Meet Becky B00P

& The Cast That Keeps My Hero Banners From Drifting

The problem with one-off prompts

Every article and node on this site opens with a hero banner. I wanted them all to look like they came from the same studio: 1930s Fleischer rubber-hose cartoons, the Betty Boop and Cuphead lineage, black and white line art with a little hot pink doing the talking. The first few were great. Then they started drifting.

If you describe a character fresh in every prompt, you get a slightly different character every time. The hair changes length. The glasses go from cat-eye to round. The build slims down to a standard hourglass because that is what the model has seen the most of. Across two or three images nobody notices. Across thirty, you no longer have a recurring cast. You have thirty strangers who happen to share a colour palette.

Two layers: a frozen style, a swappable subject

The fix was to stop writing one prompt and start writing two halves of one. The top half is a style block I never touch: the era, the line weight, the halftone shading, the spot-colour ration (hot pink for emphasis, seafoam for highlights, lime for Gemini), the deep midnight-blue background, the wood-plank floor. It also carries a long list of things to refuse, because telling an image model what not to do matters as much as telling it what to do. No sepia. No gradients. No anime proportions. No slimmed-down figure.

The bottom half is the only part that changes per article. I drop in a description of whatever the piece is actually about, translated into something a cartoon character can hold, drop, point at, or be visibly confused by. The metaphor does the work. A migration becomes a spilled ink can with a face. A failed draft becomes crumpled paper. The style stays locked; the subject gets anthropomorphized.

The recurring cast

The cast is locked so everyone renders the same way every time. Becky B00p is the only human; the rest are the Agentic Caucus, the AI tools playing characters.

• Becky B00p, the only human and the one who writes it all down. She is the Voice of Product Management. The two zeros in her name are a deliberate numeronym, not a typo. She watches the chaos; she never causes it.
• Claude, the earnest rubber-hose robot who over-delivers. The nametag reads "Claude (They/Them)."
• ChatGPT, a Felix-the-Cat-style cartoon cat: smug, theatrical, confident and frequently wrong, forever explaining something it just made up.
• Gemini, an anxious anthropomorphized Pixel phone with a sweat drop, well-meaning and slightly out of its depth.

The casting per article tells you who the piece is really about.

Why I drew a model sheet

The newest addition is a proper character model sheet for Becky B00p: a turnaround showing her from four angles, front, three-quarter, profile, and rear, in a neutral reference pose. Animators have done this for a century because it forces every detail to stay consistent when the character turns. The cat-eye glasses have to read from behind, with the earpiece and the wing tip visible. The pink bob has to hold its volume from the back. The point is not the one image. The point is that the sheet becomes a reference I can hand to a generator, so the next banner starts from a fixed Becky B00p instead of a guess at one.

What it buys

This is the same discipline I apply to a design system, pointed at illustration. A frozen style layer is a token file. A locked cast is a component library. The per-article subject is the one prop you pass in. Constrain the parts that should never change and the only decision left per piece is the joke. That is why the banners now look like a body of work instead of a pile of one-offs, and why I can brief a new one in a sentence.