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The design below combines what the evidence supports. LLMs own the plan and the critique, image models own pixels only, and deterministic code owns every bit of geometry and text. The central artifact is a page spec that every later stage keys off by stable IDs. That is how a critique like "balloon 3 covers Aki's face in panel 2.4" becomes an edit rather than a vague note.
| Role | Engine | Consumes | Produces |
|---|---|---|---|
| Author | Claude (Opus) | Premise, comics-theory summary | script.md: beats, dialogue, character bible, 8-12
comprehension questions with answers |
| Character designer | Image model, Claude selects | Character bible | refs/{char}/: turnaround, 4-6 expressions, outfit
notes; frozen once a human approves |
| Storyboarder | Claude (Opus) | Script, refs, few-shot layouts | page_NN.json (panel tree or polygons, shot scale,
camera angle, characters with boxes, intended transition, balloons with
speaker, order and reserved region) and page_NN.svg
thumbnails |
| Panel artist | Edit model (Qwen-Image-Edit locally, or Gemini/GPT image) via ComfyUI or API | Panel text spec, 1-3 ref crops, rasterized SVG sketch or pose/depth map | 3 candidates per panel, no text |
| Panel QA | Cross-family VLM plus DINO/DreamSim similarity | Candidate, its spec | Round-trip caption into the spec schema, field-by-field diff, identity score, pick or redraw ticket |
| Letterer/compositor | Deterministic Python | Spec, chosen panels | page_NN.final.svg and PNG: panels clipped to polygons,
balloons fitted, tails drawn, halftone pass; optional .kra
export via addShapesFromSvg |
| Layout checker | Deterministic plus Kumiko/Magi | Rendered page, spec | Pass/fail on panel recovery, reading order, balloon-face overlap, text overflow, OCR diff |
| Cold reader | Different model family from the author, blind to spec | Full page plus exact panel and balloon crops | Retelling, quiz answers, inferred transitions, confusions keyed to panel IDs |
| Editor | Claude | Checker and reader reports | Revision tickets routed to the author, storyboarder, artist or letterer |
Two patterns from the adjacent literature are worth borrowing directly. AnimeAgent's reviewer has an MLLM re-describe the generated output in the same schema as the spec, then compares field by field. That turns subjective critique into a structured diff (AnimeAgent). Code2Video's critic uses a 6x6 grid of named anchors plus an occupancy table linking each element to its code. It exists because text-only critique can name a misplaced element but gives no direction or distance for the fix (Code2Video). For comics, name the balloon anchor slots in each panel and keep a bounding-box table keyed to SVG IDs. Then a critic can say "move balloon b3 to slot TL" and the compositor can execute it. Paper2Video found that LLMs respond poorly to small numeric tweaks. It renders discrete variants and has a VLM choose among them (Paper2Video). Do the same for balloon layouts and panel crops.
Run the review loop at three levels, and cap each one. At the panel level, run QA and keep the best of three, with at most one redraw round per panel. At the page level, deterministic checks must pass before any VLM sees the page. A VLM is the wrong tool for "do these shapes overlap": 2024 VLMs averaged 58% on trivially simple line-crossing and overlap tasks (BlindTest), and a deterministic scene-graph checker beat a VLM critic in 65% of human comparisons for Manim (SGA). At the story level, the cold reader runs at most two revision rounds, and the best version so far is kept because refinement can regress (VFLM). Put human checkpoints at three points: approving the script and character sheets, approving the thumbnails, and approving final pages. Thumbnail approval is the cheapest place to catch a storytelling problem, and the planner is where the evidence says the value sits.
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