Character consistency across comic panels: how to keep the same face on every page with AI

You generate page 1. Your protagonist looks great. You generate page 14. Her face is a little different. By page 22 you can't tell if you've drawn one person or a family. This is the central failure mode of every AI comic generator, and the reason most "AI comics" people post online don't tell a coherent story — the cast literally changes shape between pages.

This post is about how to keep the same character across every comic panel with AI: what causes the drift specifically in comics, the architectural choice that helps the most (rendering a whole page in one call), and how Lumora's reference-sheet pipeline closes the remaining gaps.

If you want the general theory of character consistency in AI generation — across novels, comics and video — start with the complete guide. This post focuses on what's specific to comic pages.

Why comic panels drift even when novel illustrations don't

A novel might call for one illustration per chapter — maybe ten total in a 60,000-word book. The model has plenty of room to interpret the character because there are only ten interpretations to be consistent with.

A 24-page comic with 4 panels per page is 96 separate "renderings" of your characters. Every panel is an opportunity for the model to make a subtly different choice. Three specific things make comics harder than novel illustrations:

1. Many small faces per page. When a single panel shows your protagonist from across the room at 200 pixels of face, the model has very little canvas to work with. Small errors compound.
2. Action poses, reaction shots and extreme angles. A novel might describe the character looking out a window. A comic asks for "she lunges right while looking back over her left shoulder, mouth open mid-shout." Models that nail front-facing portraits often invent new faces under those constraints.
3. Multi-character composition. Conversation panels — two faces, mid-shot — are the most common composition in comics and the riskiest for character swap. The model sees two reference inputs and can mix them.

This is why the standard advice ("just write good prompts") fails for comics specifically. You can write the best prompt of your life and still produce inconsistent faces if the model has no anchor it must respect.

The architectural choice: render the page, not the panel

Most AI comic tools that have shipped this year generate one panel at a time, then stitch them together. It feels natural — comics are made of panels, so generate panels.

This is the wrong design for consistency. Every separate generation is a fresh chance for drift. Twelve panels means twelve dice rolls.

Lumora renders the entire page as one image. The model receives a prompt that describes the panel layout, the action and dialogue in each panel, and a single reference sheet for each character on that page. It returns one image containing all the panels laid out together. Within that single render, the model treats the character as a coherent entity — the same face appears in panel 1 and panel 4 because they were composed in the same call.