Titled Comic


I’ve been toying with the idea of adapting this novel into a comic, and here I’m going to try to sell you on it. The novel itself will remain free to read and share as it’s been, but trying to adapt it does take time and costs money, so I’ve launched a Kickstarter to see if there’d be interest in me doing so. I’ve got a drafted adaptation of the prologue, which you can check out below to gauge if it’s something you’d be interested in:

I’m using AI

Something I’d like to bring up right out the gate is that this project is heavily reliant on AI. It was actually born out of my intention to compare ChatGPT 4o to Gemini 2.5 Pro’s vibe coding capabilities, where I got sidetracked and wound up testing image generation instead. I tried generating a few images using some crude sketches as guides for my novel; next thing I knew hours had gone by and I had the first page of a comic made. So much for my prediction that image generation was going to peak for a while since we’re close to mastering diffusion models; that prediction lasted only a month or so until OpenAI released 4o’s autoregressive image generation.

Being largely AI assisted, there may be a few inconsistencies if you look closely. Blurry spots where I drew over mistakes that the AI made, minor inconsistencies (especially with wounds, it doesn’t seem to like to generate them) that I wasn’t able to tweak perfectly, and minor discrepancies with white balance or character/object heights and such. Still, I believe that with some manual editing, it’s enough to bring in the suspension of disbelief and effectively tell a story.

I would also like to clarify, however, that this is not AI slop. I’ve got a collage of images below, followed by one final image:

^ Various files the AI gave me (compressed to save space)

^ The final panel in the draft (compressed to save space)

The main background began with a sketch I created, followed by numerous iterations and adjustments in the AI, before I arrived at the compilation of images. Once I had them all, I put them together, taking different aspects of each one, and made the injuries on Basil more consistent with previous images. I combined them into an image close to what I had in mind, and then added a carefully placed speech bubble over the incorrectly generated box. Anyway, the point is that I’m putting effort into actually making a quality (well, at least quality within the realm of amateur hobby projects) and not trying to pump out some AI slop to make a quick buck.

Don’t feel pressured

One thing I’d like to stress, however, is don’t feel pressured to purchase anything. I’ve got a job unrelated to this, so it’s not like I’m financially dependent on trying to adapt this, and even if I don’t do so, I still get exactly what I originally set out to do: run a real world benchmark on the current state of AI that I can create a blog post about later.

Act 2 Updates

Anyway, now that you’ve listened to my sales pitch, I might as well tack on an update about Act 2. I probably have close to a third of it drafted, and since the first part is very linear, expect at least a half dozen chapters to be shared here by the end of summer. By that time I’ll also probably be close to having a draft of most chapters, so once I figure out the exact order they’ll appear in it’ll be a matter of proofreading and posting the rest.