How The Clutch gets made
The Clutch isn't written ahead of time. It's played first, then drawn.
Every issue starts the same way: our party sits down and plays a real session of D&D, full combat, bad decisions, side quests nobody asked for. We record the whole thing.
From there, the session goes through a few stages before it becomes the comic you're reading:
- The recording The session audio is captured start to finish, every roll, every argument, every terrible plan that somehow worked.
- The transcript That audio gets transcribed into a full written record of what happened at the table, who said what, in what order, no cleanup yet.
- The story The raw transcript gets shaped into a narrative using Claude, cutting the "can I get a snack" moments, keeping the story beats, and figuring out what actually matters for the issue.
- The script The narrative becomes a real comic script, also built with Claude: panels, pacing, dialogue, and layout, the blueprint an artist would use to draw the issue.
- The art The script becomes pages using ChatGPT's image generation. Characters, props, and settings are kept consistent issue to issue, so Vigeaux's cloak looks like Vigeaux's cloak whether it's issue 1 or issue 12. It's not always perfect, sometimes a detail gets mixed up or a character's look drifts a little, but there's something genuinely fun about watching our sessions come to life anyway.
- The release Finished pages get resized, given a manifest, and added to the archive you're looking at right now, closing the loop from dice on a table a few weeks earlier to a page on your screen.
Nothing in The Clutch is invented after the fact. If it's in the comic, it happened at the table. AI helps us shape and illustrate it, but the story itself comes from a real game, played by real people.