The last time I seriously tried to make a comic was probably fifth grade. It was called Catman and Bobbin, which should tell you pretty much everything you need to know about the quality of the project. I thought the idea was great. The execution was not. I couldn’t draw then, and I can’t draw now.
For most of my life, that meant a lot of visual ideas simply stayed in my head. I could picture characters, scenes, strange little situations, and things that might look interesting, but there was always a pretty obvious gap between having the idea and actually making it exist. I wasn’t an artist, at least not in the traditional sense, and I didn’t have the skill to sit down with a pencil and turn what I was imagining into something somebody else could see.
AI changed that for me. I don’t mean that in some grand, sweeping way, and I’m not trying to settle the argument about whether AI is art, whether it should be used, or where exactly it belongs in the creative world. I’m only talking about what it changed in my own life. For the first time, I had a practical way to take an idea that existed in my head and turn it into an image close enough to what I was imagining that I could actually do something with it.
The funny part is that none of this started because I had some big creative plan. I was trying to make something kind of cute with our two cats that I thought my wife would like. That was really all it was. I wasn’t trying to build a brand or create an elaborate fictional universe, and I definitely wasn’t thinking about websites, comics, merchandise, lore, or any of the other things that eventually came out of it. I was just messing around with an idea involving the cats.
From there, it started growing in a way I never really planned. One image led to another, and the characters started feeling like they needed personalities. Once they had personalities, they seemed like they needed histories. If they had histories, they needed somewhere to live, and that place needed rules, other characters, and relationships between them. Somewhere along the way, the thing I had been making for fun started turning into Darling Nightmares.
As the world became more specific, I realized how much I enjoyed the worldbuilding side of it. The characters weren’t just designs anymore. They had behaviors, habits, relationships, places they belonged, things they would never do, and small details that probably matter far more to me than they ever will to anyone else. The more defined all of that became, the more real the whole thing started to feel.
The comics came naturally after that, and I still love them. They are probably one of the clearest ways to show what Darling Nightmares is supposed to feel like because you can actually see the characters interact. A comic can deliver a joke, a reveal, a strange moment, or a little piece of the world in a way that a single image can’t. At the same time, making them showed me the limits of the format pretty quickly.
When you’re trying to tell a complete story in eight or nine panels, almost everything has to be reduced to its simplest form. Every panel has a job, dialogue has to stay short, and there isn’t much room to wander around inside a character’s head, build atmosphere slowly, explain why something matters, or spend time on a detail that doesn’t directly move the story forward. That isn’t a flaw in comics; it’s simply what the format requires. But there were times when I knew what I wanted a story to say and realized there just wasn’t enough room to say it.
That limitation is what pushed me toward writing short stories. At first, I thought they would simply be another way to expand Darling Nightmares—a place to fill in backstory, spend more time with the characters, or tell stories that would be too complicated to squeeze into a comic page. Instead, they ended up becoming the part of all of this that I think I love the most.
Writing gave me something the comics couldn’t always give me: room. I could slow things down when I wanted to, let a character think, spend more time on atmosphere, or explain something without trying to fit it inside a speech bubble. I could let a story breathe instead of forcing every beat to fit into a fixed number of panels. More importantly, I could finally say what I actually wanted the story to say.
That discovery surprised me more than I expected. When I first started experimenting with AI images, the exciting part was finally being able to see ideas that I had never been able to create visually before. It still is. Being able to take something that only existed in my head and start turning it into a real character or scene opened a door that had pretty much always been closed to me.
Somewhere along the way, though, the images stopped feeling like the end product and started feeling more like the beginning. They gave me characters to write about. The characters gave me a world. The world gave me stories. And, without really planning for it, the stories became the part I most wanted to keep coming back to.
There is probably something a little ironic about that. I spent most of my life assuming visual creativity was mostly inaccessible to me because I couldn’t draw. Then a visual tool finally gave me access to it, and that process ended up leading me into writing more seriously than I ever had before.
I still care a lot about the images. Darling Nightmares would not be Darling Nightmares without them. The characters need faces, the Garden needs to feel like a real place, and the comics need visual personality. Getting those things right matters to me, probably to an unreasonable degree sometimes. But when I think about the work I’m most excited to return to, it is usually the stories.
What I enjoy most is figuring out why a character does something, finding the little detail that makes a scene feel real, writing a line that tells you more about somebody than a paragraph of explanation would, and taking one of these strange little creatures and deciding what actually matters to them. That has probably been the biggest surprise of this whole thing.
AI gave me a way to make images I couldn’t make before, but somewhere in the process it also led me to writing. I still can’t draw, and apparently that wasn’t the important part.
Stories From the Dark
Creative Process • Nine Sixteen Supply Co.
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