Ben's Library — Comic Production Schema

The Global 50 · v1.0

A fresh comic system for Ben's Library — deliberately not the Nifty/manga pipeline. This defines how any of the 50 prose books becomes a comic, from art generation to the finished page, in a way that is consistent across all 50 books and cheap to run.

1. The one big idea: ART and TEXT are separate layers

Every panel is built in two independent layers:

ART layer — generated by Seedream (bytedance/seedream-v4-edit, 2K). The art prompt contains no words at all ("NO text, letters, numbers or signage"). Seedream is bad at text and text baked into art can't be edited, translated, or fixed.
TEXT layer — captions and speech bubbles composited on top of the finished art at build time (HTML/PDF), as dark ink on light plates.

Why: guaranteed legibility, trivial edits, free translation for INTL editions, and no re-billing Seedream to fix a typo. This is the single most important rule.

2. House look (distinct from Nifty)

	Nifty series	Ben's Library
Style	manga / anime	painterly literary picture-book realism
Feel	pop, kinetic	illustrated-encyclopedia × Pixar lighting; luminous, dignified
Palette	bright	series palette = the site's: cream `#faf8f4`, ink `#1f2430`, vermilion `#b23b2e`, gold `#c99a2e`

Accuracy must satisfy an engineer; faces are gentle and human (no rubber/cartoon faces); every panel a distinct emotion; always a luminous readable value range so captions sit cleanly — even in night/undersea scenes.

Full art rules live in series.json → art.

3. Consistency: anchors (character sheets)

Characters must look identical across all 50 books. The mechanism:

Bootstrap once: generate a canonical anchor image for each recurring cast member and location — Maya, Ben, Charlie, Warren, Pixel, and the Library (series.json → cast/locations, anchor: fields).
Every panel feeds the relevant anchors as Seedream image_urls, so the model edits from the canonical look rather than reinventing it.
Per-book guests (Faraday, Bell, the two Steves, mine workers…) get their own anchors declared in that book's comic.json → meta.guest_cast, generated once at the start of that book.

Cast is original, inspired-by the named figures (Ben/Charlie/Warren), not photoreal likenesses — cleaner and avoids impersonation. Historical scientists are period-accurate educational illustration.

4. Data model (three files)

comics/
  series.json                      ← series bible: cast, style, palette, roster, tiers, pipeline
  schema/book.schema.json          ← JSON Schema every book file validates against
  books/<NN-slug>/comic.json       ← one book mapped: pages → panels
  books/<NN-slug>/refs/            ← generated anchor images (bootstrap output)

Hierarchy: book → pages → panels. A panel is the atomic unit (one Seedream image + its overlay text). A page arranges panels via a named layout template.

Panel fields (see schema): id, beat, setting, shot (establishing/wide/medium/close_up/insert/splash), cast[] (key + distinct expression), refs[] (anchors to feed), art_prompt (no text), aspect, overlay{captions[], bubbles[]}, credit_est.

Page layouts: cover, splash, full_bleed, two_row, three_tier, grid_2x2, big_top_two_bottom, text_plate.

books/01-apple/comic.json is the worked exemplar — cover, front matter and Chapters 1–2 are fully specced panels; Chapters 3–12 carry a page_note beat-sheet plus one hero panel each, ready to expand to full panels the same way.

5. Adapting 35k words → a comic

The prose can't all fit, so each chapter compresses to a beat sheet of key visual beats (one panel each). Standard density = ~4 beats/chapter. The manuscript's set-pieces map almost 1:1 to hero panels (hilltop fires → telegraph → Faraday → 1947 transistor → cleanroom → undersea fibre → garage → 2007 stage → globe → mine → Silicon Key). Dialogue becomes bubbles; narration becomes captions.

6. Size & cost (density tiers)

Tier	Panels/ch	Body	+Matter	Total panels	~Pages	Seedream credits*
Lean	2	24	6	30	~34	~155
Standard ✅	4	48	7	55	~46	~285
Full	6	72	8	80	~66	~415

* total_panels × 4 credits × 1.3 retry-buffer. Confirm the live rate by logging kie.ai credit before/after the first bootstrap panel. Recommended: Standard — rich enough for the literary voice, ~$1.50–2.50 of art per book. Animation (Seedance) is separate and much pricier (~14 cr/5s clip) if added later.

7. Pipeline (build steps)

bootstrap — generate cast + location anchors (once for the series) and this book's guest anchors → refs/.
gen — for each panel: compose [global style] + [art_prompt] + [cast expressions], feed refs[] as image_urls, call Seedream 2K, save art/<panel_id>.jpg. Credit-floor guard (stop < 30, fall back). Skip already-done panels (resumable).
compose — lay panels onto pages per layout, overlay caption plates + speech bubbles (text layer).
build — emit a web reader (like the prose reader, under /comics/<slug>/) and a print PDF.
qa — render pages and check legibility (no text-on-text, captions on light plates) before shipping.

Steps 1–2 are the only ones that cost credits and are fully resumable.

8. Open decisions (need your call before build)

Density — Standard (~46pp) recommended. Lean or Full instead?
Aspect — landscape 16:9 hero panels (screen-friendly) vs portrait (print-book-friendly). Default: landscape, with portrait splashes.
Cast likeness — original inspired-by characters (recommended) vs closer to the real Graham/Munger/Buffett faces.
Output first — web reader, print PDF, or both. Default: both.
Build it — approve this schema and I'll write the pipeline scripts + run bootstrap on Book 1's anchors as the pilot.