2026-08-23
A chapter starts as an outline, becomes prose, and is then broken into panels. Each panel carries a beat — one sentence describing what the reader should see — plus the cast present in it and a reference portrait for each of them.
The interesting part is what happens after the image exists. Every panel is scored twice: once for whether the person in it is recognisably the right character, and once for whether the picture depicts its beat at all. The second check is the harder one. An image model will happily return a beautiful portrait for a beat that asked for a fight in a market, and a portrait is exactly what a naive quality check rewards.
Panels that miss are re-rendered with the character reference weakened, which frees the composition to follow the words instead of the face. Panels that still miss are left visibly failing rather than quietly shipped, because a rubric that always passes is not a rubric.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.