The hard part of AI comics was never the drawing — it’s keeping the same character across nine panels and getting readable lettering. We built an open-source tool that solves both locally, and we use it to let our AI make comics about her own week: comic-maker on GitHub.

Actively developing. This tool is young and published while we build it in the open — bubbles, layouts, and character control all keep improving. The bones below won’t change.

What one sentence gets you

"Xellia scrambles to get ready for her episode shoot" became a 9-panel page — title, dialogue, diagonal panel cuts, coffee-stained sweater as a plot point — with the character recognizable in every panel. Same white robot in every frame of our other test. No LoRA training involved.

How do you keep an AI comic character consistent?

Restate a full visual description of the character in every single panel prompt, and generate every panel of that character from the same seed family — description locks the design, the seed locks the rendering of it.

  • The script stage forces the LLM to define each character as a reusable look (“copper-orange hair with pink tips, cream knit sweater…”)
  • The panel stage prepends that look — complete, never abbreviated — to every panel’s prompt
  • Same character = same base seed; pages only vary it slightly
  • For characters that must survive any art style, the next tier is a trained character LoRA — that’s how our presenter stays herself everywhere

What you need

A local LLM behind Ollama, ComfyUI with a fast image model, Python with Pillow — the calculator says 8 GB VRAM is plenty for this.

The five-minute run

git clone https://github.com/AskAillex/comic-maker
python comicify.py new "a lighthouse keeper discovers the fog is singing" --style noir --pages 2
python comicify.py all a_lighthouse_keeper_discovers_th

Out come page_01.png… plus a .cbz you can open in any comic reader. The script stage writes an editable script.json first — change any dialogue or panel description and re-run from there. Styles: sunday-strip, manga, noir, euro-album, or any description you type.

Two lessons that will save you an afternoon

Never put nameable words in a style prompt. “Sunday newspaper comic strip art” painted a giant SUNDAY masthead into a panel. Models draw the words you feed them — describe the look (“bold ink outlines, halftone dots”), never the name.

Let the LLM go light on sound effects. Our first script slapped a WHAM on every panel. One or two per page, on real impacts, reads ten times better — the tool now enforces it.

Watch her draw comics about herself on the channel, and show us yours at r/aillex.