The Laziest Way To Make AI Comics Ever
Can you make the entire comic book page in AI? An experiment.
Most AI-comics are made by generating individual elements like panels, characters, and backgrounds and compositing them manually. What if you could let the AI generate an entire page of a comic book for you without any compositing?
The Discovery
This method started when I saw this joke reply from The Bestiary Chronicles creator Steve Coulson. The Bestiary Chronicles is one of the best AI-comics out there, and Coulson just released a new free 78-page issue. When someone asked for his prompts, he replied:
Thinking it would make a funny reply to his post to actually generate that, I tried it:
Originally, I thought I’d share the above screenshot as a joke, but then I realized...
These pages actually look kind of good…
If I was to re-do the dialogue bubbles, you could pass these off as real comic book pages. Could you use this method to generate an entire page of comic at once?
I started to experiment.
Experiment #1: Comic from Full Script
First, I used ChatGPT to generate a comic idea and script.
Then - because we are laziness maxing - I pasted the entire page description into Midjourney as a prompt.
Here are the results:
As you can see - it accurately captures the “girl wanders wasteland” story, but not much else. The details of each panel and story beat are lost and the reveal of a garden on the last panel is absent from most of them.
Experiment #2: Comic from Concept
Then I decided to try just communicating a story beat. I told the AI to just draw a fight scene between two characters in the style of a particular comic artist.
The results:
Midjourney struggles with action, but these pages look pretty good. Absent the gibberish dialogue, they look like they came from a classic 80s comic.
That said, the big issue with these pages is consistency. Each page features very different characters than the previous, even when generated from the same concept. could we get sequential pages that feel like a cohesive comic?
Experiment #3: Multiple Page Comic
I decided to try multi-page concept with recognizable characters, where each page had a single beat of the story:
The results:
Page 1:
Page 2:
Page 3:
I don’t think these work at all. The second image on the first page is pretty cool. The rest are all over the place. Totally inconsistent character design even within the pages. Most do not capture the intended concept. This is a bust.
Experiment #4: Simple Prompts
I tried just the prompt “comic book page layout” and got this:
I was expecting a blank page layout, and instead got full pages. Like the first prompt, these look pretty good. If you had the right story, you could re-letter them. The advantage of this prompt is that you can get some interesting inspiration for little input.
The prompt “blank comic book page layout” got what I originally intended:
Not great, but that was the prompt.
I also tried the prompt “3-panel comic strip” and got this:
This looks like a comic strip, though it clearly dropped the 3-panels element.
I also tried “trippy psychedelic comic book page with full lettering in style of real comic” and got this nonsense:
Wew.
Potential Uses
First the drawbacks: This method produces inconsistent characters and style. You cannot use it to create a cohesive full comic. There is a reason most AI-comic creators generate each element separately, often making characters, backgrounds, and key elements in the frame with separate prompts and compositing them.
However, this method could still be used to:
Generate a full single-page comic that you re-letter.
Generate a layout that you then replace each image in.
Generate ideas, concepts, and inspiration.
You could also get a full page and use img2img to change individual elements in it. For consistent style, you could also train a Stability Diffusion model on a series of images all made in the same style and teach it specific characters. This might solve the consistency element, but it wouldn’t solve the missing storytelling beats issue.
I’m still surprised at Midjourney’s ability to generate full comic pages. I could see in the future, as technology improves, there being a tool to arrange panels or use AI in the elements of comic creation that are currently done manually, such as page layout. Right now, this is the closest I can see to using AI for full pages.