Project Writeup
4 min read
How I turned my favorite comic into a 10M views content pipeline in 2 weeks
A case study on spotting an Instagram trend, automating the boring production work, and turning it into an automated short-form pipeline.
I grew up reading Big Nate. I had nearly all the books and had been following the comics since elementary school. When I saw Big Nate videos catching on across Instagram, I knew the format had demand: familiar characters, quick jokes, and easy replay value.
I wanted to try it, then immediately hit the problem. Making one good clip was simple. Making them every day was tedious: find the comic, save it, crop panels, guess timing, render the video, repeat.
@thebignatedaily
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total views
110
posts
7,562
followers
The move
I found out GoComics stores Big Nate strips by date. Once I reverse engineered the page to fetch a comic from any day, the project stopped being manual editing and became a pipeline.
- Pick a date.
- Fetch the GoComics strip.
- Cut the comic into panels.
- Use word count to pace each panel.
- Render a vertical video ready for Instagram.
The video reached about 413K views and 32K likes.
Ugh, still too many steps.
The first script proved the format. Then I turned it into a GUI so I could preview, batch, and export without living in the terminal. After that, I wrapped the same workflow in an MCP server so a local AI model could operate it safely.
That changed the job of the model. Instead of editing videos, it could research popular or recognizable strips, choose candidates, ask the pipeline to render them, and report the real output path.
The win was not making one video. It was making the next video almost effortless.
Why it worked
The pipeline matched the business goal: publish fast, test more comics, and keep quality consistent. It preserved the reading experience while removing the repetitive editing work that would have slowed the account down.
That is how a childhood comic became a repeatable content system: spot the format, automate the bottleneck, use AI for selection, and keep the output easy to inspect.