Panel: Building an AI Comic Engine Around the Visual Grid

Panel turns static comics into animated stories with game mechanics. It is a grid-based and AI-assisted engine and editor. It transforms a static page into a structured system of panels, media layers, dialogue bubbles, animations, loops, and reader-triggered interactions.

In the demo, I’ll show the current working prototype: the board/canvas view, panel inspector, visual grid editing, media layers, panel-level animation and interaction controls, the animated outline and dialogue system.

I’ll also show the first AI layer: generating static images directly into the grid, with support for character/style consistency and reference-based generation. The important part is the UX and how the generated asset lands inside an editable structure.

I’ll explain how the system is built around a DOM/React-based visual grid, how GSAP animation and interaction are layered on top of it, and how this structure can evolve into a more advanced AI-native workflow: video generation, layout/story assistance, and eventually an agentic layer that can understand user intent and orchestrate editing steps.