The Carnivalarium - Seraphim | Seeker James Publishing

CARNIVAL OF LOST SOULS

A carnival arrives in New Orleans and Scary Harry doesn’t notice. An invitation changes that. He’s a man carrying enough of his own darkness to recognise something different when it’s in front of him.

This carnival has seen him before. It knows things it shouldn’t, does things that are hard to explain. Everything there is worn and broken, and the people who get too close don’t leave the same.

Twelve days leading to a confrontation long overdue — dredged from a past he’d buried and forgotten. Will his resolve be enough to keep his soul, or was it never his to begin with.

The Naughty Goblin — Carnival of Lost Souls

Every character in this world existed before I drew a single line. Scary Harry, Mr Fancy Pants, the others, the locations — they came from the writing, from the lore, from a master document that maps every relationship, every location, every rule this world runs on. The plot was written first. The beat layout for every chapter was completed before any image was generated. I knew what every panel was before I made it.

Scary Harry — Carnival of Lost Souls character reference

Making a world that lives in writing into something you can see is a different kind of work. Panels created via agentic, every prompt runs to a paragraph — sometimes longer, no cookie cutter prompts, this work is far too complex for that. The same atmospheric precursor in every generation, every session, character reference pictures added to every prompt for continuity, across twelve chapters. A single panel can take hours. The same detailed prompts repeated until what appears on screen matches what already exists in print, the vision realised to the acceptable standard.

Mr Fancy Pants — Carnival of Lost Souls character reference

Regenerating a panel that was almost right can destroy it, generate a panel with one too many changes and it becomes distorted, all of this must be taken into account and weighed against the ability to edit and fix manually through a digital art program to amend the existing generations, that’s another tool in the process, and a lengthy digital art session, a polish to turn the panels from generic to customised, from generated to created.

The Carnival — Carnival of Lost Souls location reference

During the digital edits, the real finish work. The colour palette set and needs to be applied and the patchwork done, something doesn’t look quite right, this is the repair shop where things that are slightly broken get a patch, a polish, before they are even considered for a place at the table, tools are only as good as their master, and nothing passes without this final polish.

The world was always complete. The lore exists. The beats are mapped. The page layouts are built and waiting. What you are looking at is the work of making something that already existed in full somewhere else finally visible in the context chosen to tell this tale. The process is carefully curated and I think the results speak for themselves.