How to Make a Webtoon With AI, From a Story to Vertical Pages

A print comic is laid out in pages and grids; a webtoon is one long vertical canvas read by scrolling, usually in short episodes, and almost always on a phone. That changes how you pace it:

• Vertical, not gridded: panels stack down the screen, and the gap between them is a pause you control.
• Episodic: readers expect a chapter at a time, ending on a hook that pulls them to the next.
• Mobile-first: a panel has to read at phone size, so one clear beat per panel beats a busy page.

The tool side of this is a page format and an aspect ratio. A webtoon wants a vertical shape (9:16), where a print comic wants a page (3:4) and a strip wants a wide or square panel.

Three things, and only the first is really yours to write:

• A chapter of story — up to about 1,000 words of prose (or 2,000 characters in Chinese, Japanese or Korean), or an outline the tool writes into a chapter for you.
• A cast — pick a lead from an original character library, create your own from a description or a reference image you have the right to use, or let the tool find the characters in your text.
• A look — one of 18 art styles and one of 6 page formats; for a webtoon, the vertical format.

Plain prose works best: say who is in the scene, what they do, and what they say in quotes. You are writing a script, not a novel.

This is the Comic Studio flow end to end. The planning is free; you only spend credits once pages are drawn.

1. 1

   Start a comic and pick the cast

   Create a new comic and choose a lead — from the character library, one you create, or skip and let the studio find the characters in your chapter.

2. 2

   Write or paste the chapter

   Give it a title and paste the first chapter of prose, or write an outline and let AI draft the chapter from it. You can add more chapters to the same comic later.

3. 3

   Choose style, format, ratio and language

   Pick an art style, the webtoon (vertical) format, a 9:16 page shape, and the language for every caption and balloon. Turn off auto-generate in Advanced settings if you want to review everything before any drawing.

4. 4

   Check the character sheets

   The studio reads the chapter, lists every character and draws a reference sheet for each in your art style. Fix a face or outfit here — every page is drawn from these sheets.

5. 5

   Break into panels and edit the storyboard

   The chapter is split into pages with a continuity pass and a drawing prompt for each — all free. Edit any scene, insert or delete a page, before anything is drawn.

6. 6

   Draw the pages, then fix the text

   Pages are drawn with their panels and lettering, a few at a time. Captions and balloons sit on an editable layer, so you can change a word or move a balloon without a redraw.

7. 7

   Read and export

   Preview in the reader, then export a ZIP of every page or a PDF of the chapter. A free account adds a small mark; any paid plan or credit pack removes it.

The full walkthrough, with every setting, is in the Comic Studio guide.

The single thing that separates a real webtoon from a pile of AI pictures is character consistency — the lead looking like the same person in panel one and panel forty. A general image tool makes one picture at a time and forgets your character between prompts, which is why its 'comic' is forty strangers who vaguely rhyme.

The approach that works is a reference sheet per character, drawn in your art style before any page, with every page drawn from those sheets. New characters in later chapters get their own sheet, and finished sheets are kept and reused. Our AI comic generator post goes deeper on why consistency is the make-or-break step, and the character consistency page shows how the sheets are built.

'Webtoon' is a format, not the only one, and the AI comic wave in late 2026 has pushed all of them forward — Higgsfield released a dedicated manga generator (Mangaka) in early November, for example. The format you pick decides the reading experience:

Comic Studio does all of these from the same chapter — pick the format and pair it with any of the 18 art styles — so you can try your story as a vertical webtoon and as a manga page without rewriting a word.

Dialogue, captions and sound effects are set on an editable text layer over the art, in any of nine languages (English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German or Indonesian). Change a word, drag a balloon or resize it on the page, with no redraw — or switch to lettering drawn into the art if you prefer that look.

When the chapter is ready, export it and publish where webtoons live. WEBTOON's own self-publish channel, Canvas, is the usual starting point and documents its episode and image requirements; read those before you size your export so pages are not rejected or resampled.

What it costs

Writing a chapter from an outline, the character scan, the storyboard, the continuity check and the prompts are free. Drawing costs credits: 13 per character sheet, 13 per page (17 in HD), and 40 to turn a finished page into a 5-second clip. Failed images and clips are refunded, and every button that spends credits shows the price on it. New accounts get free credits to start.