Work / Children's publishing · AI-illustrated
Once Upon a Block
The Brothers Grimm, retold as 1930s Harlem picture books with Black characters: three books per tale (hers, his and together), then narrated films and merch.
- Role
- Creator, writer, art director
- Status
- First book complete
- Year
- 2026
- Link
- Private
211Grimm tales catalogued
21pages in the first finished book
28residents of the shared Block
The idea
Nobody has done a paired his / hers / together picture-book set of fairy tales in this setting. Every tale lives on one Harlem block, so the characters cross over from book to book. The flywheel runs from books to films to an audience to merch, and back to more books.
What I built
- The whole corpus: all 211 Grimm tales analysed, 24 shortlisted, content flags logged, and a shared universe of 28 residents across 17 places.
- A production pipeline that runs from structured prompts to consistent characters, illustrated spreads, a print PDF, narration and Amazon KDP.
- Directing systems for character, location and scene prompts, to keep faces and places consistent across a series.
- The first finished book: True John and the Golden Dwelling, retold from "Faithful John".
Stack
HiggsfieldNano Banana ProKokoro / Qwen3 TTSWan 2.2n8nObsidianClaude Code