Honestly? It was cheap.
I can't draw, but I also couldn't afford to pay a real artist. AI helped me create the images I needed.
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I didn't set out to make a graphic novel. I wrote a movie.
Unfortunately, because I love action and sci-fi, I wrote a very expensive movie.
I'm still working to get it produced, but I really wanted to share the story now, and adapting it as a graphic novel series sounded very exciting.
When I started, consumer AI was grabbing a lot of headlines, and AI image generation was very intriguing.
It was far from perfect. Character consistency, for example, was a major challenge... and it shows.
Most of the images in this book required a mess of iterations. Once culled, most of the final images still required a lot of editing, compositing, and manipulating until they were even near to approaching what I was imagining.
In the end, I generated over 4,000 images, to create 250+ final images, for a 60+ page book. Not exactly efficient.
It probably took longer than if I had been working with a real human, and the art is far less uniform, but— I bet we would have had just as many creative mis-understandings.
The inescapable truth is, no artist would/could/should have worked for the same $30 monthly subscription fee.
For the record, I never consciously used the name of any existing work or artist in my prompts.
I have reservations about how AI is trained on existing imagery, but all art is inescapably influenced and guided by the magnetism of previous works, and then given another push.
That said, AI will soon be able to generate this entire work all by itself and for even less money.
AI will also write the text novel. It will voice the audiobook. It will generate the movie. It will create the eponymous video game. It will code that game for all the platforms. It will design exciting merch. It will execute a perfect marketing campaign. It will trend mightily on all of social media. It will minimize risks. It will maximize profits. It will ensure success. It will do it in seconds.
AI will also have completed several other projects in the time it took you to read that.
As a lover of science fiction, I'm not about to just embrace our new robot overlords, but… I did jump in, feet first, on image generation. It was fun, and it allowed me to create something that I could never have done on my own.
If you're here for traditional comic book art, this ain't that. This is a new thing. It may not be great, but it took a lot of effort and creativity despite the assist from AI, and I'm proud of it. It's my first book of any kind, and I'm only gonna get better at it.
People still love paintings, despite photography.
People still love live theater, despite movies.
Maybe, human-guided, machine-generated visual storytelling can find a similar space.
Cheers,
Manny Freitas
Available Now!
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