G: Yes. You gave the instruction correctly. The failure was on the generation side, and there are actually two separate things that went wrong.

First, on the handedness: you said his left hand, which is unambiguous. In a front-facing figure, his left hand normally appears on our right side of the image. Both generated pictures instead put the shaka on the viewer-left side, which makes it the character's right hand. So this wasn't a linguistic ambiguity between "left side of the picture" and "the man's left hand" in what you asked; the generator effectively collapsed those concepts and produced the familiar visual composition of a raised hand on the left side of the canvas.

Second—and I think you've correctly spotted the more interesting failure—you explicitly said:

“do not try and simply alter the one you just made.”

I did invoke it as a new generation rather than an edit operation. But the resulting generation nevertheless reproduced the previous composition extremely closely. Same basic pose, same raised arm, board in essentially the same place, similar clothing, cap, sunglasses, face, etc. That's because my instruction to the image generator essentially said retain everything about the successful concept except fix the hand. Although technically that asked for a fresh generation, semantically I gave it a very strong description of the previous solution. The generator then converged on almost the same composition instead of reconceiving the pose from first principles.

And there's an additional problem visible in what the tool actually did: the handedness constraint apparently didn't survive strongly enough into the generation. The internal generation description characterized the scene as a skater “flashing a shaka sign” without preserving the crucial anatomical requirement that it be specifically his LEFT hand. That's the load-bearing requirement of your correction, and it got weakened into a generic description before image generation.

So the chain was basically:

You: “Fresh conception. Everything else conceptually similar. HIS LEFT HAND must be raised.”

→ Me/image-generation handoff: retained lots of highly specific visual features from version 1, but failed to retain left hand as an explicit hard constraint.

→ Generator: recreated the successful familiar composition, including its original handedness.

→ Result: effectively version 1 rearranged/restaged rather than the genuinely reconceived version you requested.

Your observation about the text is therefore fair. It wasn't literally manipulating pixels from the first image—the metadata indicates it was a new generation—but conceptually it behaved much more like a remake of the first composition than a redraw from a newly constructed pose.

The particularly annoying part is that your instruction to start over was actually the right way to solve the handedness problem. A genuinely better attempt would begin with the skeleton-level constraint—character facing us; identify his left shoulder; extend that arm upward; shaka on that hand; other hand grabs board—and only afterward add the clothing, expression, rendering technique, etc. That would make handedness part of the pose rather than a late descriptive modifier.

G: The key is to distinguish “same design language and concept” from “same composition.” Saying “everything else the same” accidentally gives the generator permission to preserve the pose—which contains the error.

I would use this:

Generate a completely new illustration from scratch. Do not use the previous image as a compositional, positional, or pose reference. Preserve only its general character concept, visual vocabulary, level of detail, line treatment, color sensibility, and energetic 1980s/1990s skate-art atmosphere.

The subject is a wildly exaggerated cartoon skateboarder airborne during a board-grab trick. Construct the anatomy and pose anew.

CRITICAL HANDEDNESS REQUIREMENT: The skateboarder must raise HIS OWN LEFT HAND in the air, making the thumb-and-pinky-out “shaka/hang loose” gesture. Because he is generally facing toward the viewer, his raised left hand should appear on the RIGHT-HAND SIDE OF THE IMAGE FROM THE VIEWER'S PERSPECTIVE. His right hand, appearing generally toward the viewer's left side, should be the hand interacting with/grabbing the skateboard.

Treat this handedness as a structural requirement of the pose, not as a decorative detail. Establish the character's left shoulder → left arm → left wrist → left hand correctly before determining the rest of the composition.

Do not mirror the previous composition. Do not reproduce the previous placement of the arms and merely alter details. Invent a substantially different airborne body pose and board orientation so that the new anatomy naturally produces the required left-handed gesture.

Keep the qualities that worked previously: extremely bold outer contours defining the major shapes; substantially finer ink work, hatching, wrinkles, textures, and small details inside those contours; deliberately exaggerated anatomy rather than realistic proportions; grotesque but recognizably human cartoon features; manic skate-culture energy; distressed late-'80s/early-'90s graphic sensibility; vivid colors.

Do not include any words, lettering, logos, captions, or typography anywhere in the illustration. The eventual phrase “THE RADICAL LEFT” will be added separately and is only the conceptual joke motivating the image.

Before rendering, internally verify: raised gesture = character's LEFT hand = viewer's RIGHT side. Board-grabbing hand = character's RIGHT hand = viewer's LEFT side. If the pose does not satisfy that relationship, reconstruct the pose rather than mirroring the finished image.

The most important additions are the two-coordinate description:

“his left = viewer's right”

and the explicit separation:

“preserve design language; discard composition.”

I'd also remove all text from the generation request. The generator doesn't need to know how to spell or lay out “Radical Left”; the joke only requires the left-handed gesture. Giving it lettering creates another thing it can try to preserve from the earlier image and, as you pointed out originally, makes mirroring unusable as a fallback.

One other subtle change: don't say “holding everything else as it was.” Say “preserve these listed qualities and nothing else.” That turns an open-ended inheritance instruction into a whitelist. That's much harder for the generator to interpret as “make picture #1 again, but fix something.”

G: [Empty message]