You write it and let the panels be generated. The skill a comic actually needs is not drawing, it is deciding what happens in each panel, and that part was never the drawing.

29 August 2026 · Panel Haus

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You write it, and the panels get generated from what you wrote. No drawing at any point. A first comic takes about an evening, and the part that takes the evening is deciding what happens in each panel, not making the pictures.

That is worth saying plainly, because "I can't draw" is the reason most people who want to make comics never make one. It has not been the real barrier for a while.

What a comic actually needs from you

Strip a comic down and there are four jobs. Only one of them is drawing.

1. Deciding what happens, and in what order.
2. Choosing the moment each panel freezes. This is the craft of comics.
3. Writing what people say.
4. Drawing it.

Job four is now optional. Jobs one to three are not, and nothing generates them for you in a way that is worth reading. A tool that writes your story for you produces something nobody wants, including you.

The order that works

Start with the shape, not the first panel. Six to eight panels for a first comic. Write one line per panel describing what a reader sees. Not prose, not dialogue yet. Just: "she opens the door", "the room is empty", "she notices the window is open".

If that list is boring to read, the comic will be boring, and you have found that out before spending anything.

Then pick your moments. This is the bit that separates a comic from an illustrated summary. A comic does not show everything that happens; it shows the instant either side of the thing that matters, and lets the reader do the rest. The gap between two panels is where a comic actually happens.

Practically: if two panels next to each other show almost the same thing, delete one.

Then generate, roughly. Take the whole thing through on the fast setting. Do not stop to perfect anything. You are checking whether the sequence reads, and you cannot tell that from one good panel.

Then letter it. Speech bubbles, captions, sound effects. Read it out loud. Comic dialogue is much shorter than dialogue you write sitting down; anything that fills a bubble is usually twice as long as it needs to be.

Then fix only what is seen. Regenerate the panels a reader will actually look at closely. Leave the rest.

The thing that goes wrong first

Your character will not look like themselves in panel four.

This is the single most common reason people abandon a first AI comic, and it is not a failure of the tool so much as a misunderstanding of what it is doing. Each generation is independent unless you give it something to hold onto.

The fix is to define a character once and reuse that definition, rather than describing them again each time and hoping. It has its own post: How do you keep an AI character consistent?

What you do not need

You do not need to know panel layout theory. Pick a preset grid and change it later if it fights you.

You do not need a drawing tablet, or any of the software people assume. It runs in a browser.

You do not need a finished script. Six lines describing six pictures is a script for these purposes.

You do not need to spend anything to find out whether you like it. A free account gets enough to make something real, which is the only way to tell.

What it will actually feel like

The first one will not be good. That is not discouragement, it is the schedule. The first comic teaches you that your instinct is to cram too much into each panel and to write dialogue that nobody would say out loud. Everyone learns those two things by making something bad, and it is much faster to learn them in an evening than over the years it takes to learn to draw first.

The second one is noticeably better. That is the part worth staying for.

Where to start

Getting Started walks through a first comic end to end. If you would rather understand the cost before committing an evening, How much does it cost to make a comic with AI? has the arithmetic.