Can AI Create a Comic Book?
Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.
- John F. Kennedy
I’m not an artist. I’m not a computer programmer. But I wanted to know if I could use AI to create a comic book story from scratch. After less than a day I found the answer was a resounding “Yes.” (Now, if you want to know if it is a good story, well… you’ll have to judge for yourself at the end.)
I got my first comic book when I was six years old and have been a lover of the medium ever since. I even left a good job in 2009 to pursue a crazy passion of starting a comic art marketplace. But creating an actual comic book has never even occurred to me. So how did my non-developer, non-artist self use AI to “write and draw” a comic book in less than a day? Here’s what I did.
Step 1- Writing the Story
Computers still need to be told what to do; they don’t just create comics out of anticipation that someone may want to read them. So I intentionally gave it a simple and relatively straightforward prompt in OpenAI’s GPT-3 to tell the AI to write a story:
Create a comic book script with dialog and multiple characters of a short comic book story that has a very unusual ending.That gave me the script. (A very unusual script like I asked for.) I didn’t edit it or run multiple versions. I could have done that to improve the quality of the product but I wanted to largely let the AI run itself.
From that prompt, a 3–4 page comic book script was complete, and it only took seconds.
Step 2- Deciding on the Layout
This was one part where there was no computer involvement. Unfortunately, the original prompt did not give me an actual comic book script that would include things like actions or panel descriptions. It provided something like this:
INT. DARK ROOM - NIGHTTwo figures are shrouded in darkness, their faces hidden in the shadows.FIGURE 1:What do you want?FIGURE 2:I want what you have.
I had to translate this into pages and panels, which I could use in Step 3.
Step 3- Prompt the Artwork for Each Panel
Taking the first two lines of the script, I had to translate that into something that would output the desired result.
INT. DARK ROOM - NIGHTTwo figures are shrouded in darkness, their faces hidden in the shadows.
I translated that into the following prompt:
Two shapeless figures are shrouded in darkness, shadows, smoke, darkness, cinematic lighting, black and white film noir style art, 4kI ran a version of this prompt in three different AI generative art programs: Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney. Ultimately I liked the Midjourney result the best and used it for all the artwork (with some additional outpainting by DALL-E). The prompts needed to be reasonably consistent so that the output looked similar across the story. For example, this is a prompt from the second panel; see how close it is to the prior prompt.
close up of a shapeless figure, part human/part animal, shrouded in darkness- shadows, smoke, darkness, cinematic lighting, black and white film noir style art, 4kI repeated that process for every panel of the comic book until I had all the artwork complete.
Step 4- Title
Because every story needs a title, I fed the script back into GPT-3 and asked for a “creative title for the following script, not revealing the ending.” It gave me the following five options to choose from (most of which do reveal the ending):
1) "The Battle of the Cats"2) "The Darkness Within"3) "The Power Struggle"4) "Fighting for Control"5) "Kitty Cat Chaos"
Step 5- Assemble the Comic
Finally, I downloaded a copy of Comic Life 3 to assemble the comic, add the word bubbles, etc. And this is what the final story turned out to be.
The Verdict
So, can AI create a comic book? The answer is yes. And the quality will only get better over time as tools improve. The better question to ask is, should it? I’d love to hear your thoughts about the ethics and the story itself. I will take ZERO offense to any criticism. (The story has at least two plot holes so big you could fly the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier through them.)
In the comments, let me know your thoughts about the story and what it means for creative works!
