Firn for comics & manga
From world bible to paneled page.
You know the story. What eats the months is the rest of it: keeping a cast recognizable across a hundred panels, laying out pages that actually read, and prepping files that don't blow up at the printer.
Firn is a narrative studio that composes real pages (US comic left-to-right or manga right-to-left, at print resolution) from one living world bible, then exports the archive your readers and printers already expect.
Pages are built at print size from the start — US comic and manga B5, both at 300 DPI — so what you see on screen is what a printer would set. No upscaling a web-sized image and hoping.
Free to start. Full commercial rights. CBZ, PDF/X, and fixed-layout EPUB export are premium.
Package what readers already open
A CBZ that opens in every comic reader.
A CBZ is just your pages in order, plus a small file that tells a comic app what it is holding — every reader understands it. Firn fills that in from your story, so the file already knows its own title, series, page count and which way it reads:
- CBZ: your pages in order, plus the details a comic library sorts by
- PDF/X-1a for print: CMYK, 300 DPI, bleed marks, the file a print shop accepts without a back-and-forth
- Fixed-layout EPUB: your pages, with manga marked as right-to-left, so digital stores open the book from the correct side
More indie comics die on file preparation than on anything else. Firn hands the whole thing over already labelled and sized — you check it, you publish it.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ComicInfo>
<Title>The Frost Orchard</Title>
<Series>The Glass Orchard</Series>
<Number>1</Number>
<PageCount>24</PageCount>
<LanguageISO>en</LanguageISO>
<Manga>YesAndRightToLeft</Manga>
<Genre>Fantasy</Genre>
<!-- one page per image, in reading order -->
<Pages>
<Page Image="0" Type="FrontCover" />
<Page Image="1" Type="Story" />
<Page Image="2" Type="Story" />
</Pages>
</ComicInfo>Pages that read
Composed at print size, panel by panel.
The Designer picks a layout template and composes the page (art in each panel, dialogue placed, borders drawn), running your chapter prose through scene beats to panel art to a finished, composited page. You approve the result, not a raw prompt.
US comic, left-to-right
Pages at 2063×3150px @ 300 DPI, six to nine panels, reading left-to-right with proper gutters: the classic single-issue page a shop or an Artist Alley table expects.
Manga B5, right-to-left
Pages at 2140×3024px @ 300 DPI, four to six panels, reading right-to-left with a screentone treatment, laid out the way manga is actually read, not a flipped comic page.
Nine page templates
Nine page layouts to start from — five comic, four manga — and Firn draws the rest onto them: speech bubbles in five shapes, caption boxes, sound effects, and the panel borders themselves.
One canon, a hundred panels
The same character, panel after panel.
This is where AI art usually falls apart: ask for the same face twice and you get two people. Firn keeps a set of reference images for each character and draws from them every time — and if a face starts wandering over a long book, it notices and pulls it back.
One art direction
Every panel is drawn to one agreed look — the same palette, the same way of framing a shot — so page one and page two hundred belong to the same book.
Rename once, everywhere
Your characters, places and objects live in one place, and the panels point at them rather than at a name someone typed. Rename someone once and every panel they appear in follows.
The Editor
The one nobody else has. Continuity checks catch the breaks a long series actually makes (the hair color that drifted, the item that vanished a chapter early) before they reach the printed page.
You are the artist. Say so.
Comic and manga readers are sharp about AI, and platforms increasingly ask you to disclose it. Firn keeps an activity ledger of crew work in the studio, so you can answer honestly about what was drafted, directed, and rejected: disclosure as a practice, not a confession.
And Firn is an assistant, not a generator: the Storyteller and Illustrator propose, and nothing lands without your sign-off at the gate between stages. If you want the crew for planning and continuity only, that line is yours to draw.
Same world, different stage
Paced for the page here. Paced for the thumb next door.
A webtoon is the same story re-paced for scrolling — the cast and the continuity you already built carry straight over. See Firn for webtoons, or browse every format that opens from the same world.