Works: for big projects like an animated comic

Some things do not fit in one conversation. An animated comic has dozens or hundreds of panels, several episodes, and a whole cast of characters. You settle what the lead looks like today and come back three days later to keep drawing — and if all of that only lives inside one chat, the next chat cannot find it.

A work exists for exactly this. It sits alongside apps, with its own entry in your profile, but it is not something you ship: no domain, no deployment, no releases. It holds the creative material itself and nothing else.

When you get one

Ask in a chat for an animated comic. The assistant talks the idea through with you first, then creates a work, and from that point every drawing, reference sheet and bit of progress lives inside it.

The reverse is also true: small jobs do not need a work. A few illustrations or a fifteen-second clip are faster asked for directly in a chat. A work earns its keep once there is more material than you can keep track of, once it spans several days, and once there is an episode or chapter structure to it.

What the list looks like

The Works entry in your profile shows a row of cards, just like Apps: a cover image, the name, the category, and where it stands — "Step 3 of 7 · Reference sheets". You do not upload the cover yourself; the first reference image you make becomes it.

What is inside

Open a work and you get four tabs, listed down the left-hand side. Everything inside is laid out field by field rather than as one block of text — the concept, the story, each episode and each panel get their own place, reference sheets are a wall of cards with their portraits, the storyboard is grouped by episode as thumbnails, and finished films play right on the page. The moment you pick a category, what goes in is settled, so the fields you see stay the same from one work to the next.

Reference sheets matter most. They hold more than a portrait — they hold a written description that pins the character down, and that is what makes the lead in episode seven the same person as in episode one. It is also where AI-generated serial content most often falls apart.

One sheet shows one character. If the picture you hand over is a group photo, the assistant crops that one character out before building the sheet rather than using the whole shot — otherwise every panel drawn from it would keep pulling the second person into frame.

The storyboard is grouped by episode. Each episode is a group of thumbnails, so you can see at a glance how it turned out; click a panel and its details open in a dialog — the picture, the lines, what that panel has to get across — with buttons to step to the previous or next one. When there are a lot of episodes, click a heading to fold the ones you have already been through.

One step at a time, and it checks with you

Making an animated comic runs roughly like this:

Talk through the idea → write the outline → build the character and scene sheets → write the storyboard and dialogue → draw the panels → record the voices → assemble the film.

The three bold steps each stop and ask whether you are happy. There is a reason for that order: the earlier a step, the cheaper it is. An outline is a few paragraphs and costs nothing to rewrite ten times. A character sheet is a single image, a few cents. Saying "that is not my lead" after a hundred panels are drawn is the expensive version.

So being picky early pays off more than anywhere else. You do not need any jargon for it — "he does not look right", "this part drags" is enough.

Change one thing without redoing everything

This is the real difference between a work and simply generating it all again.

Say you want the lead's hair colour changed. The assistant first tells you which panels that touches — "6 panels get redrawn, the other 14 stay as they are" — and only redraws those six once you agree. Nothing you already approved gets thrown away.

Revising one episode's plot works the same way: only that episode is affected.

Any chat can pick it up

A work belongs to your account, not to a conversation. Three days later, start a new chat, type @ and pick the work: the assistant reads its progress, its reference sheets and the decisions you made before carrying on. You do not have to explain any of it twice.

Dialogue and voices

Dialogue is written during the storyboard step; the voices are recorded after the panels are drawn. That order cannot be swapped — how long a line takes to say is what decides how long its panel stays on screen. Draw first and add lines later and you end up with three seconds of picture against seven seconds of speech, which means redoing the timing.

Dialogue is delivered as voice-over plus subtitles; there are no speech bubbles drawn into the panels.

What you can make today

The first release covers animated comics only. Other categories with different structures — novels, short dramas — will follow.