https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44253083

It's an alternate-history comic about an archaeology student in modern Pompeii who discovers a slate that lets him exchange short messages with a Roman slave a week before the eruption of Vesuvius.

The premise is simple: what happens if someone in the Roman world suddenly gains access to modern scientific knowledge, but still has to build everything using the materials and tools available in 79 AD?

Volume 2 (The Engine of Empire) explores the second-order effects of that idea.

About the process: I write the story, research, structure, and dialogue. The narrative is planned first (acts → scenes → pages → panels). Once a panel is defined, I write a detailed visual description (camera angle, posture, lighting, environment, etc.).

LLMs help turn those descriptions into prompts, and image models generate sketches. I usually generate many variations and manually select or combine the ones that best match the panel.

The bulk of the work is in the narrative design, historical research, and building a plausible technological path the Romans could realistically follow. The AI mostly acts as a sketching assistant.

I'd love feedback on the story direction, pacing, and whether the industrial shift feels believable.