planning one of the next scenes for Tinky & Bocca.

Both the armored transport and the Echo-class soldiers were originally designed separately in pencil. I wanted to lock down their silhouettes, proportions, equipment and overall visual language before trying to use them in an actual scene.

From there I built the sequence in stages:

first the vehicle as a standalone design

then the gull-wing side hatch and interior

then the soldiers as their own character/unit sheet

then a separate image of the squad deploying from the vehicle

finally all of those elements were combined into a three-panel comic page

The last step was adding short operational dialogue and making the sequence feel less like concept art and more like an actual moment in the story.

This is basically how I’m approaching the next part of the comic now: design the pieces first, establish the rules, then make them perform inside the story.

Still entirely made with ChatGPT — and still on my phone.

I’ve started planning one of the next scenes for Tinky & Bocca.

Both the armored transport and the Echo-class soldiers were originally designed separately in pencil. I wanted to lock down their silhouettes, proportions, equipment and overall visual language before trying to use them in an actual scene.

From there I built the sequence in stages:

first the vehicle as a standalone design

then the gull-wing side hatch and interior

then the soldiers as their own character/unit sheet

then a separate image of the squad deploying from the vehicle

finally all of those elements were combined into a three-panel comic page

The last step was adding short operational dialogue and making the sequence feel less like concept art and more like an actual moment in the story.

This is basically how I’m approaching the next part of the comic now: design the pieces first, establish the rules, then make them perform inside the story.

Still entirely made with ChatGPT — and still on my phone.

If something needs fixing, finding, trading, pouring or quietly making disappear, Tamika probably knows how to handle it.

She runs the Red Sand Trading Post with equal parts charm, stubbornness and practical common sense — and somehow still finds time to keep Tamika’s Tavern open.

Just don’t assume the tavern is only a tavern.

A few pieces from the wider Tinky & Bocca universe — the Red Sand Trading Post, Echo-Class operatives, and one of the armored vehicles used in this part of the story.

I’m trying to build the world as a real place rather than just a backdrop: recurring locations, factions, equipment, vehicles and visual rules that stay consistent as the story moves forward.

Red Sand Trading Post will be one of the key locations in Part Two.

​

Tamika is the backbone of the Red Sand Trading Post. If something needs fixing, moving, buying, selling—or simply getting done—chances are Tamika is already halfway through it.

She also runs a small tavern tucked beneath the sprawling structure. On the surface, it’s just a place for cold drinks, bad stories and a little shade from the desert.

But Tamika’s Tavern has a few secrets of its own.

More from Red Sand soon.

Tinky/Bocca Universe — Part Two

A stacked little desert outpost built from containers, scaffolds, tarps, bad repairs, and stubborn survival. Part general store, part meeting place, part rumor machine.

This is where people come for goods, water, fuel, and stories.

And somewhere inside it sits Tamika’s Tavern — a small, dusty bar where a lot more happens than it first seems.

Red Sand Trading Post will matter.

18 years old, 155 cm, scavenger, builder, and very stubborn about doing things her own way.

Her prosthetic legs are built from scavenged parts, repaired and modified by Bocca herself.

She doesn’t need new parts.

She builds what she needs.

Part One may be ending, but the story isn’t.

Tinky & Bocca continues soon in Part Two: Red Sand Trading Post.

New characters. New places. New adventures. And a much bigger world beginning to open up around Tinky and Bocca.

Coming soon.

I’ve been working on Tinky & Bocca as a long-form AI comic experiment, with a big focus on character consistency, visual continuity, storyboarding and keeping the pages feeling like part of the same world.

It has taken a lot of trial and error, but Part One is finally approaching its ending.

There are still imperfections, and I’m still refining the workflow, but the project has already taught me far more than I expected about directing AI-generated comic pages instead of treating them as isolated images.

And this is not the end of the project.

Part One is ending.

Tinky and Bocca are not.

Will Bocca finally agree to cover her legs — and why is Tinky so obsessively determined to protect her in the first place?

A few answers are coming.

And probably a few more problems.

A small flashback from Bocca’s past.

Before the R-7 legs, there was scrap, trial and error… and a lot she’d rather not think about.

So what actually happened to Bocca’s legs?

We’ll get there.

The panels, composition, camera angles, character placement and negative space are described in the prompt, and ChatGPT generates the page as a single image rather than me generating individual panels and compositing them afterward.

These are some recent pages from the project.

A few more pages from Tinky & Bocca.

Tinky decides she’s going to prove she knows how to relax: new outfit, ridiculous sunglasses, a cocktail and some peace and quiet.

Then Bocca comes back from the desert with something she definitely wasn’t supposed to find.

Meet DAR-14.

Needless to say, Tinky’s afternoon takes a turn

A few more pages from Tinky & Bocca.

Tinky decides she’s going to prove she knows how to relax: new outfit, ridiculous sunglasses, a cocktail and some peace and quiet.

Then Bocca comes back from the desert with something she definitely wasn’t supposed to find.

Meet DAR-14.

Needless to say, Tinky’s afternoon takes a turn.

I spent 1.5 hours convincing ChatGPT to edit ONE comic panel without destroying the other four

This page started from a single generated five-panel comic page.

The original was already close to what I wanted. Panels 1–4 worked. The problem was only the final panel: I wanted the camera pushed much closer to the Colt M1911, the character’s face completely outside the frame, and much more physical recoil — slide movement, casing, muzzle blast and shake.

Sounds like a tiny edit.

It took 1.5 hours.

The first attempts actually improved the gunshot, but ChatGPT kept “helpfully” redesigning the page around it.

One version removed panel 4 completely and turned the bottom two panels into one giant action panel.

Another created a weird double-exposure effect with two overlapping guns and arms.

Then we got a good close-up, but again the five-panel layout was destroyed.

At that point I stopped treating it as just an image-generation problem and started treating it as an instruction-control problem.

I had ChatGPT analyse every failed result instead of immediately generating again:

What exactly changed outside the requested panel?

Why did the layout collapse?

Was the gun geometry actually wrong, or did it just look strange because the slide was in recoil?

Which parts of the failed image were worth keeping?

I also gave it a real photo reference of a Colt M1911 with the slide fully back. Interestingly, that corrected one of our own assumptions: the barrel sticking far out in front of the recoiled slide looked exaggerated at first, but the reference showed that this geometry can actually be correct.

So the target became very specific:

Keep the original five-panel page intact.

Do not touch panels 1–4.

Do not merge panels 4 and 5.

Only replace the visual content inside panel 5.

Close crop on the gun and hands.

No face.

Strong recoil.

Recognisable M1911 geometry.

One gun, not two.

At the end I did something slightly ridiculous: I asked ChatGPT to write the final correction prompt for ChatGPT.

I didn’t write the last prompt myself.

I explained what had failed, showed it the references and previous attempts, and asked it to turn everything we had learned during the session into one strict correction prompt.

Then I pasted that back into the image edit.

That was the version that finally worked.

The interesting part for me isn’t that AI eventually generated a better gun.

It’s that the workflow became:

generate → inspect → diagnose → correct assumptions → tighten constraints → let the model write its own final instruction → regenerate

This is also why “AI made this image” can be a pretty misleading description of the process.

The final edit was one panel.

The debugging session was 90 minutes.

And yes, after all of that, the solution really was basically:

“PLEASE. LEAVE. THE OTHER. FOUR. PANELS. ALONE.” 😅

A little teaser from tomorrow’s Tinky & Bocca episode.

Apparently someone suggested Tinky doesn’t know how to have fun.

She took that personally.

Sunglasses, cigarettes, cocktails… and one very questionable idea of how soldiers relax.

A few pages from the next part of Tinky & Bocca.

Bocca has had a rough day, discovered wine for the first time, and wandered a little farther into the desert than she probably should have.

Then she finds a junkyard.

For most people, a pile of dead machinery is just trash.

For Bocca, it’s basically Christmas.

She can’t leave broken things alone. If it has wires, gears or something that might still work, she has to know why it stopped working.

Unfortunately for her sister Tinky, this particular piece of junk is about to become a much bigger problem. 😅

Meet DAR-14 — Daria.

She’s about to become part of the story.

How, why, and whether that’s a good thing… I’ll leave for the next episode. 😅

Coming soon.