Shortbread's 2023 bet: prompt-to-page AI comics with an editor, launched to 235 HN points

Shortbread is a browser tool that turns a text prompt into a comic or manga page. GPT-3.5 Turbo writes the script — layout, characters, scene, Stable Diffusion prompts and dialogue — while Stable Diffusion 1.5 servers on GCP draw one large image per page that is then cropped into panels, a trick borrowed from Reddit experiments to keep characters roughly consistent. Users finish the page in an editor the team built from scratch, composing panels, speech bubbles and text and republishing the result "like a webpage".

Fengjiao Peng, Shortbread's founder and chief engineer and a former webtoon artist, built the product because AI had made images easy but comics still demanded the whole creator pipeline. The bet: a 60%-complete generated page plus full editing control beats both a blank canvas and raw text-to-image — "The onboarding process helps you kick start a page from 60%, then you can use your creativity to bring it to 1000% in a fully-controllable editor." The launch was friction-free — no sign-in, no pricing — and asked whether the project was bootstrapped or YC-backed, Peng answered "we are YC".

The Show HN on 2023-10-06 drew 235 points and 57 comments, with users generating their own strips and traffic heavy enough that Peng had to spin up more GPU servers mid-launch. The consistent feedback was the unsolved core problem — characters drifting between panels — which Peng acknowledged openly, pointing to regeneration, future inpainting and ControlNet as the path. The reviewed material ends on launch day; it records no funding amount, revenue or later status.