<a href="https://comicvibe.com/singapore-grand-prix-entertainment-may-be-curbed-if-haze-worsens-fia-says/” title=”Singapore Grand Prix entertainment may be curbed if haze worsens, FIA says”>Singapore-based publishing startup Novvel.co was cofounded this year by Anumeha Bisaria, who previously spent nine years at Google. It offers an AI-powered platform to assist with the creation of graphic novels, claiming to cut production time and cost by roughly half.
How did Novvel.co come about?
We came together around the question of how to make reading exciting again in a world of declining attention spans. We spent a lot of time talking to teachers and parents, and looked at literacy data, which shows the biggest drop in reading tends to happen right around the grade level when kids are also getting their first phones, typically middle school. We landed on the hypothesis that a graphic novel is the ideal format to bring people back to reading, not just reluctant readers.
Why isn’t there more graphic novel content already, if the format works so well?
Production is expensive and slow. The average production cost of a graphic novel runs somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000, and it typically takes 12 to 18 months. Most small publishers and authors don’t have that kind of capital to spend on a bet, and even large publishers that do have to be very selective about what they commit to.
Walk me through what the platform actually does.
You put in a manuscript. The system spends time studying the story, including the background, the protagonist, and the emotional beats that pay off for a reader, and produces a storyboard that gets you to roughly 60%–70% of a finished product. Then an editor, the author, and an illustrator go in and shape that further, because a purely AI-generated output tends to lack soul and be generic. This is not a self-driving car. It’s more like handing a Ferrari to someone who already knows how to drive.
What kind of savings are publishers actually seeing?
We’re seeing roughly 50%–70% savings on production time and cost versus the traditional process. Pricing varies depending
on the project. Factors like length, visual complexity, creative requirements, and the level of human involvement, but even at the higher end, we’re able to deliver significantly better speed and lower cost than traditional production processes.
Can you replicate a specific illustrator’s style?
If someone asks us to replicate something like Charles Schulz’s Peanuts or the Moomins, we won’t do that, because that style doesn’t belong to us. What we do instead is have the client sit down with our illustrator and describe what they want, and our illustrator develops an original style from that description, which we can then apply at scale.
Where does copyright land on an AI-assisted book?
A purely AI-generated image can’t be copyrighted under current law. The storytelling, meaning how you sequence panels, pair dialogue with imagery, and structure the narrative, requires human creative input, and that layer can be copyrighted. If a client is building a franchise and wants a consistent, exclusive character likeness that no one else can replicate, we typically work with a human artist up-front to establish that design, and the AI is then used to scale and multiply it, not originate it.
Could people do this kind of work themselves using ChatGPT?
We’re not in the business of turning words into pictures, because that’s what a general-purpose model does. We’re in the business of taking a 300-page novel and doing it justice as a visual story. It’s an adaptation, specifically, not image generation.
What has already been produced with the platform?
Our first print title is a graphic anthology of O. Henry stories, opening with “The Last Leaf.” We’ve also run cross-cultural adaptation experiments. We took “The Gift of the Magi” and asked what it would look like relocated to Asia. We produced a version set in China, where the heirloom becomes a grandfather’s camera instead of a pocket watch; a second set in Kashmir, where the wife is a pashmina weaver; a third set in Bihar; and we’re currently working on a Singapore version. There is also library of books that we have created on our own from public-domain stories.
A version of this article appeared in the 10/05/2026 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: A Novel Approach to Graphic Novels
