ComicForge has launched a web app that turns a written story into a finished comic book. You paste the text, choose one of 29 languages, one of eight art styles and a length between 2 and 40 pages, and the service sends back every page drawn, the cover designed and the speech balloons lettered. The site at comicforge.space sums itself up in one line: “A story goes in. A comic book comes out.” Its domain was registered on 3 September 2026, and the build we loaded is dated 10 September.
We found no press release, launch post or news coverage behind this launch, and the product names no company, founder or legal owner. So this report is built from what ComicForge itself publishes: the price catalogue its front page loads for every visitor, the in-app guide, the six demo books on its front-page shelf and the JavaScript it serves to browsers. We read all of it on 11 September 2026. Every price, limit and quotation below comes from those files.
Three findings stand out. ComicForge charges by the page, from $5.00 a page in its smallest pack down to $1.50 in its largest. Every one of the six demo books on its front page publishes the full story it was made from, not just the pictures. And the name is crowded: at least six other comic generators already call themselves ComicForge. For the wider field, see our reports on ComicInk and Makiverse, and our AI models and tools hub.
Table of contents
- What ComicForge Launched, and When It Went Live
- How ComicForge Pay-by-the-Page Pricing Works
- Eight Art Styles, 29 Languages and Three Drawing Hands
- Photographs of Real People in ComicForge Books
- Lettering, Fix Detail and Redraw: Repairing a Page
- House Rules, Refusals and the Family-Safe Setting
- Writing a Story the App Can Draw
- Sharing, Exporting and the ComicForge Front Page
- What ComicForge Promises About Your Stories
- Six Other ComicForges and the Name Problem
- Who Should Try ComicForge, and Who Should Wait
- Frequently Asked Questions About ComicForge
- References and Further Reading
What ComicForge Launched, and When It Went Live
A story goes in, a comic book comes out
ComicForge is a single-purpose web app. You sign in with Google or an email address, paste a story into one box, set a handful of options and press “Make the book”. The guide says a book “usually takes between ten minutes and an hour”, arrives whole rather than page by page, and keeps going if you close the browser. When it is done you can read it in a page-turning viewer, share it with one link, or export it as a PDF and a CBZ file.
The front page makes three promises in a row: “Every page drawn, the cover designed, all of it lettered in the language you picked.” Its footer adds a fourth: “Your stories stay yours.” Behind those screens the browser calls at least 20 server functions, covering books, drafts, page corrections, lettering, sharing, exporting, payments and feedback. There are no templates, no panel editor and no drawing tools. Apart from optional photographs and one line of rules, the story is the only thing you give ComicForge to work from.
The launch timeline in six timestamps
The public records let us date the launch closely, even without an announcement.
| Date (UTC) | What happened | Where it is recorded |
|---|---|---|
| 3 Sep 2026, 06:01 | comicforge.space domain registered | RDAP domain record |
| 3 Sep 2026 | First two TLS certificates issued for the domain | Certificate Transparency logs |
| 4 Sep 2026, 03:32 | First demo book captured for the front-page shelf | Public showcase record |
| 6 Sep 2026, 03:57 | Sixth demo book added; shelf last updated | Public showcase record |
| 8 Sep 2026 | Domain record last changed | RDAP domain record |
| 10 Sep 2026, 02:51 | Current front-end build published | HTTP Last-Modified header |
The first demo book was captured 21 hours and 31 minutes after the domain was registered, and the shelf filled over the following two days. No public web archive has caught up yet: the Wayback Machine holds no snapshot of comicforge.space. By the time we checked, ComicForge was under nine days old.
Built on Firebase, paid through Stripe
The served code shows the stack plainly. Sign-in uses Firebase Authentication, books and accounts live in a Firestore database, artwork sits in Firebase storage, and the work runs as callable Cloud Functions in Google’s us-central1 region. Buying credits hands you to a Stripe Checkout page, and credits land “the moment the payment clears”.
Prices are not something the operator can change on a whim. The admin console says so in as many words: “Changing a price is a code change — functions/src/packs.js — on purpose.” The same console has a panel for payment events from Stripe. When it is empty it reads: “Stripe has not called yet. Until the webhook is wired up, nothing here will fill in.” That is placeholder text for an empty panel, so it tells us nothing about how many people have paid.
What we could not find
We found no press release, launch post or directory listing for ComicForge. Google News and Bing News return no stories for the name, Hacker News has no submission, and neither Product Hunt nor AIxploria has a page at the obvious address. The app names no company, founder, registered address or contact email. Its Contact page is a form that “goes straight to the inbox, not to a queue”, with a promise that “one person reads this, and that person answers”.
The shipped code contains no terms of service, no privacy policy, no licence terms and no copyright statement. That absence matters for a service that asks for manuscripts and family photographs, and we return to it below. It also means the launch date is ours, reconstructed from public records, not one ComicForge has stated.
How ComicForge Pay-by-the-Page Pricing Works
ComicForge sells credits, and books spend them. The front page puts the model in four words: “Pay by the page.” A page costs 10 credits at the standard settings, “Credits do not expire”, and “New accounts start with enough for a couple of pages, to see how it comes out.” The live catalogue lists four packs.
Four credit packs, four prices per page
| Pack | Price | Credits | Standard pages | Per page | Per credit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sampler | $25 | 50 | 5 | $5.00 | $0.50 |
| Author (marked popular) | $120 | 300 | 30 | $4.00 | $0.40 |
| Studio | $200 | 1,000 | 100 | $2.00 | $0.20 |
| Press | $300 | 2,000 | 200 | $1.50 | $0.15 |
The Author pack is sold as “Thirty pages, at a fifth off”, and the arithmetic holds: $4.00 is 20% below the Sampler’s $5.00. The deeper cuts sit higher up. A Studio page costs 60% less than a Sampler page, and a Press page 70% less, “at the best rate there is”. Prices are in US dollars only, the catalogue carries no tax information, and there is no subscription.
The pay-per-output model is common in this market. Anyvids, which we covered this week, also bills in credits. What sets ComicForge apart is that the unit is a finished comic page rather than seconds of video or a single image.
What moves the price: resolution and the drawing hand
Two settings multiply the 10-credit base. The first is resolution. Draft (1K) and Standard (2K) cost the same, and Print (4K) costs 1.2 times as much. The second is what ComicForge calls the rendering, described in the guide as “which hand draws the book”. Lumen costs 1 times the base, Meridian 1.5 times and Cinnabar 2 times. Stacked together, one page costs anything from 10 to 24 credits.
| Drawing hand | Draft or Standard | Print (4K) | How the catalogue describes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lumen (default) | 10 credits | 12 credits | “The quickest to arrive and the least it can cost.” |
| Meridian | 15 credits | 18 credits | “Slower and dearer” — faces, hats and clothing “hold together more tightly” |
| Cinnabar | 20 credits | 24 credits | “A different hand altogether”, surest with an attached photograph of a face |
Charged only for the pages that arrive
The page slider sets a ceiling on the price, not a promise of length. The app works out a quote when you press the button, holds that many credits, and settles when the book is finished. The guide spells out the rules. If the story needs more pages than you asked for, “they are drawn anyway and cost you nothing”. If it needs fewer, “you are charged only for the pages that arrive”. A book that could not be started is refunded.
Your credit history shows each step as its own line: Bought, Book started, Returned, Correction and Drawn again. The guide also lists what never costs anything: “Drafts, lettering, choosing between versions, sharing and exporting: free.” For a pay-per-page service, that is a clean set of rules. What no page says is whether unused credits can ever be refunded as cash.
What a real ComicForge book costs
The table below converts credits into dollars at each pack’s rate per credit. It uses the default Standard resolution unless it says Print.
| Book | Credits | Sampler rate | Author rate | Studio rate | Press rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shortest book: 2 pages, Lumen | 20 | $10.00 | $8.00 | $4.00 | $3.00 |
| Default book: 8 pages, Lumen | 80 | $40.00 | $32.00 | $16.00 | $12.00 |
| 15 pages, Lumen (longest demo book) | 150 | $75.00 | $60.00 | $30.00 | $22.50 |
| 40 pages, Lumen (the maximum) | 400 | $200.00 | $160.00 | $80.00 | $60.00 |
| 40 pages, Cinnabar at Print | 960 | $480.00 | $384.00 | $192.00 | $144.00 |
Packs are sold whole, so the cash you hand over is not the same as those rates. The cheapest way to buy exactly 400 credits is one Author pack plus two Sampler packs, for $170. One Studio pack costs $200 but leaves 600 credits for the next book. A maximum-length Cinnabar book at Print needs 960 credits, and a single Studio pack covers it with 40 to spare.
The Sampler pack does not cover the default book
The New book screen opens at eight pages, the 2:3 album shape, Standard resolution and the Lumen hand. That comes to 80 credits. The Sampler pack holds 50. A first-time buyer who picks the cheapest pack and keeps the defaults will see the cost marked short and a “Buy credits” button, unless the welcome credits close the gap. ComicForge does not say how many welcome credits it grants, and its admin settings allow anything from 0 to 500. Two Sampler packs, $50 for 100 credits, cover the default book with 20 credits left.
Eight Art Styles, 29 Languages and Three Drawing Hands
Every book is set up on one screen. This table collects every option the catalogue offers, with its default and its effect on the price.
| Setting | Options | Default | Effect on price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Art style | 8 styles | Franco-Belgian Ligne Claire | None |
| Language of the book | 29, five of them right to left | English | None |
| Pages | 2 to 40, “the story decides in the end” | 8 | 10 credits a page at base |
| Shape | 10 aspect ratios, from 1:1 to 21:9 | 2:3 album | None |
| Resolution | Draft 1K, Standard 2K, Print 4K | Standard 2K | Print costs 1.2 times as much |
| Drawing hand | Lumen, Meridian, Cinnabar | Lumen | 1, 1.5 or 2 times |
| House rules | General, Family-safe | General | None |
| Reference photographs | 0 to 12, JPEG or PNG, under 15 MB each | None | None |
The eight styles
Each style is fixed for the whole book. “A different style is a different book,” the guide says, and it cannot be changed afterwards. The catalogue lists eight, each with two sample images, and the default is Franco-Belgian ligne claire, the clean-line European album style.
| Style | How the catalogue describes it |
|---|---|
| Golden-Age Adventure | Vintage newsprint superhero comics — bold outlines, primary colours, halftone dots. |
| Gothic Indie Graphic Novel | Gothic indie ink and wash — scratchy line, washed-out colour, candlelit gloom. |
| Franco-Belgian Ligne Claire | Clean European album art — even ink lines, flat colour, bright and readable. |
| Japanese Manga | Black-and-white Japanese manga — fine ink lines, screentone shading, big feeling. |
| Modern Superhero Action | Modern superhero action — rendered digital colour, cinematic light, real impact. |
| Ink Noir | High-contrast black and white — deep shadow, hard light, rain-slicked drama. |
| Painted Graphic Novel | Painted graphic-novel artwork — soft edges, rich light, cinematic mood. |
| Sunday Strip Humor | Warm newspaper-strip cartooning — round shapes, gentle humour, sunny colour. |
Every style name describes a genre or a period, never a named artist. That sets comicforge.space apart from two of its namesakes, which sell styles named after specific manga creators. One caution, though. The preview image the site sends to chat apps and social feeds includes ligne claire panels of a quiffed, ginger-haired boy in a blue jumper beside a man in a bowler hat. Those figures closely resemble Hergé’s Tintin and one of his detectives, Thomson and Thompson. A style is not a character, and anyone making books for sale should keep the two apart.
29 languages, five of them right to left
The book is lettered in the language you pick, and your story can be written in another. “The story does not have to be in the language you want the book lettered in,” the guide says. Five of the 29 languages read right to left: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu and Yiddish. For those, the whole book turns the other way: “the pages, the panels and the balloons all reverse”. The page-turning direction carries into the exports too.
The other 24 are Bengali, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. The choice applies to the book only: the app’s own screens and guide are written in English.
Lumen, Meridian and Cinnabar
ComicForge never says which image models draw its books. The words “Gemini”, “Imagen”, “OpenAI” and “Flux” do not appear in its code, and the catalogue names three house brands instead. Lumen is “Where most books start.” Meridian is “steadier” on faces and clothing from page to page. Cinnabar is “A different hand altogether”, which suggests a separate system from the other two, and is the one to try “when a book comes out right but not the way you pictured it.”
The admin console shows the operator how many pictures each book took and what it cost in dollars, so ComicForge knows its margin on every book. Customers only ever see credits. The settings also cap how many books one author can have in progress, two by default and ten at most. The note beside that setting is the closest the code comes to describing its hardware: “Each one holds a graphics card somewhere.”
Ten page shapes and three resolutions
The catalogue offers ten aspect ratios: 1:1, 3:2, 2:3, 3:4, 4:3, 4:5, 5:4, 9:16, 16:9 and 21:9. The guide groups them as “album, tall, square, wide or cinema” and calls album “the standard comic shape and the safe answer”. Resolution “changes the size of the picture, nothing about the drawing itself”. Draft is “Fastest, for trying a story out”, Standard “Reads well on screen and in print”, and Print is “Full print resolution”.
Photographs of Real People in ComicForge Books
Up to twelve photos, each with a note
The second of the front page’s three steps is headed “Put real people in it”. ComicForge accepts up to twelve photographs, JPEG or PNG, each under 15 MB. Beside each one you write a note of up to 200 characters saying who or what it shows. “Somebody with a photograph is drawn from that photograph instead of being invented,” the guide says, “which is how a book about your own grandfather comes back looking like your own grandfather.”
Personalised image generation from your own photos is spreading fast. Google made Gemini’s personalized image generation free for US users in June. ComicForge applies the same idea across a whole book, where one face has to stay the same person for dozens of panels.
A likeness, not a portrait
The guide gives “Two honest warnings”. The first: “It is a likeness, not a portrait: the whole book is drawn in one art style, and a face rendered in that style will never be a 100% match for the photograph — closer on some pages than on others.” The second: “photographs can confuse as easily as they help: a crowded picture, a vague note, or four photographs of four people who resemble each other can leave faces mixed up between pages.”
Which drawing hand you choose matters here. The catalogue calls Cinnabar “the surest of the three with a face you attached a photograph of — a real person stays themselves from the cover to the last page”. At 20 credits a page, that reliability doubles the cost of a book.
What helps and what confuses
The guide’s advice on photographs, side by side:
| Helps | Confuses |
|---|---|
| One person per photograph — face clear, well lit, facing the camera | A group photograph with a note that does not say who is who |
| A note naming them exactly as the story does: “Daniel, the grandfather” | Notes like “family” or “my uncle” when the story never uses those words |
| A place photographed plainly: the house, the school, the shop front | Blurred, dark, tiny or heavily filtered pictures |
| Only the people who actually matter to the story | Several photographs of the same person taken decades apart |
If one page gets a face wrong while the rest of the book has it right, the guide calls that “a page problem, not a photograph problem”, and points you to the fix and redraw buttons covered in the next section.
What the guide does not say about consent
Nothing in ComicForge asks whether the people in your photographs agreed to appear in a comic. The word “consent” does not occur anywhere in its code, and no rule bars photographs of strangers, colleagues or public figures. The house rules govern clothing, romance and violence. They say nothing about whose face you use. Platforms are moving the other way: see our reports on TikTok’s AI likeness detection and the VidMage face-swap listing.
In the UK and the EU, a photograph of an identifiable person is personal data, and the ICO’s guidance on artificial intelligence applies to services that process it. Our data protection team’s advice is simple. Only upload photographs of people who know about the book, and keep family projects private until they have seen it.
Lettering, Fix Detail and Redraw: Repairing a Page
Why balloons come out garbled
ComicForge does not typeset its speech balloons. The guide is frank about it: “The book is lettered as it is drawn, and drawn letters are not typed letters: a balloon can come out with a garbled word or a letter in the wrong shape, and a language not written in the Latin alphabet gets this more often.” Getting legible text inside a generated image is a problem model makers have only recently started to crack, as our report on ChatGPT Images 2.0 and text in images explains, and results still vary by script.
That warning matters most for the 29-language pitch. A Hindi, Thai or Arabic book is more likely than an English one to need hand correction, and ComicForge says so itself.
The lettering editor costs nothing
The fix for a bad balloon is a lettering editor. It “opens the page in an editor where you type the real text over the balloon — your words, your language, exactly as they should read.” It costs nothing, it “can be redone as often as you like”, and the page is marked once you have lettered it. The typed lettering is saved as a separate version of the page image rather than painted over the original.
One rule is worth knowing before you start. “Lettering belongs to the picture it was typed over, so a page you redraw keeps the lettering of its older version, and you letter the new one when you decide to keep it.” Redraw a lettered page and you letter it again.
Fix detail or redraw
“Under every page — and under the cover — there are the same buttons,” the guide says, and the right one “depends on whether you can say what is wrong”. Fix detail changes one thing and leaves the rest of the page alone, in “about a minute”. Redraw “throws the page away and draws it again from the beginning”.
| Action | Use it when | Lumen | Meridian | Cinnabar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fix detail, first three on a book | You can say the change in a sentence | Free | Free | Free |
| Fix detail, fourth onwards | Same | 2 credits | 3 credits | 4 credits |
| Redraw | The page has drifted from the rest of the book | 5 credits | 8 credits | 10 credits |
| Choose between versions | A redraw was worse than the original | Free | Free | Free |
| Lettering editor | A balloon is garbled | Free | Free | Free |
A redraw costs “less than the page cost, because the page was already paid for once”: half the page price at Lumen. The guide’s rule of thumb is sound. “If you can say it in a sentence”, Fix detail “is cheaper, faster, and keeps the page you liked.” If you cannot, redraw.
Every version is kept
“Every picture a page has ever had is kept,” the guide says. Once a page has two versions, a button lets you put them side by side and pick one, and the choice “is not a one-way door — redraw twice, compare all three, and go back to the first one if it was the best.” That removes the usual gamble with image generation, where a retry can lose the version you actually wanted.
House Rules, Refusals and the Family-Safe Setting
General and Family-safe
Each book is made under one of two house rules, chosen once before the book starts. The rules “set the standard the whole book is drawn to — the drawing, not the plot”, and bind “every page, every character, and every extra standing in the background”.
| Rule | General | Family-safe |
|---|---|---|
| Meant for | “The ordinary standard of a comic anybody can print” | “children, for a school or library shelf, or for a readership that expects modesty” |
| Clothing | “dressed for the story’s own time, place and culture” | Sleeves over the upper arm, high closed necklines, hems below the knee, nothing tight, sheer or cropped |
| Romance | “nobody ever drawn sexualized” | No embracing, kissing, dancing together or hand-holding between men and women |
| Elders and clergy | No specific rule | “drawn with dignity, never as a joke” |
| Violence | Whatever the drawing service accepts | “implied rather than shown” |
Family-safe goes into far more detail than a simple on-off content filter. It covers hemlines, necklines, who may hold hands and how clergy are drawn, and it applies “men and women alike, indoors and out, the main cast and the extras nobody is looking at”. It is also honest about its limits: it “does not soften what your story says — if the story itself has a scene you would not want a child to read, take it out of the story.”
When the drawing service refuses a scene
“Some stories stop the run,” the guide warns. “A very graphic scene — violence in detail, cruelty, gore — or a passage that reads as hateful can be refused by the drawing service.” The book then stops with a message saying that part of the story could not be illustrated. ComicForge is candid that “These refusals are not consistent, and the same page often goes through on a second attempt.”
Its advice runs in four steps: press the button again; if it stops again, soften the passage; describe the aftermath instead of the act; or take the passage out and tell it in a caption. “The room the morning after the fire is drawable where the fire with people in it may not be,” it notes. Nothing already drawn is lost, and nothing is paid for twice.
Other ways a run can stop
Refusals are not the only interruption. The code carries three more messages: “The art service was busy and the run stopped”, “Something about the story text stopped the run” and “The run stopped before the book was finished”. In each case a “Pick up where it stopped” button “continues from exactly where it got to, and never draws anything twice”. Behind the scenes, the admin console flags any book that says it is being made but has “not moved in half an hour”.
Writing a Story the App Can Draw
Paste the whole story, not a summary
“Paste the whole story, not a summary of it,” the guide says. “Rough notes are fine, unfinished sentences are fine, a chapter out of a manuscript is fine — the more the book has to work with, the less it has to invent.” The box needs at least 40 characters and takes up to 120,000, which the guide calls “a short novel”. Drafts save to your account automatically and cost nothing.
Four writing tips follow, and each prevents a real failure. Name people the same way every time, because “Somebody called Daniel in one paragraph and ‘the shoemaker’ in the next can end up as two different faces.” Say where and when it happens. Put dialogue in quotation marks. And write in whatever language you think in.
Page count is the setting most books get wrong
The guide calls the page slider “the most important choice on the New book screen, and the usual mistake is asking for too few.” A story given too few pages “is not told faster — it is squeezed and cut: whole scenes disappear, others are crushed into a single panel, and the book reads like a summary of a better book.”
Its rule of thumb is one scene per page. Count the scenes, treat that as the floor, and add a page each for the opening and the ending. More characters or locations need more pages, not fewer. Because pages beyond your number are free and pages below it are not charged, “when you are between two numbers, take the larger one.” A story too long for 40 pages “is better split into two books than crushed into one.”
What the demo books tell you about length
The six demo books give a real-world check on that advice. Together they turn 18,166 words of story into 62 pages, an average of 293 words a page. The densest, The Mind of the Machine, packs 395 words into each of its 15 pages. The lightest, SAVING THE SMILE, spreads 303 words over 3 pages, or 101 a page. If your story runs to about 300 words a page at the length you picked, you are in the same range as the books the operator chose to show.
Your own rule for the whole book
Under the house rules sits one optional line, up to about 600 characters, for “an instruction of your own”. What you write there “reaches the whole book — the cast as it is designed, the script as it is written, and every page as it is drawn.” The guide’s examples include “no modern logos or brand names”, “period clothing only, 1920s New York” and “winter throughout — snow on every outdoor page”. Its advice is to keep it short: “Two or three plain rules are followed far more reliably than a paragraph of wishes.”
Sharing, Exporting and the ComicForge Front Page
One link, no account needed
Sharing “makes one link that opens the whole book for anybody, with no account needed.” The guide promises that readers “see the pages and nothing else — not your story, not your photographs, not your name.” Unsharing “really withdraws it, including from people who saved the address.” The admin console explains how: withdrawing a link “replaces the download token on every picture, so the old link stops serving artwork — not just stops resolving.” In other words, a saved copy of an old address stops working too.
PDF and CBZ export
Export “gives you a PDF and a CBZ, page-turning direction set by the language — yours to print or to keep.” A CBZ file is the standard comic-book archive that most comic reader apps open. With Print resolution at 4K, a book can go to a print-on-demand service. ComicForge itself sells no printed copies, though its sign-in page promises every page “drawn, lettered and bound”.
Six books on the front-page shelf
The front page shows a shelf headed “Books made here”, with the line “Real books, opened by the same link their authors would send you.” It holds up to 12 books. On 11 September it held six, all added between 4 and 6 September.
| Title (as shown) | Style | Pages | Took | Story words | Words per page |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| THE IMMUTABLE LEDGER | Golden-Age Adventure | 12 | 14 minutes | 3,911 | 326 |
| ABSOLUTE RESOLUTION | Ink Noir | 8 | 10 minutes | 1,406 | 176 |
| OPERATION PASTORIUS | Painted Graphic Novel | 10 | 11 minutes | 2,943 | 294 |
| BOSTON STRONG: THE HUNT FOR THE MARATHON BOMBERS | Franco-Belgian Ligne Claire | 14 | 13 minutes | 3,676 | 263 |
| The Mind of the Machine | Japanese Manga | 15 | 18 minutes | 5,927 | 395 |
| SAVING THE SMILE | Gothic Indie Graphic Novel | 3 | 6 minutes | 303 | 101 |
| Total | 6 of 8 styles | 62 | 72 minutes | 18,166 | 293 |
All six are in English, read left to right and used no photographs. Each shared copy holds exactly one cover plus its pages. Two titles name real events: Operation Pastorius was a failed 1942 German sabotage plot in the United States, and the Boston book’s title names the 2013 marathon bombing manhunt. Modern Superhero Action and Sunday Strip Humor have no book on the shelf. None of the six stories is attributed to an author.
The guide says a book takes “between ten minutes and an hour”. The shelf’s books took 6 to 18 minutes, 72 minutes for 62 pages in all, which is a little over a minute a page. At the cheapest settings those 62 pages would cost 620 credits: $310 at the Sampler rate, or $93 at the Press rate.
The story goes on the card
Each shelf card can open a panel headed “The story it was made from”, with a word count. On all six cards the full text loads for any visitor, signed in or not. We checked the lengths only. They match the word counts on the cards and total 118,968 characters.
That goes further than a shared link. The guide tells authors that a link shows “the pages and nothing else — not your story, not your photographs, not your name”, and its sharing section does not mention the front page. The admin console treats publishing a story as a separate step, with the warning “This puts the author’s own text on a public front page — the link by itself never showed it. Type publish to confirm.” Only books whose authors are sharing a link can go on the shelf, and withdrawing that link “takes the demo down with it”.
The confirmation is typed by an administrator, and the code shows no matching switch for the author. For books whose photographs were used, a card would also list the notes written beside each photograph, under a “reference photo” placeholder rather than the image itself. ComicForge does not say who wrote the six demo stories. They may well be the operator’s own.
What ComicForge Promises About Your Stories
“Your stories stay yours”
The privacy promise appears in three places. The front page and footer say “Your stories stay yours.” The guide goes further: “Your books are yours. Nobody else sees a book’s page: the story you pasted and the photographs you attached are shown back to you and to no one else.” And the Contact page says it keeps “Your name, your address and what you wrote — nothing else, and nothing about your books.”
Those are clear sentences, and much of the design backs them up. The sign-up gate is one example: “Every account starts with free credits, so every account has to be a person,” so email sign-ups must confirm their address before anything else, while Google accounts skip the step.
What the operator console can open
The admin console’s code sits in a separate file on the public site, but the console only opens for administrator accounts. The server checks, and anyone else sees “This account is not an administrator.” Its book page has two panels for a book’s text, labelled “As the author sent it” and “As the book tells it”, with the note “Hidden by default — it is somebody’s writing.” That is a thoughtful default. It also confirms that the operator can open an author’s story.
From the same console, an administrator can move credits in either direction with a reason “the author reads”, lock accounts, put stuck books back on the queue, refund holds and delete a book’s artwork, work area and photographs. Two design choices stand out as good cybersecurity practice for a service under nine days old. “The admin closes itself after a while, whether or not you are still signed in. It is the one thing that makes a stolen session useless.” And the audit log is “Written by the backend. No client can read this collection.”
| Public promise | What the shipped code also shows |
|---|---|
| “the story you pasted … shown back to you and to no one else” | Admin panels “As the author sent it” and “As the book tells it”, hidden by default |
| A shared link shows “not your story” | An administrator can put the story on a public front-page card, confirmed by typing “publish” |
| “Your books are yours” | No licence terms, terms of service or copyright statement anywhere in the app |
| Unsharing “really withdraws it” | Withdrawal replaces every picture’s download token and removes any demo card |
| Contact form keeps “nothing about your books” | Matches the code: the form sends name, address, topic and message |
No terms of service, no privacy policy
The promises above are product copy, not a contract. The app has no terms of service, no privacy policy, no statement of who the data controller is and no named business behind it. For a quick comic from a short story, that may not worry you. For an unpublished manuscript, or photographs of your children and parents, it should. A privacy policy would normally say how long stories and photographs are kept, whether they help improve the service, and how to delete an account. ComicForge answers none of those questions in writing.
An outreach letter tool for people who did not ask
The admin console also includes a letter tool for sending email to people who did not sign up. Its own wording is direct: “A letter nobody asked for owes its reader a real address and a way to stop it. The way to stop it is added for you; this is the other half, and it is empty until you fill it in.” Sending asks for confirmation: “This posts a real letter to” the chosen people “who did not ask for it. Type send to confirm.”
The example address in its list box is “[email protected]”, letters can carry the cover and title of any book that is currently shared, and replies go to an address the operator sets. The code cannot tell us whether any letters have gone out. The tool’s two requirements, a postal address and a way to opt out, match the US CAN-SPAM rules. UK recipients are covered by the ICO’s direct marketing guidance.
Six Other ComicForges and the Name Problem
The namesakes we could read
Search for “ComicForge” and you will find a crowd. Before this launch, several other web tools had already taken the name for the same idea: turning text into comics. This table lists every one we could load or date on 11 September 2026.
| Where it lives | How it describes itself | First record we found |
|---|---|---|
| comicforge.space (this launch) | “Paste a story, get a finished comic book”; 2 to 40 pages, credits | Domain registered 3 Sep 2026 |
| comicforge.ai | “AI-powered comic book generator that transforms your stories into illustrated comics” | Domain registered 17 Nov 2025 |
| comicforge.link | One-panel or four-panel comics from a 300-character prompt; English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean | Domain registered 25 Nov 2025 |
| comicforge.org | Listed by search engines as “Comic Story Generator”; would not load from our test machine | Domain registered 8 Jan 2026 |
| perchance.org/comicforge | “Generate comic book panels guided by comic eras and legendary artists” | Undated generator page |
| miniapps.ai/comicforge | “Create AI comics with consistent characters. Upload a reference photo, generate character sheets” | Undated mini-app page |
| ComicForge AI on Blink | “Novel-to-Manhwa”: web novels into manhwa and webtoons | Undated app page |
| comicforge.pages.dev | A Chinese-language AI comic generator that turns a novel into a comic “with one click” | Linked GitHub repository created 24 Jul 2026 |
Six of the seven namesakes describe themselves as comic generators on pages we could load. The seventh, comicforge.org, carries a comic-generator title in search listings, but its site would not complete a secure connection for us. The .ai page’s preview image is hosted by the Lovable app builder, and the Blink and OnSpace builders each host an app with the name as well. The OnSpace app gave only a builder’s generic description, so it is not counted in the six.
32 GitHub repositories
GitHub’s repository search returned 32 results for “comicforge” on 11 September 2026. The 20 most recently updated include a YAML-driven comic page engine that renders to SVG, PNG and PDF (mojzis/comicforge), a local-first comic authoring tool, an ASP.NET Core multi-agent generator and several AI comic experiments. All 20 had zero stars, and none listed comicforge.space as its home page. The oldest in that set was created in August 2025.
Artist names versus genre names
The namesakes differ sharply on one point that matters legally. The style picker at comicforge.link lists Monochrome, Marvel, Ghibli and Retro alongside the surnames of famous manga creators: Toriyama, Otomo, Rumiko Takahashi, Oda Eiichiro, Hara and Obata. The Perchance generator is “guided by comic eras and legendary artists”. The comicforge.space picker uses genre labels only, from Golden-Age Adventure to Sunday Strip Humor.
Style names are not a legal guarantee, but they signal intent. A tool that sells “in the style of” a named creator invites the questions Japan’s cartoonists, animators and publishers raised in their October 2025 joint statement on generative AI, which we covered in our Makiverse report.
| Point of comparison | comicforge.space | comicforge.link |
|---|---|---|
| Input | A story of 40 to 120,000 characters | A prompt of up to 300 characters |
| Output | A 2 to 40 page book with a cover | One panel or four panels |
| Style names | Eight genre and period labels | Includes named manga artists, Marvel and Ghibli |
| Languages | 29, with right-to-left books | 4 |
| Usage claims | None published | “50K+ Comics”, “5K+ Users”, “15 Seconds” |
How to make sure you are on the right ComicForge
If you want the app described in this report, check four things before you pay. The address is comicforge.space. The front page headline reads “A story goes in. A comic book comes out.” The price page sells four packs, from Sampler at $25 to Press at $300. And the New book screen offers 29 languages and eight named styles. If the tool asks for a one-line prompt, offers four panels or names manga artists as styles, you are on a different ComicForge.
Who Should Try ComicForge, and Who Should Wait
Good fits
ComicForge suits people who already have the words and want pictures fast. A family history, a short story, a school project or a pitch for a graphic novel all fit its one-box design. Teachers and parents get a Family-safe standard with real detail behind it. Writers in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu or Yiddish get books that read in the right direction. And anyone trying it once can test a two-page book for 20 credits.
The rules on money are fair for a new service. Pages that never arrive are not charged, extra pages are free, three corrections are included, credits never expire, and every version of a page is kept.
Reasons to wait
The case for waiting is about trust, not features. Nobody is named as running ComicForge. There are no terms, no privacy policy and no licence covering the books you make. The demo shelf publishes stories in full, and the guide does not tell authors that can happen. Photographs of real people are welcomed with no word on consent. And the name is shared by at least six other tools, so reviews, complaints and search results for “ComicForge” may not be about this one.
For a business, add one more. With no terms, nothing says you may use a ComicForge book commercially, even though “Your books are yours” suggests you can.
A checklist before you buy credits
| Question | What ComicForge says | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs it? | Not stated | Nowhere in the app |
| Can I sell the book? | “Your books are yours”; no licence terms | Guide |
| Who can read my story? | “shown back to you and to no one else” | Guide |
| Can the operator open it? | Yes, from a panel hidden by default | Admin console code |
| Can a story go on the front page? | Yes, after an administrator types “publish” | Admin console code |
| What if a page is wrong? | Three free fixes; redraws cost 5 to 10 credits | Catalogue and guide |
| What if the run stops? | Resume it; nothing is drawn or charged twice | Guide |
| Do credits expire? | No | Front page and guide |
Frequently Asked Questions About ComicForge
Is ComicForge free to try?
Partly. New accounts start with welcome credits, “enough for a couple of pages”, and email sign-ups must confirm their address first. After that you buy credits. The cheapest pack, Sampler, costs $25 for 50 credits, which is five standard pages. Drafts, lettering, choosing between versions, sharing and exporting are free.
Which AI models does ComicForge use?
It does not say. The code names three drawing “hands”, Lumen, Meridian and Cinnabar, and mentions a “drawing service” and an “art service”, but no model or vendor. For background on how commercial image models differ, see our explainer What Is Google Imagen?.
Can I print a ComicForge book?
Yes. Choose Print resolution (4K, 1.2 times the credits) and export the book as a PDF, which the guide says is “yours to print or to keep”. The CBZ export suits comic reader apps. ComicForge does not print or ship physical copies itself.
Who owns a ComicForge comic?
ComicForge says “Your books are yours” but publishes no licence or terms. Separately, copyright in AI-generated art is unsettled. In February 2023 the US Copyright Office decided that the comic Zarya of the Dawn was protected for its human-written text and the arrangement of its images, but not for the images a generator produced. Its AI copyright reports set out the current position. This is not legal advice: take advice before selling a book.
How long does a ComicForge book take?
The guide says “between ten minutes and an hour”, depending on length. The six demo books took 6 to 18 minutes each, a little over a minute a page. You can close the tab while it works, and the finished book waits in your library.
Is ComicForge the same as comicforge.ai or comicforge.link?
No. The app described here lives at comicforge.space and its domain was registered on 3 September 2026. comicforge.ai and comicforge.link were registered in November 2025, and nothing we found links any of them. Check the address and the four pack names before you pay.
References and Further Reading
ComicForge: your story as a comic book
RDAP domain record for comicforge.space
Firebase: Call functions from your app
Firebase Authentication documentation
ComicForge: Turn Words into Illustrated Worlds (comicforge.ai)
AI Comic Generator by ComicForge (comicforge.link)
ComicForge AI Comic Studio (Perchance)
ComicForge Free AI Miniapp (miniapps.ai)
ComicForge AI Novel-to-Manhwa (Blink)
ComicForge AI comic generator (comicforge.pages.dev)
Comic book archive file format (Wikipedia)
US Copyright Office: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
US Copyright Office decision letter on Zarya of the Dawn
FTC: CAN-SPAM Act compliance guide for business
ICO: Direct marketing and privacy and electronic communications
ICO: Guidance on artificial intelligence and data protection