Unblock is an AI comic and manga studio built on one bet: the story comes first. It is for people who have a story in their head and no way to get it onto a page — the ones who can picture the whole thing but can't draw a line of it. Point it at an idea and it works the way a writers' room does: a story bible, characters with consistent voices, a beat sheet, a page and panel breakdown, and only then the art.
That order is the whole argument. Every other AI comic tool treats the story as an input — paste a prompt or a script, get panels back — and competes on the pictures. Unblock runs the other way. The part a model can already do well, generate a good-looking panel, was never the hard part. The part it can't do on its own, hold a story together across fifty pages so the panels mean something, is the entire product. This is the sharpest version of a tension I keep circling: AI lets me build far more than I could alone, but it cannot manufacture the judgment that makes the work worth reading.
I have built this four times since 2022, and each version taught me the last one had solved the easy half. The current build is an early rebuild — a single app around a versioned pipeline with a human review at every step, writing before art. It is not live, and I am not going to describe it as if it were. What exists is the foundation and the reasoning behind it.
Read the thinking in The Story Is in the Gutter. The four-generation build history lives in the project's architecture notes.