Telegram Russian Joke Comics Automation with n8n, OpenRouter & Google Sheets

Turn Russian jokes into Telegram-ready single-panel comics—automatically

This n8n automation scrapes a Russian joke from anekdot.ru, converts it into a single-panel comic image using OpenRouter (chat + image), and posts the result to Telegram—while keeping deduplication, processing state, and image storage in Google Sheets and Google Drive.

What this workflow does

• Bootstraps history on first run: it searches Google Drive for the history spreadsheet, creating the Google Sheets file (and an images folder in Drive) if needed.
• Loads progress and builds paging: it reads the last processed page from the Sheets State tab, then constructs the appropriate anekdot.ru tag URL.
• Selects an unused joke: it reads hashes from the Used Jokes tab, then downloads and extracts candidate jokes from anekdot.ru—paging up to 15 pages until it finds the first unused match within the target length.
• Generates a strict comic plan: the chosen joke is sent to an OpenRouter chat model to produce a strict JSON description (scene, characters, and short dialogue).
• Creates the comic image: it calls the OpenRouter Images API to generate a square panel (with optional speech bubbles). If moderation blocks the request, it logs the blocked joke in Google Sheets and retries with the next unused candidate.
• Saves and publishes: the returned base64 image is converted to PNG, uploaded to Google Drive, made publicly shareable, and posted to Telegram with an HTML caption containing the joke text.
• Updates deduplication: it appends the joke hash, excerpt, timestamp, and Drive image URL to Used Jokes.

Use cases

• Automation engineers building a content pipeline that converts text sources into comic images and schedules posts to Telegram.
• SaaS operators who want an always-on “joke → image → social post” workflow with persistence and deduplication.
• Creators maintaining a Russian humor channel with controlled novelty and moderation-aware retrying.

Technical details

• n8n nodes/components: if, set, code, telegram, sticky note, google drive
• External services: anekdot.ru (scraping), OpenRouter (chat for JSON + Images API), Google Sheets (State/Used Jokes), Google Drive (image storage)