A father-son comic book about physics

River loves writing comics. One of his is a space adventure starring himself and two friends named Zib and Luma. The plot is about getting the physics of the very big and the physics of the very small to agree with each other, which is a problem that real physicists have not solved. He wrote it for kids his own age. There is more about it, and the picture books, in Comics and picture books starring River.

I decided it deserved to be a real book.

What we are making

A 40-page educational comic in three parts, printed at standard comic book size by a local print shop.

What AI did

Organized the pages into the three parts.
Lettered the pages: the speech balloons and captions.
Wrote a prompt for each page's art, so the look stays consistent from the first page to the last.
Worked out the print side: the page size and the file format a print shop wants, so I do not show up with something they cannot use.

What I changed my mind about

The first round of artwork looked like it was made by a computer. I did not want that for River's book, across all forty pages.

We talked through two options: run the existing images through a filter, or redo the art. I chose to redo it. I am regenerating the art myself in another image tool, one page at a time from the page prompts. After that, the new art gets swapped in and the lettering goes back on top.

It is slower. It is also the part River and I do together, which was the point all along.

What I take from this

AI is good at the scaffolding of a creative project: the page count, the file formats, the consistency and the tedious lettering. The story is River's. The decisions about how it should look are ours. I would not hand those over even if I could.

Where it falls short

AI-made art still has a look, and readers can tell. Getting past that takes more human effort, not less. If you want a book that feels handmade, plan to put your hands on it.

Try it

If your kid has a story, ask an AI how many pages it would be and what a printer needs. Seeing that it is possible is half of it.

Try this yourself

A prompt like the one I used. Paste it into any AI chat and fill in the brackets.

My kid wrote a story called [title]. Here it is: [paste the story].

I want to turn it into a printed comic book. How many pages would it be, how would you split it into parts, and what page size and file format should I bring to a local print shop? Keep every word of the story theirs.

Part of the series 27 ways I actually use AI. Claude drafted this post from the record of our work together.