[AI Manga (Partially Hand-Drawn)] Midnight Marauder: The Fate of the Man Who Stole His Wife's Pudding

The kitchen at midnight is a battlefield.

I can state this with certainty. No objections allowed.

2:00 AM. When the house is fast asleep, the man begins to move. He silences his footsteps, holds his breath, and heads to the kitchen like a special forces operative. He has only one goal. It is 'that thing' sitting on the second shelf of the refrigerator. It might be pudding. It might be a cream puff. Regardless, it is sweet, cold, and criminally delicious when eaten in the middle of the night.

He opens the refrigerator door.

This sound is the problem.

No matter how quietly you open it, a refrigerator always makes a 'poof' sound. What on earth is that? I have always wanted to grill the refrigerator manufacturer about it, but I suppose the opportunity to do so will never come.

The man's name is Kenji.

And the woman who sets traps in that refrigerator is named Yukiko.

This work, 'Midnight Marauder,' depicts the endless midnight battle between these two.

Keen readers might have already noticed, but Yukiko is modeled after my wife. Those terrifying traps are all based on things I have actually experienced over many years. The note sealed with cellophane tape on the second shelf of the fridge that says 'If you eat this, I'll kill you.' The terror of discovering that at 2:00 AM is more real than any horror movie.

Even so, for me, the allure of the pudding outweighs it.

Small incidents that happen in daily life. Interactions between a husband and wife. Beef bowl sauce splattering on a shirt, or taking the batteries out of the remote without asking—I have learned over more than 40 years that each of these trivial events becomes a top-tier spice when turned into manga. What an expensive tuition fee that was.

Now, there is something I was particularly particular about in this manga.

The faces.

A human face is not symmetrical. Whether laughing, angry, or frozen in fear, something is always distorted. However, if you leave generative AI to its own devices, it mass-produces what I call 'masterpiece faces'—faces that are too perfect. They are beautiful, but boring. They lack humanity. They are not the face of a man whose blood sugar has exploded after eating a beef bowl at midnight.

That is why I was so particular about it.

Kenji's face, frozen in terror, has only the left corner of his mouth raised, only his right eyebrow arched, and sweat standing out on his forehead. Yukiko's smile, confident of victory, has eyes like crescent moons while her mouth remains cold. The raw, surging expressions where emotions explode and even break through the panel borders. The beauty of Osamu Tezuka's lines, the power of Mitsuteru Yokoyama's composition, the intensity of Hirohiko Araki's bodies, the genius of Akira Toriyama's deformations. Fusing all of that with the modern magic of generative AI is what I call the 'Usami-style AI Manga Method.'

I have borrowed the souls of the great masters to finish this as a full-color entertainment piece.

I believe this is a job only I can do. Probably. A person who has been drawing manga for over 40 years uses AI as a tool. The brush has turned into a pen tablet, and the pen tablet has turned into a prompt. Even if the tools change, creating stories is still a human job.

Now, please read with your eyes wide open.

And finally, I will give you a warning.

If you find an unfamiliar note on the second shelf of your refrigerator tonight.

You must never touch it.

What happens to those who touch it, you will understand if you read this story. I know. I know, yet I still reach out for it. Because a midnight pudding is, helplessly, just too delicious.

It was truly a terrible story.

Oh my, oh my.