Ever imagined turning your OC into a character with their own manga storyline? With an AI manga generator, you can bring your ideas to life through individual panels or a complete manga page. Still, planning scenes and making the story flow naturally can take some work.
In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to make manga pages with AI using PixAI and its latest anime-focused model, Tsubaki.3. From mapping out scenes to refining details and editing your image, follow along and create your own manga!
What Kind of Manga Can You Make with Tsubaki.3 AI Manga Generator?
Let’s turn an action scene into a four-panel manga using AI. Our story features a katana-wielding female OC who encounters a monster on her school’s rooftop under the night sky. We’ll use two characters, concise dialogue, and varied panel compositions to build the sequence, as shown here:
With the Tsubaki.3 model, Smart Reference, Quality Stokes LoRA, and PixAI Reference Pro, we’ll explore how to transform an OC’s story into a short manga sequence like this.
Prepare Your Manga Storyline Before Image Generation
Before generating your manga, decide on the creative direction you want to follow. Here’s how I planned the scene for this tutorial. Consider the storyline, genre, characters, and visual style first. Thinking about everything at once can feel overwhelming, so it helps to organize your ideas into a simple list:
Genre: Action
Setting: Abandoned Village
Characters: Dark-haired female student OC, muscular large-claw monster
Visual Style: Four-panel Japanese manga style, black and white with grayscale shading, left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading direction
Story: A supernatural female OC student with a katana encounters a monster in an abandoned village.
Once you’ve outlined these key elements, break the storyline into individual actions for each panel:
Panel 1: The OC encounters the monster.
Panel 2: The monster charges toward the OC.
Panel 3: OC is Overpowered.
Panel 4: OC ready for a counterattack.
How to Write an AI Manga Prompt for Tsubaki.3
Once you’ve organized all the details, putting together your prompt becomes much easier. Since this manga includes multiple scenes and detailed actions, using natural language instead of relying solely on tags can help communicate your ideas. You can also explore other ways to write a prompt to find the approach that suits you best.
Here’s the prompt:
“Create a four-panel vertical manga page in dynamic Japanese manga style, with detailed anime characters, expressive faces, strong black ink linework, screentones, dramatic shadows, speed lines, and cinematic action framing. Use black-and-white with subtle grayscale shading. Traditional manga reading direction, right-to-left and top-to-bottom. The setting is an abandoned village at dusk, with ruined wooden houses, broken carts, debris, cracked roads, dust, and light fog. Keep the same mature female OC and the same monster consistent across all panels. The OC has the same hairstyle, hair color, eyes, outfit, weapon, and proportions throughout. The monster is much larger than her, muscular and intimidating, with long arms, large claws, and sharp teeth. Panel 1: notices the monster standing at a distance between the ruined houses. No dialogue. Panel 2: The monster suddenly charges toward her. raises her weapon and confidently faces the attack. Add strong motion lines and flying debris. OC: “Bring it!” Panel 3: The monster’s claw crashes against her weapon. OC struggles to block it as the ground cracks beneath her. Show a powerful impact with dust and debris. No dialogue. Panel 4: The OC rises from the dust, gripping her weapon and preparing to fight back. The monster watches from a distance. Give a determined expression. OC: “I’m not done yet.” Exactly four panels, no extra characters, no extra dialogue, and maintain consistent character and environment designs throughout.”
I started with the overall page layout and art direction, then described the actions and dialogue for each panel. This helps establish how the individual scenes should connect instead of treating them as separate images. The key is to be specific about character movements, framing, and the visual details you want to see.
For my example, I replaced the OC’s appearance description with @image1 because I used a character reference image during generation. You can do the same if you already have a reference for your OC. If you’re working entirely from text, describe the character’s appearance clearly and identify who performs each action or delivers each line of dialogue.
Check the Story Flow Upon First Generation
Before we start generating, I’ll show you the character reference image for my OC, along with the settings used to create the manga panels.
The OC reference image was created with Tsubaki.3 and the Quality Strokes LoRA. I then opened Smart Reference and entered the manga panel prompt, replacing the OC’s name or description with @image1 to show which character performs the actions. This is how the prompt looked:
Now, let’s see the initial manga panel image!
Let’s look at the storyline first. At first glance, the model generated the main scenes from each panel. We got the encounter, the monster’s charge, and the moment the OC gets overpowered. However, the fourth panel didn’t fully follow the prompt. The expression and katana grip look right, but the OC should be rising from the dust.
The model also generated a four-panel manga page, but it didn’t follow the right-to-left reading direction, as the panels were arranged vertically. The image also used muted warm and cool colors, even though we specified black and white with gray shading. Still, the characters and viewing angles turned out well.
The biggest strength is its ability to structure the storyline. It understood the story’s concept and how each scene connects to the next. Even without reading the prompt, you can understand what the short manga is about. Some adjustments to the color palette and specific actions may be needed, but overall, the result was good.
Maintain Character and Detail Consistency Across Manga Panels
Let’s check how consistently the model rendered our OC across all four panels.
Replacing the OC’s description with @image1 seems to have helped maintain her appearance. Even in the black-and-gray output, her main features and outfit stayed true to the reference image. Her long black hair and katana also look consistent. However, the third and fourth panels still need some adjustments. You can use Smart Reference to guide the prompt, or try another method to make your character consistent.
In the third panel, the intended action is “the monster claw clashes against her weapon,” but the result looks more like a large wooden plank is positioned between them. In the fourth panel, our OC should be rising from the dust while gripping her weapon and preparing to counterattack. Instead, she’s already standing and aiming to attack. We should also adjust the panel composition to follow the right-to-left reading direction.
Let’s try editing these details with Tsubaki.3 using this prompt:
“Remove the plank of wood in between the female OC and the monster claw in Panel 3; the monster claw should clash with the katana and female OC. Change the female OC pose in Panel 4; she should be rising from the dust while gripping her katana. Change the panel composition, make it vertical: two panels at the top and two panels at the bottom. The reading direction should be from right to left. Don’t change characters. Don’t change actions.”
Now, that’s much better! We removed the plank-like object from the third panel and adjusted the OC’s pose in the fourth without losing her key visual features. We also changed the panel layout to follow the intended right-to-left, top-to-bottom reading direction.
Create Manga Dialogue with Clear Speech Bubbles
Tsubaki.3 has already done a good job with dialogue accuracy. The text is spelled correctly and appears in the intended panels. However, a few small adjustments could help the dialogue blend more naturally with the rest of the manga.
Let’s refine the third speech bubble by adding a sharp tail pointing toward the OC and moving it slightly inward. We’ll also add sound effects (SFX) to the other panels to give the page a more authentic manga feel.
Let’s use this prompt:
“Place the first panel's jagged text bubble near the upper right area and create a bubble tail pointing toward the female OC. On the second panel, create a sound effect text: "GRRR..." near the monster's head. Use large, rough, irregular manga-style lettering with jagged edges. On the fourth panel, create a sound effect text: "SLASH!" with sharp jagged lettering following the direction of the sword swing. Do not place it inside a speech bubble.”
Polish the Manga Page in PixAI Studio
We don’t have to stop at the minor edits we made earlier. We can experiment further with our short manga by making two consecutive edits. For this, we’ll need a workspace where we can organize the panels and refine each scene. Let’s continue the creative process by using PixAI Studio.
For the first edit, I want to completely change the fourth panel. Instead of showing our female OC rising from the dust, we’ll use an extreme close-up of her gripping her katana, as if she’s about to unleash her strongest attack.
Here’s the prompt I’ll use:
“Keep all the panels. Change the third panel to an extreme close-up scene of the female character. She's holding her sword, eyes closed; keep the bubble text. She's getting ready to attack. Don't include the monster.”
For our second edit, we’ll rework the manga’s colors, mood, environment, and panel composition. The original layout feels a bit static, so let’s make the scenes more dynamic and visually engaging. This time, we’ll set the encounter on a school rooftop beneath the moon, using muted blue tones and strategic highlights to establish a new atmosphere.
Let’s try this prompt:
“Open the female OC’s eyes in the third panel. Change the background to a Japanese School rooftop across each panel. A big moon behind them. Change the color palette to a dark rooftop at night with a deep midnight blue sky, charcoal shadows, cool blue-grey moonlight, and pale blue highlights. Bright blue light from the moon. Cinematic. Change the panel composition to a 4-panel asymmetrical tilted layout, slanted borders, no straight grid, dynamic overlapping panels, dramatic perspective.”
I uploaded the original manga page, set up two image nodes, and entered the prompts while keeping the existing LoRAs unchanged. For these edits, I used PixAI Reference Pro to refine the image. This lets me modify specific panels while keeping the character consistent and avoiding unwanted changes to other elements.
Both edits turned out well! The first edit successfully changed the third panel to an extreme close-up of the OC while keeping the speech bubble and other panels intact. The second edit also incorporated the requested changes, capturing the new panel compositions without affecting the remaining scenes. Despite the change in setting, the characters and their actions stayed consistent.
Common AI Manga Issues and How We Addressed Them
We encountered a few minor issues during the creative process, so let’s review what went wrong and which edits helped resolve them.
The first issue was the unwanted plank-like object in the third panel. This may have resulted from the brief instruction in our initial prompt: “Panel 3: The monster’s claw crashes against her weapon.” The model may have interpreted the weapon or the clash incorrectly. To fix this, we used a more specific edit prompt: “Remove the plank of wood in between the female OC and the monster claw in Panel 3; the monster claw should clash with the katana and female OC.” This worked well.
The second issue was the OC’s pose in the fourth panel. Our original prompt said: “Panel 4: The OC rises from the dust, gripping her weapon and preparing to fight back.” However, the generated image didn’t clearly show her rising from the dust. We corrected this with a more direct instruction: “Change the female OC pose in Panel 4; she should be rising from the dust while gripping her katana.”
Both examples show how specific instructions can produce more accurate results than general descriptions. Instead of using a broad term like “weapon,” naming the “katana” makes the intended object clearer. Likewise, separating the action of rising from the dust and gripping the weapon from the additional detail about preparing to fight back can help the model understand the intended pose. We can describe the main action in one clear sentence, then add the fighting stance in the next.
Can Tsubaki.3 Generate Complete Manga Pages?
If you’re considering Tsubaki.3 as an AI manga generator, this tutorial gives you an idea of what it can do. It captured the storyline well and turned our prompt and selected LoRAs into a short manga page. A few details still needed adjustments, including the unwanted object in one panel and an incorrect OC pose. Even so, the speech bubbles were accurate, the character’s appearance stayed consistent, and the initial panel layout was a good foundation to build on.
When creating your own manga panels, pay attention to the composition and how you describe each scene. Longer prompts don’t always lead to better results. Focus on giving clear, specific instructions so the model can better understand the actions and details you want.
With PixAI and the Tsubaki.3 model, you can explore different ideas, from one-shot manga and manga trailers to original short scenes. Experiment with various LoRAs and recipes, then use sequential edits to refine your manga page.
