One prompt, two AIs: the Ninjai comic test

Raw results and test log. Greg Nowak gave the same one-line prompt to Claude and to ChatGPT on 10 November 2026. This page records what each one delivered. It is a log, not a review.

The prompt

Create an awesome comic 10 pages based on ninjai the little ninja. Start with page 1 for approval before you continue.

Nothing else was specified: no style, no story, no tool, no format.

At a glance

Three comic pages side by side: Claude's first page 1 in flat colour, Claude's second page 1 as black and white manga, and page 1 of ChatGPT's painted comic The Hollow Bell. — Left and middle: the two versions of page 1 that Claude delivered. Right: page 1 of the ten pages ChatGPT delivered.

	Claude	ChatGPT
Tool	Claude Fable 5.2 (Anthropic), running in Claude Code as an unattended agent on Greg's server, working from a task card.	ChatGPT (OpenAI). The result file is named "Codex-Chatgpt-Ninjai_The_Hollow_Bell_Complete_Comic.pdf". Model and settings were not recorded in this log.
How the art was made	Drawn in code. Claude wrote a small comic engine in JavaScript on HTML Canvas and rendered the page with headless Chrome. No image generator was used; this setup had none.	Ten finished page images, 1024 x 1536 pixels each, packed into one PDF.
Delivered	Page 1 of 10, in two versions, plus a written script for all ten pages.	All ten pages as one PDF of 14.6 MB.
Title and story	"The Scarecrow's Hat": Ninjai and Little Bird leave a bamboo forest and find a scarecrow dressed like Ninjai.	"The Hollow Bell": a river rises, a sunken bell tolls, and a girl who gave her name to save her village is waiting inside it.
Stopped after page 1 for approval	Yes, as the prompt asked. Pages 2 to 10 were never drawn.	Not recorded. The file Greg saved is the complete comic.
Time	Page 1 was on the task card 30 minutes after the task started. The second version came 24 minutes after Greg's feedback.	Not recorded. The PDF was on Greg's server at 00:00 UTC on 11 November 2026.
Usage	About 10.0 million tokens for the first session and 9.1 million for the second, by the agent runner's own meter. Together 58 points of one 5-hour usage window.	Not recorded.
Page size	2000 x 3000 pixels.	1024 x 1536 pixels.
Greg's verdict	First version: "The drawing style is just not enough manga. It looks like a 5 year old drew it…" Second version: none recorded.	None recorded.

Claude's run

Times are UTC on 10 November 2026, taken from the task card.

08:03. The task starts. Claude judges ten pages too big for one session and splits the job into three parts. Page 1 comes first and waits for approval, as the prompt says.
08:03 to 08:33. Claude writes a ten-page script, "The Scarecrow's Hat", and about 1,000 lines of JavaScript: a drawing kit, scenery, the characters, lettering and a page compositor. It renders page 1 in flat colour and posts it with two questions: is the page approved, and where should the finished comic be published.
10:48. Greg answers: "The drawing style is just not enough manga. It looks like a 5 year old drew it…"
10:48 to 11:13. Claude redraws page 1 as black and white manga: tapered pen lines, dot screentone, a taller Ninjai with sharper eyes, a slanted gutter, Japanese sound effects. Story and dialogue stay the same. It is still drawn in code.
11:13. Claude posts the second version and adds that code-drawn art "has a ceiling". It offers to generate the art with an image model instead and letter it itself, if Greg says so.

Claude's first page 1: a flat-colour cartoon page with a small round-headed Ninjai, a title panel at sunset, a bamboo forest and a scarecrow in a golden rice field. — Claude, first try. Flat colour, drawn in code. This is the page Greg rejected.

Claude's second page 1: the same four panels redrawn as black and white manga with screentone, Japanese sound effects and a vertical chapter title. — Claude, second try, 24 minutes after the feedback. Black ink and screentone, still drawn in code.

ChatGPT's result

The PDF's own metadata gives the title "Ninjai: The Hollow Bell - Complete 10-Page Comic" and the subject "An original, unofficial fan adventure". What is in it:

Ten pages in full colour, in a detailed painted style, with four or five panels on each page.
Speech balloons, captions and sound effects on every page ("DOOOONG", "SHRAAK!", "CHIRR!"), a running header "The Hollow Bell, Chapter One", page numbers, and "The End" on page 10.
A complete story. On the seventh morning the river begins to climb. A sunken bell tolls and Ninjai and Little Bird find a girl inside it. Fifty springs ago she gave her name to the bell to turn a flood and save her village. Ninjai carries her seal back through the river's memory. A name needs a voice freely given, so Little Bird gives up its song. She remembers that her name is Aki. At dawn she is back in the village, in the arms of an old man: "I waited for you."
The same Ninjai from page 1 to page 10: straw hat, dark clothes, red sash, and a small white bird.

Page 1 of ChatGPT's comic The Hollow Bell: a painted mountain river at dawn, Ninjai crouching by the water holding a red seal, a white bird, and a large bell under a ruined gate with the sound effect DOOOONG. — ChatGPT, page 1 of 10, at the size it was delivered.

All ten pages of ChatGPT's comic The Hollow Bell, shown small in two rows of five. — ChatGPT, all ten pages, reduced. The full-size comic is not published here.

Observations from the files

Noted by Claude while compiling this log, from the pages themselves.

ChatGPT's pages. On the pages checked closely (1, 5, 8 and 10) the lettering is clean and correctly spelled. Ninjai looks the same on every page. Most pages are wide panels stacked down the page. At 1024 x 1536 pixels the pages are fine on a screen and small for print.
Claude's pages. The figures are built from simple shapes and look it. The second version reads as manga, but it has far less detail than a painted page. Because every line is code, any element can be changed and the page renders identically each time, at 2000 x 3000 pixels.

What this log can and cannot show

It is one run per tool, on one prompt, on one day. It is not a benchmark.
The two tools did not work the same way. ChatGPT produced images. Claude had no image generator in this setup and drew with code.
Claude stopped after page 1 because the prompt asked for approval first, and the approval never came. So there are no Claude pages 2 to 10 to compare.
How ChatGPT got to its ten pages (how long it took, how many messages, whether it paused after page 1) is not in this log.

Credit

Ninjai: The Little Ninja was created by The Ninjai Gang. Both comics shown here are unofficial, non-commercial fan pages with new stories, made to test two AI tools. They are not connected to or endorsed by the creators.