My daughters and I do a family writing contest each year. We’re all 3 writers — or would-be writers, depending on your point of view — and we’re all competitive. We write, and our family judges. A winner is declared.

This past year we decided to go big. Longer works were the goal. We each wanted to write something we could spend a substantial part of the year working on.

Z settled on an epic YA fantasy romance novel. W chose a feature-length screenplay. I picked a comic book series.

I wrote the series bible for what could be a 12 issue mini series or a graphic novel. I did chapter/issue break downs, character sheets. Anything I might need as plot and backstory. Then I wrote the full script for the first issue.

Now bear in mind, the girls are doing their own long works and this is a competition. I’m competing with the judges’ grand babies and nieces. It’s not a fair fight. I realize I need to kick things up a notch.

So I decided — I would write and draw the first issue of the comic as my submission piece.

Here’s where it gets interesting. I plugged my panel descriptions from my full script into an AI art generator. Through many, many hours of trial and error, I got the model to generate reference images for my story. “References images,” is an important phrase here.

You see, I care deeply about comics and art. I didn’t want to use AI to copy another artist or make some generic computer generated comic. But I really wanted to do this comic myself. Remember — family writing competition. I need wow points.

So I took the AI generated art, put it all together in reference frames within Procreate on my iPad, and used what little art skill I have to draw, ink, color, and letter each page, doing my best to act like a real comic creator.

I did have an art style in mind. The story is a family-friendly Southern Gothic superhero tale. That’s a lot, I know, but picture Flannery O’Connor meets Marvel Comics. I did my best to put the pages together with this style in mind, trying to stay true to my story bible.

This took forever. I only got 3 pages done. But I’m proud of having done all this even if I didn’t finish it or win the family writing contest. (W’s screenplay was the winner.)

That’s the backstory. Here’s the 3 pages I did for my comic. Behold, HARTWELL, a Southern Gothic family drama comic.

HARTWELL, Chapter 1, Page 1

HARTWELL, Chapter 1, Page 2

HARTWELL, Chapter 1, Page 3