I Built an AI App to Make Manga (From Zero Art Skills)

This is my drawing skills. Yeah, I can't draw. But this is what I turned it into using this AI tool that I vibe coded in less than 24 hours. Like I made an entire manga in less than 24 hours. Look at it. It is called the in between. There's character consistency, there's stylistic control, and I did it with this vibe coded manga generator studio without a single line of code. You can create your characters, you can generate panels, even upload your own sketches or entire pages. It is not perfect, okay? It's only V1, but oh my gosh, this unlocks so much either in just your normal workflow or if you want to just build a SAS product now without writing a single line of code. So, in this video, let me show you the journey of how I did this in less than 24 hours. So, I literally have no idea how to make manga. So, in classic Tina Huan style, the first thing that I did was I took an entire course on how to make manga. I will be using bolt new using bault.

I'm just going to write build a web app with the following features. Click on the plan using sonnet and see what we can get from here. Let us see. Okay, a few plans. AI image generation. Which AI image generation service would you prefer? I'm going to use nano banana cuz I do think it has the best character consistency. So nano banana generate API key. Cool. Okay. API key. Got this marker called a taro marker. Here's the API key. Yeah. Let's go. No. An error. RIP. Okay. So we have the API key and I'm going to try it out. So we have the character. So B has generated these three features. We have the character creator where you can insert the character, describe the manga character and generate um the character designs at the panel generator that you can upload the character reference description and also a sketch to generate the manga panels. Finally, a page composer to compose all the different panels together. Now, let us see if it works. Fingers crossed. So, character creator. Let's try something simple first. So, it has the front view and the back view. Um, and here is the back view and here's the front view. So, it doesn't actually look like the same person here. So, that's not good. This is like mostly a prompting thing, though. So, I'm just going to ask to change the system prompt here. Okay, let us see. Let's try it. I'm going to do since we're doing manga, let's just do like Japanese woman. Okay, that's actually not bad. I quite like that actually. Okay, I'm going to upload that reference image. Click to upload character sheet. And then I'm going to write panel description character presenting a report. I'm going to try that with just a description and then a sketch after. Let us see. — Yeah. No. What is this? No. Definitely not. I'm going to take the image here, put it here, and be like for the panel generator, I use this reference image. Yeah. Yeah, actually that worked. I do want to try with a reference, man. Yeah. And another one that's like, here's a paper. Yay. Okay, I'm going to send this over. It's a reference image. Please work. Do you guys like my drawing? Really trying my best here. Let's see. That's actually not bad. Now, let's actually check the page composer. Now, I will just upload a few panels maybe of like these and then see if it's able to put stuff together. Ooh, that's not good. Okay, I need to do this. Take a screenshot. The dimensions of the page composer is not correct. Got to iron out these little details. Okay, that actually works fine. And then what if I describe it? The middle picture with major. Nice. I'm actually pretty impressed. Okay, I'm pretty happy with this. So, we know that all these work now. So, on the technical side, things are okay. So, I feel a bit better. Great. Now, let's actually work on the story itself.

So, when I was hiking, the story that kind of like popped into my head a lot is Through the Looking Glass. Not sure if you guys have read that story or like watched the movie before. I believe that Through the Looking Glass, it's like a sequel to Alice and Wonderland. Actually, let me double check that. Okay. Yeah, it actually says here Alice's Adventures in Wonderland came first and then To the Looking Glass is the sequel. Okay, cool. So, published 6 years later. This time, Alice steps through a mirror into a world structure like a chess game where everything is reversed or inverted. Yeah. So, she goes in uh into this mirror world and she starts off as a pawn and everything is reversed where inverted, but the ultimate goal is to reach the end and become a queen. Okay, so the most famous example is when Alice tries to reach the red queen in the garden. Alice walks directly toward her but kept finding herself at the front door. Finally, she tries walking in the opposite direction away from the queen and suddenly finds herself face to face with her. Red Queen explains, "Now here you see it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to go somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. " So it's like this inverted logic. Yeah, I really like that concept. So yeah, that's sort of what I have in mind. Also thinking about a lot of mangas and anime, they're about having like is they call it Kai? Um you know like they get transported to a different universe, right? So it's sort of like that as well. and the main protagonist. I wanted to be someone who's like very serious, like very going through life, everything is just like very straight edge, always like getting all A's in school, you know, doing all the correct things and then just finding themselves suddenly in this kind of situation where they have to navigate an entirely nonsensical way of life and where they have to grow as a character to be able to embrace that type of uncertainty. and then the crazy things that happen and just kind of succumbing to the will of the world. Okay, new chat. Writing the script for a manga. I first want to figure out what the world concept. Let us see. Okay. Option one, the upside down corporate tower. Shanders skyscraper which she must ascend from the ground floor to the top floor. That is pretty cool. Okay. We're getting somewhere. Working titled A Still Point. Ayaka is the perfect salary woman. Punctual, efficient, and devoted to doing everything right. She's climbed every run exactly as she should, sacrificing spontaneity and joy for the security of following the rules. Then one day, she slips through a crack in reality and finds herself in an impossible world where logic doesn't exist. Panicking, Ayaka watches as a massive floating pen appears in the sky and draws a glowing path before her. A trickster guide appears and explains she must reach the still point, a place of perfect balance at the center of this chaos. Domain one, the infinite queue. The pen draws her toward an endless line that loops and twists through impossible architecture. Ayaka looks for a shortcut. She's efficient after all, but the pen erases the ground everywhere except the Q entrance. Inside, she meets the efficiency expert, a frantic creature who's been optimizing the queue for eternity. Ayaka tries to help him fix the system, but every logical solution creates more chaos. The pen keeps nudging her forward, refusing to let her solve it properly. Finally, in frustration, she just cuts the line, breaks the rules, the domain dissolves. The pen draws a check mark. She passed. Domains to the inverted office. Pen draws her into a corporate building where up is down and meetings happen backwards. She meets the burnt top manager, not blissfully incompetent. After achieving enlightenment through failure, Ayaka is given a crisis to solve. Every corporate skill she uses makes it exponentially worse. And when she finally fails successfully by doing nothing at all, the domain dissolves. Ayaka, you're not helping me. You're torturing me with lessons I didn't ask for. The pen writes, "You asked me to reach a still point. This is the way. " Ayaka, "Your way. What about my way? " The pen writes, "Show me. " The garden of forgotten hobbies. Domain three. The pen draws her into an overgrown landscape where abandoned dreams bloom as strange plants. Ayaka finds her own forgotten dreams here. Ayaka tries to revive them all. She can optimize her life to fit everything in. The pen erases her schedules, her plans. Ayaka, let me fix this. Let me do it right. The pen writes, "You can't do everything. Ayaka, watch me. " But the more she struggles, the more the garden overgrows, choking itself. When she finally releases them, the garden becomes beautiful. Bayaka is exhausted, resentful. Domain 4, the deadline desert. The pen draws her into a vast empty space where time behaves unpredictably. She meets the timekeeper who forgot. Ayaka is given something urgent to deliver, but time speeds up and slows down randomly. Following the pen's guidance makes her miss every deadline. Ignoring it gets her stuck in time loops. She finally snaps. I'm done. I'm not paying her game anymore. She sits down in the sand, refuses to move. The pen hovers silently. The abandonment

using Balt the mango generator studio that we created, the app that we created to start generating the characters there so we can use them as reference photos. Ayaka, a perfectionist salary woman in her late 20s to early 30s, always in business attire. The trickster, a small fox-like creature with a mischievous grin, appears in puffs of smoke. The efficiency expert. Rabbit-like creature with wild eyes, multiple clipboards, frantic energy. The burntout manager. Disheveled human man who lounges peacefully despite chaos. The collector of may. Ethereal plant-like creature who tends the garden of forgotten hobbies. The timekeeper who forgot. Ethereal being with clock hands for arms. Face is serene. Okay, now let's do the pen. A uh a ball pen. I don't know if that would work cuz it's not like a people character. I don't see. Okay. Yeah, I don't think that works because it's like a character sheet specifically. That's fair. I feel like that's fair. Okay. So, for the pen itself, I'm actually just going to use Gemini for this for V1 of this app. So, create image a ballpoint pen in manga black and white style. Cool. Wait, why does this have two clips? It should not have two clips. No, it still has two clips. That's weird. Why is this the hardest thing to generate? Like, I feel like generating the characters was not even that hard, but generating like a ballpoint pen apparently is um rocket science. Wow, that wasn't so hard, was it? Reference image done. Onwards. I'm going to try one. Let's try like a random panel. Why should a Tokyo office building at dusk? Okay, I'm going to do right to left. Wow, the floor tiles beneath her feet. Let's go with this for now. Oh my gosh, if this works, that would be very interesting. Oh, hey, not bad. Can we just give the AI some credit here? Okay, good. How would you rate my drawing from a scale of 1 to 10? Maybe minus three. You can't possibly be worse than my drawing. So, I guess like how many of you guys are equal to my inability to draw? Let me know. What if I get really lazy and I don't even draw it and I just prompt it directly? I might not even have to draw. Let's prompt vault. going to create lazy mode full page generator where you only have to put in a text prompt and it'll generate the entire page of manga for you. The panels arranged too. Yeah, I wonder did it do it. Okay, let's go here. We'll put this as the character sheet art style have this and puty panels text. Fingers crossed. This looks good. Okay, there's like some mixture between the Japanese and the English, but you know, actually, I'm not even mad. Like, this looks good. Yo, I'm thinking about how the I don't have to draw anywhere. Oh my god. Okay, let me try let me try the next page as well. Tweaking a few things here and there, especially when there's multiple characters. But look, oh my gosh, it actually worked with just text prompting. Okay, so overall, this looked pretty good. But we have problems rendering the text itself. I don't think I can actually try to like prompt it better in order to make the situation better. Okay, I'm going to try this. I'm going to try to have it generate the bubbles, right? The text bubbles and then try to have it like have text directly overlaid on it. I don't know if this is going to work. — One hour later. — It did work. You can add the dialogue as like speech bubbles onto the manga pages, but it isn't the nicest user interface. It's like it takes a while for you to be able to adjust the dialogue box the way that you want it to. Also to be able to match the quality of the manga itself. I would need to be able to generate like different shapes of boxes, different styles, different fonts, which I'm pretty confident is doable, but for the V1 version, I just stuck it into Canva and you can do it so much faster. So here it is. Cue the montage. Tokyo at night. Here's the office building. Ayaka with her coffee cup going to refill her coffee. Suddenly, her she goes, "Ah! " and gets spirited away into the in between land. "Where am I? This can't be real. This is impossible. I'm dreaming. " While a shadow looms behind her. So scary. It's a giant floating pen. And she says, "Gosh, haha. A pen. Is it showing me the way out? " Trickster appears. Welcome, lost one. Who are you? What is this place? You've slipped into the in between. A world where your rules don't apply. How do I get home? Simple. Reach the still point. A place of perfect balance at the center of all this chaos. The pen will guide you there. Just follow its path and then I can go home. Perhaps, perhaps not. Who knows? All right, I'm going to let you read the rest of the manga in peace without my narration. Link is in the description. Let me know what you think in the comments. This is my debut manga.

All right, thank you so much for making it until end of this video. That was my journey of making a manga and a manga generator app in less than 24 hours. Took me 17 hours and 32 minutes to be precise. This experience has taught me so much. It's also shown me like this wider trend of being able to improve your workflows by building your own apps like vibe coding your own apps and you know if it does well you can literally like sell it as a SAS product if you wish. I really think learning how to vibe code just like unlocks so much power. I have like so much to say about this topic and how like it fits into your work streams and the tips that I have. So maybe we're overdue for a new vibe coding video. Let me know in the comments if you would like me to make one. And in the meantime, I hope you're inspired to have a go at vibe coding yourself. Let me know in the comments ideas that you want to build. And I will see you guys in the next video or live stream.