I’ve appended a conversation I just had with ChatGPT. What’s going on should be self-evident from the dialog. Now imagine what you could do. You could, for example, expand the story to six panels by adding one at the beginning to show the tsunami developing and one just before the end when the tsunami is in retreat, but the sun hasn’t yet come out. Why not make it eight panels? Or you could add other incidents, the boy confronts a volcano, a raging bull, and so forth. Or you can make it about a little girl instead. A different race.
Or a different visual style. When you read the dialog you’ll see that I said nothing about visual style. I could have specified anime style, in the manner of Cardcaptor Sakura, or Warner Brothers, Wylie Coyote. Whatever you want. I have no idea how accurately ChatGPT would mimic those styles, or whether it would balk at such imitation because it guidelines don’t permit it. But it wouldn’t hurt to ask.
Come to think of it, if I knew that the story was being created for a specific child, I’d upload a photo of the child to ChatGPT and as it to model the protagonist on that child. Cartoons being what they are, regardless of the particular style, much detail will be lost. But general body type, facial shape, and coloring – complexion, eyes, hair, not to mention clothing – should survive. There’s a reasonable chance that the child would recognize themselves in the resulting comic.
I wouldn’t say that anything is possible. But, yes, a lot certainly is.
* * * * *
Some years ago I was invited to a birthday party for a four-year-old girl, whom I knew. What was I going to get her? I knew that she’d been talking a lot about monsters recently, so I decided to write a little book for her, “Valerie and the Monsters.”
In this story a little girl named “Valerie” – the four-year-old’s name – was given a magic pencil. Whenever she came across a monster all she had to do was draw a picture of it with the magic pencil and she’d tame the monster. So, in the book I drew pictures of the monsters, wacky semi-funny monsters. I left the facing pages blank so that Valerie could use her pencil to draw a picture of the monster.
When her mother read the story to her at the birthday party she wanted to draw the pictures. But of course her mother didn’t let her. Still, when the story was over, Valerie went around and hugged everyone in the room.
I’m thinking of something similar. I want to make a comic book with a series of four panel episodes. In the first panel a little boy is confronted with a large and frightening “monster,” broadly understood. In the second panel the monster tells the boy, “Guess my name or I will harm you, or your friends and relatives.” In the third panel the boy stands tall and says, “You name is...” And he says the name. In the final panel the monster is chastened and the boy is triumphant.
Let’s try one. In this one the monster is a tsunami. In the first panel we see a little boy standing on the beach in the center of the panel. There’s a rocky hillside behind him. In front of him there’s a large tsunami wave looming high over him, as high as the hillside behind him. He’s cowering down and looking up the way. The sky is cloudy and overcast, maybe with a lightning bolt in the distance.
Now let’s draw the second panel. We see a word balloon at the top of the wave. It’s saying, “Guess my name or I’ll drown you.”
OK, the third panel. The boy is standing tall, a look of defiance on his face. He says, “tsu...tsu...tsu, tsunami!”
In the forth panel the sun has come out, the sky is bright, and the boy is standing tall on a surfboard atop the tsunami wave.
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