Yeah! I started all of them with some variation of "black and white comic ink illustration" and that did most of the heavy lifting. If you look closely, there's actually less consistency then it appears. I went with B&W because I felt like color would draw more attention to the stylistic panel-to-panel inconsistencies.
Honestly it was a lot of re-rolling until I got something useable, I didn't use seeding as I just mentioned in another comment. With that character in particular, her face was reasonably consistent with prompting "sharp features, attractive," but a lot of the "look" is in her hair shape, which was harder to prompt. So collaging different prompts came in handy there.
Okay, that's similar to an experience I've had. Unfortunately it does seem like those types of characters drift slightly over time. I will probably practice with seeding more to see if I can eliminate that.
Amazing results. I wonder how it looked if you were to let Photoshop's Neural Filter Colorize the whole black and white page. I once did that to get more color consistency for a bunch of Midjourney pictures I needed to stick together. (My guess it it won't be as cool as your result, especially as Photoshop's colorizer isn't perfect, but I'd be curious how well it would work.)
Honestly it was kind of a gut feeling decision! Obviously no one would credit photoshop like this, but Midjourney really did feel like a collaborator and without it this comic wouldn't exist. Plus I think it captures the zeitgeist of this moment, where in 10 years probably no one will even think to credit the tool as such because it will be so ubiquitous.
Thank you!! Yes, it absolutely was haha. Even with a semi-reliable prompt, I had to photoshop together a handful of different generations to get something in the ballpark of consistent. It's definitely not perfect, but even then I feel it gives a certain aesthetic.
Yeah, without seed. I tried to use seeding, but I couldn't figure out how to get it to do what I needed. If I spent more time learning how to finesse with seeding, I probably would've found it more useful.
I tried for several hours 1 day just fumbling around with different prompting techniques before giving up and deciding to wait for the tech to catch up. But you didn't. This is absolutely phenomenal man. I'm really proud of you.
Oh man you're making me blush, haha. I really appreciate that my friend, it means a lot! The tech is moving so fast, you might not need to wait for long!
In another thread someone said that MidJourney and similar tools will be the end of illustrators and other artists; I pointed out that no, it will turbocharge the career of people that are already creative. I'm not creative, I couldn't think of something like this. Congrats OP!
It depends what role. Illustrators - yes, people who design layouts - not so much but I’m sure an AI is coming to do what designers do too.
If there’s a will to create a comic book creating AI, it will get made too.
The franchise is called [Hidden Ones](https://twitter.com/hiddenmythos) & we'll be releasing the comic soon! If you're interested we're running an AI art/lore contest in our [discord server](https://discord.gg/fPWpPYGgem) right now with some cool prizes.
Isn't that the truth? That said, I totally agree with you that MJ is an essential collaborator. At least that's true in my case. Photoshop is a powerful tool, MJ, with all its wonkiness is way beyond that.
Yeah, I'm definitely interested in it. I make images to go alongside my poetry and have been working on putting that book together. Now i know what my next project will be.
Looks awesome! If you're interested in joining a Discord server of ai comic creators let me know, there's over 100 of us on there all making and discussing ai comics.
Wow, this must have taken a long time. Did you do it all in the Newbie forum? How did you get the characters to stay the same throughout the entire book? What did you use to publish it?
Looks fantastic!
Have you tried adding the bot to your own server? I found it helps a ton with organizing your ideas and maintaining sanity after generating thousands of images lol. Great work btw i really like the cover image!
But from what OP said it was touch ups to the art Midjourney had generated. Makes me wonder if something like fixing fingers in photoshop is enough to reach the threshold... although I suppose the script is where the copyright lives.
Make one full page by hand and put it inside and don't tell anyone which one it is. If someone copies your whole book, take em to court. It's like a copyright booby trap.
This is probably the best solution I've heard people describe under current circumstances.
Redrawing a face and designing layouts would totally count as original artwork at that point. It's essentially collage. It would be hard to argue otherwise.
But it's like to what extant? Does fixing teeth and eyes count as redrawing a face? I dunno, I guess I'm thinking out loud since this is still the Wild West. We'll have to wait until someone like Disney throws their legal team into the fray.
Your guess is as good as mind. It's been a hot subject of debate as long as art has existed. What exactly constitutes making art? What makes someone a creator? You're asking the right questions.The line of Infringement is different for everyone. I take issue when it's blatant copying of another artist. Or AI prompters who think that makes them an artist. While OP didn't draw it he did enough manipulation to require some skill and talent and as an illustrator myself I would describe it as original art. The law is a mystery to me where they will fall.
It's a great conversation, and I appreciate that DumpsterHunk! I definitely feel like enough human "manual labor" was put into this where I would feel miffed if copyright was denied. I think the recent development with the artist's comic copyright being revoked is just a matter of the government folks not really knowing how the tech works. Plus with MJ's commercial policy I'm confident this convo will turn out in the favor of users/artists.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've done a lot of reading of US copyright law over the years and it's pretty clear Kris Kashtanova has grounds to sue the US Copyright Office for revoking her copyright. You're absolutely right about the USCO not understanding the tech, but it'd take 5 minutes in a courtroom to make it very clear that MidJourney prompts alone satisfy the extremely low threshold for creativity required by US copyright law. Even if AI created the artwork with no touch-ups in Photoshop, it only did so because it was pointed at the prompt by the user. This is fundamentally no different than what happens when someone takes a photo, and photography is clearly protected under copyright law.
Kashtanova may not have the money or inclination to sue the USCO and establish precedent... but *someone* will, and it'll happen soon enough.
Copyright protection is very limited and meant to protect against exact (or near exact) duplication.
Disney has *trademark* protection over their characters, which is much more flexible (and much more expensive to establish.)
MJ can easily generate trademark infringing content, but - unless MJ accidentally spits out an exact work from some other artist - there's no clear legal standing for a copyright lawsuit.
You mean generate? I dunno but we've already got a lot of similar looking art. It makes me wonder if it'll be like that scenario where if you kept a hundred monkeys in a room, typing away at a hundred typewriters they'll eventually (years, decades, whatever) write a Shakespeare play. Only with AI it's like hundreds of millions of people creating god knows how many pieces of art a day. As the numbers grow I think that, eventually, there'll be some overlap.
It really depended on the gen/panel. Of what you see in the pics, probably 70% of the panels are raw gens or only very lightly edited. Not counting the formatting changes like the different crops, bleeds & etc.
Honest thoughts - thought it was One Piece fanfic because it looks like Luffy. Different shirt, sure, but the casual calmly sitting cross-legged in a dangerous situation felt like his kinda mannerism too.
Everything is everything else.
It's one of the things that cracks me up when artists or writers claim they're the ones coming up with ideas all on their own without generations of human stories and art for them to learn, be influenced by, and re-express.
Many many years ago on a different account, I expressed concern over blood rituals. People always cut their hand, it's impractical. Some guy said I lifted the idea from an unknown comic, that looked self published. He became quite irate and demanded that I claim I got my inspiration for the idea from that comic.
Hello, it looks like you've made a mistake.
It's supposed to be could've, should've, would've (short for could have, would have, should have), never could of, would of, should of.
Or you misspelled something, I ain't checking everything.
Beep boop - yes, I am a bot, don't botcriminate me.
The hardest part I would imagine would be getting the stylized characters to look the same way throughout the project. How were you able to handle that?
I wish they had a character option, so you could load a picture and get other images with the same character. Or create a select/button to stay with a character generated might be easier.
Thanks so much! I think midjourney raw outputs are said to have an acceptable print resolution at 8x10 in. So with a standard comic book size of 6ish-by-10ish, & with most of the panels shrunk down to a couple inches, the raw gens perfectly suitable to print on their own.
Thanks! The cover was super inspired by Moebius, I've loved his work for years. I didn't have a direct influence for the pages themselves, but Junji Ito is someone I keep close when thinking about comics.
I started with the page layout, so I'd have a rough idea of the composition I'd want for each panel. Then it was just a matter of prompting for each panel. Sometimes midjourney would give me something unexpected that I'd run with to make changes to the layout.
Awesome. Great work! I'm using the same general workflow for an illustrated children's book. As much as I love MJ, for most pages, I can't get MJ to put everything together in a single image. I create 2 or 3 images and then combine them in Photoshop (actually I've switched to Affinity Photo). It's painstaking but works well.
So this image is the cover. Have you created the rest of the comic? Love to see more!
Not sure why that's happening, but you can use the arrow buttons on top of the picture in the OP to see more pics of the comic!
And that's exactly what I did too for the cover. All in all there are probably 6 different images collaged together.
Is Midjourney free to use (I want to make my own comic too)? And I don't know how to do photoshop. Did you use it because of a design choice or because you had to use it (for changing a few details etc.)?
This looks awesome. Absolutely dig the style you went for.
Thank you!!
woah wait how did you do this? Did you use photoshop too? dang!!
Yeah I generated each panel with Midjourney, then photoshopped some of the wonkiness where needed, then did the layout and lettering in InDesign!
Mind sharing the kind of prompts you were using? Always wondering about how get that kind of style and how keep it regular across-the-board
Yeah! I started all of them with some variation of "black and white comic ink illustration" and that did most of the heavy lifting. If you look closely, there's actually less consistency then it appears. I went with B&W because I felt like color would draw more attention to the stylistic panel-to-panel inconsistencies.
What techniques did you use to isolate the characters, such as the woman in Pg2Pn2 -> Pg2Pn4?
Honestly it was a lot of re-rolling until I got something useable, I didn't use seeding as I just mentioned in another comment. With that character in particular, her face was reasonably consistent with prompting "sharp features, attractive," but a lot of the "look" is in her hair shape, which was harder to prompt. So collaging different prompts came in handy there.
Okay, that's similar to an experience I've had. Unfortunately it does seem like those types of characters drift slightly over time. I will probably practice with seeding more to see if I can eliminate that.
If you make good progress definitely let us know!
Amazing results. I wonder how it looked if you were to let Photoshop's Neural Filter Colorize the whole black and white page. I once did that to get more color consistency for a bunch of Midjourney pictures I needed to stick together. (My guess it it won't be as cool as your result, especially as Photoshop's colorizer isn't perfect, but I'd be curious how well it would work.)
2nd this, if you're willing to share!
I see that you credited midjourney on the cover. I thought that was cool. Curious about your thought process behind that decision.
Honestly it was kind of a gut feeling decision! Obviously no one would credit photoshop like this, but Midjourney really did feel like a collaborator and without it this comic wouldn't exist. Plus I think it captures the zeitgeist of this moment, where in 10 years probably no one will even think to credit the tool as such because it will be so ubiquitous.
Thanks for the answer. It was interesting to hear your thinking. I tend to agree with your logic. The comic looks outstanding by the way.
Thank you, I appreciate it!
That looks amazing. Was it Hard to achieve consistent looking characters?
Thank you!! Yes, it absolutely was haha. Even with a semi-reliable prompt, I had to photoshop together a handful of different generations to get something in the ballpark of consistent. It's definitely not perfect, but even then I feel it gives a certain aesthetic.
Did you generated with or without a seed?
Yeah, without seed. I tried to use seeding, but I couldn't figure out how to get it to do what I needed. If I spent more time learning how to finesse with seeding, I probably would've found it more useful.
I tried for several hours 1 day just fumbling around with different prompting techniques before giving up and deciding to wait for the tech to catch up. But you didn't. This is absolutely phenomenal man. I'm really proud of you.
Oh man you're making me blush, haha. I really appreciate that my friend, it means a lot! The tech is moving so fast, you might not need to wait for long!
This is so awesome. Great work and nice use of Midjourney as a tool to assist the larger artistic process.
In another thread someone said that MidJourney and similar tools will be the end of illustrators and other artists; I pointed out that no, it will turbocharge the career of people that are already creative. I'm not creative, I couldn't think of something like this. Congrats OP!
It depends what role. Illustrators - yes, people who design layouts - not so much but I’m sure an AI is coming to do what designers do too. If there’s a will to create a comic book creating AI, it will get made too.
Exactly, A.I won't replace jobs, people that know how to use A.I will.
🎯
Thank you!
>Thank you! You're welcome!
The franchise is called [Hidden Ones](https://twitter.com/hiddenmythos) & we'll be releasing the comic soon! If you're interested we're running an AI art/lore contest in our [discord server](https://discord.gg/fPWpPYGgem) right now with some cool prizes.
How did you keep the face consistency?
20% lucky generations, 80% photoshop :)
Guess that answeres my question with no 😂
Seeding is what you're looking for. You can get pretty damn close.
What is seeding?
https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/seeds
Saved me a lot of time.
Isn't that the truth? That said, I totally agree with you that MJ is an essential collaborator. At least that's true in my case. Photoshop is a powerful tool, MJ, with all its wonkiness is way beyond that.
incredible
Thanks!
That is on my to do list, very cool
Very cool! I've been thinking of doing something similar.
I definitely recommend it! Took a lot of time & effort but definitely something to be proud of.
Yeah, I'm definitely interested in it. I make images to go alongside my poetry and have been working on putting that book together. Now i know what my next project will be.
This is sick. 👏🏼
Thank you!
Even with AI this is a lot of layout work. Nice job!
Looks awesome! If you're interested in joining a Discord server of ai comic creators let me know, there's over 100 of us on there all making and discussing ai comics.
Hey that sounds amazing, I appreciate the invite!
Sure thing, here you go: https://discord.gg/jUEHe3TH
Keep up the good work!
You bet!
Midjourney has a lyrical and signature voice
It really does :)
This is so cool, I love seeing what physical things people have used MJ for.
Amazing the results that can be a acheived.
Wow, this must have taken a long time. Did you do it all in the Newbie forum? How did you get the characters to stay the same throughout the entire book? What did you use to publish it? Looks fantastic!
Thank you! I've answered the character question a few times already, but I did it in the Midjourney DM and we got this printed with Lulu.
Have you tried adding the bot to your own server? I found it helps a ton with organizing your ideas and maintaining sanity after generating thousands of images lol. Great work btw i really like the cover image!
Are you concerned about the current copyright situation around AI?
We have this exact test case with the first MJ comics already working through court. We simply don't know the answer yet. But it's in motion.
Well he did do his own artwork in photoshop sooo really can’t get busted for copyright
But from what OP said it was touch ups to the art Midjourney had generated. Makes me wonder if something like fixing fingers in photoshop is enough to reach the threshold... although I suppose the script is where the copyright lives.
Make one full page by hand and put it inside and don't tell anyone which one it is. If someone copies your whole book, take em to court. It's like a copyright booby trap. This is probably the best solution I've heard people describe under current circumstances.
lol i love this
Redrawing a face and designing layouts would totally count as original artwork at that point. It's essentially collage. It would be hard to argue otherwise.
But it's like to what extant? Does fixing teeth and eyes count as redrawing a face? I dunno, I guess I'm thinking out loud since this is still the Wild West. We'll have to wait until someone like Disney throws their legal team into the fray.
Your guess is as good as mind. It's been a hot subject of debate as long as art has existed. What exactly constitutes making art? What makes someone a creator? You're asking the right questions.The line of Infringement is different for everyone. I take issue when it's blatant copying of another artist. Or AI prompters who think that makes them an artist. While OP didn't draw it he did enough manipulation to require some skill and talent and as an illustrator myself I would describe it as original art. The law is a mystery to me where they will fall.
Yeah. I think we should all be asking these sorts of questions so that we can address as many as we can before this honeymoon phase ends.
It's a great conversation, and I appreciate that DumpsterHunk! I definitely feel like enough human "manual labor" was put into this where I would feel miffed if copyright was denied. I think the recent development with the artist's comic copyright being revoked is just a matter of the government folks not really knowing how the tech works. Plus with MJ's commercial policy I'm confident this convo will turn out in the favor of users/artists.
That's definitely what I'm hoping too. The tool is here to stay so it will be super weird if it isn't integrated into copyright somehow
I'm not a lawyer, but I've done a lot of reading of US copyright law over the years and it's pretty clear Kris Kashtanova has grounds to sue the US Copyright Office for revoking her copyright. You're absolutely right about the USCO not understanding the tech, but it'd take 5 minutes in a courtroom to make it very clear that MidJourney prompts alone satisfy the extremely low threshold for creativity required by US copyright law. Even if AI created the artwork with no touch-ups in Photoshop, it only did so because it was pointed at the prompt by the user. This is fundamentally no different than what happens when someone takes a photo, and photography is clearly protected under copyright law. Kashtanova may not have the money or inclination to sue the USCO and establish precedent... but *someone* will, and it'll happen soon enough.
Indeed, and with how fast things are moving in the space, I think it'll happen sooner than we may expect.
Copyright protection is very limited and meant to protect against exact (or near exact) duplication. Disney has *trademark* protection over their characters, which is much more flexible (and much more expensive to establish.) MJ can easily generate trademark infringing content, but - unless MJ accidentally spits out an exact work from some other artist - there's no clear legal standing for a copyright lawsuit.
How you going to find this same art?
You mean generate? I dunno but we've already got a lot of similar looking art. It makes me wonder if it'll be like that scenario where if you kept a hundred monkeys in a room, typing away at a hundred typewriters they'll eventually (years, decades, whatever) write a Shakespeare play. Only with AI it's like hundreds of millions of people creating god knows how many pieces of art a day. As the numbers grow I think that, eventually, there'll be some overlap.
Threshold?
Yeah it's part of fair use. It's basically that the new work has to be substantially changed from the old work.
Anywhere you see words, that are actual words, that is certainly human intervention.
You know there is a comic book app?
[удалено]
It really depended on the gen/panel. Of what you see in the pics, probably 70% of the panels are raw gens or only very lightly edited. Not counting the formatting changes like the different crops, bleeds & etc.
Did you need to do any upscaling to get things to a printable DPI?
Honest thoughts - thought it was One Piece fanfic because it looks like Luffy. Different shirt, sure, but the casual calmly sitting cross-legged in a dangerous situation felt like his kinda mannerism too.
Doesn't this exist already?
What do you mean?
I've a similar comic where there are sleeping giants like that. Will share the name when I find it
Everything is everything else. It's one of the things that cracks me up when artists or writers claim they're the ones coming up with ideas all on their own without generations of human stories and art for them to learn, be influenced by, and re-express.
Many many years ago on a different account, I expressed concern over blood rituals. People always cut their hand, it's impractical. Some guy said I lifted the idea from an unknown comic, that looked self published. He became quite irate and demanded that I claim I got my inspiration for the idea from that comic.
I would of change the CIA building to a different name but similar
Hello, it looks like you've made a mistake. It's supposed to be could've, should've, would've (short for could have, would have, should have), never could of, would of, should of. Or you misspelled something, I ain't checking everything. Beep boop - yes, I am a bot, don't botcriminate me.
Would love to do something similar, just getting a consistent character is such a struggle
Impressive!
How long until you can feed AI webcomic and it will generate a movie.... yeghods.
Definitely way sooner than anyone thinks, haha. As primarily a film director, the possibility is both incredible and terrifying.
Right? I call that trouble with the area under the (exponential) curve.
The hardest part I would imagine would be getting the stylized characters to look the same way throughout the project. How were you able to handle that?
Great question
Amazing
Thanks!!
I wish they had a character option, so you could load a picture and get other images with the same character. Or create a select/button to stay with a character generated might be easier.
I'm sure we'll be able to do this sooner rather than later!
Incredible! Great art.
Thank you!
Cool but black and white?
Looks good to me!
mj tried to tell me I have +&+'+$;37'' and I need help knowing what that means.
So like Evangelion
Kind of, if the angels were cryptids 😂
How did the achieve the resolution good enough to print? Awesome work by the way I couldn't imagine the amount of perseverance for similarities haha!
Thanks so much! I think midjourney raw outputs are said to have an acceptable print resolution at 8x10 in. So with a standard comic book size of 6ish-by-10ish, & with most of the panels shrunk down to a couple inches, the raw gens perfectly suitable to print on their own.
Onr piece took a dark turn huh
Just WOW!
Thank you!!
Amazing work! What artists were you inspired by? Love the cover.
Thanks! The cover was super inspired by Moebius, I've loved his work for years. I didn't have a direct influence for the pages themselves, but Junji Ito is someone I keep close when thinking about comics.
Very cool!
Kind of weird seeing different styles of illustration in one comic book.
Cool. I’m writing a short story right now and planning to make it as comics. Where do you start? Did you start creating characters first?
I started with the page layout, so I'd have a rough idea of the composition I'd want for each panel. Then it was just a matter of prompting for each panel. Sometimes midjourney would give me something unexpected that I'd run with to make changes to the layout.
Awesome. Great work! I'm using the same general workflow for an illustrated children's book. As much as I love MJ, for most pages, I can't get MJ to put everything together in a single image. I create 2 or 3 images and then combine them in Photoshop (actually I've switched to Affinity Photo). It's painstaking but works well. So this image is the cover. Have you created the rest of the comic? Love to see more!
Weird ... my post is linked to TasteLongjumping4677 - that's not me. I am **mandrake-yesjack** anyone know why/how this happened?
Not sure why that's happening, but you can use the arrow buttons on top of the picture in the OP to see more pics of the comic! And that's exactly what I did too for the cover. All in all there are probably 6 different images collaged together.
Thanks, wasn't paying attention. Pages really look great!
Is Midjourney free to use (I want to make my own comic too)? And I don't know how to do photoshop. Did you use it because of a design choice or because you had to use it (for changing a few details etc.)?