There are ways to create comic strips using AI. Some tools even create a whole comic book for you using AI generated text and images. While they are fast and easy to use, they don’t generally produce good results.
The biggest issue with creating comic strips using AI generated images is consistency.
If you are using an AI generator that allows you to control some of the elements of the generation, you can create far more consistent comic strips than just trying to use a series of AI generated images in general.
Please note, this post is an expansion of one of the 60 unorthodox ideas to increase traffic for your business included in the Traffic Trove Virtual Card Deck. Read part 1 of this post “Comic Strips For Marketing: The Awesome Entrepreneur’s Guide“.
Table of Contents
- If You Use AI Tools to Create Your Comic Strips for Marketing
- Go Forth and Create Comic Strips for Marketing Your Business
If You Use AI Tools to Create Your Comic Strips for Marketing
You can use AI Tools to help you create amazing comic characters, backgrounds, props and speech bubbles. You can even use the tools to create a draft of your script.
But, be aware that using these AI tools to create your comic strip is not without its challenges:
Possibly the biggest challenge at this time is consistency of images from one panel to another. It is very difficult to create a consistent character (especially) with AI. There are a few workarounds and I cover those below.
Not all AI tools are created equal. Do your due diligence to see what results you can expect when using the tool you are considering. Check out if you will be happy with the consistency of the images, the quality and style of the comic, the costs, the flexibility and the terms and conditions, among other things.
Some tools may offer limited customization options which could restrict uniqueness or specific visual ideas you had in mind.
With this approach, there’s dependency on these platforms – their terms & conditions, price changes etc., could impact your workflow unexpectedly.
Improving Consistency and Control with AI Images
There are a few things you can do to improve your image consistency when creating comics with AI.
Break it Up
First, break up your images into their constituent parts: Background, character 1, character 2, prop 1, prop 2 and then assemble into panels for the comic. This allows you to focus on one thing at a time and to keep the complexity of each element down.
Getting consistency when there are a ton of elements is much harder than when there are only a few elements.
Give Clear, Descriptive Prompts
Give detailed descriptions in the prompt, including a description of the character and clothing and the style of illustration that you want.
Specify that you want different angles, different poses and that you want a “character sheet” with a white background. This should give you the same character in a variety of poses and a variety of angles that you can then crop into individual elements and to assemble into various panels.
If you need specific poses or details, specify those.
“An older woman with short salt and pepper hair, wearing a t-shirt and pants, in the style of a classic comic strip, different angles, different poses, character sheet, white background”
This is what I got
I like it, but I got some of the parameters wrong. So I am going to tweak it.
Tweak Your Prompts
New prompt:
“An older woman with short salt and pepper hair, wearing a t-shirt and pants, full-body shot in the style of a classic comic strip, character sheet, different angles, different poses, white background”
I also changed the aspect ratio and got this:
Clearly, the tool I am using (SuperMachine) does only 3 images in a character sheet and even adding “full-body shot” does not give that to me in this aspect ratio. Let me try again.
From what I have seen, mid-journey does a much better job of doing a character sheet.
Here I used this second prompt with a square aspect ratio.
Now I used the same prompt but with
“An older woman with short salt and pepper hair, wearing a t-shirt and pants, full-body shot in the style of a classic comic strip, character sheet, different angles, sitting down, white background”
I kept tweaking the prompt until I came up with something that I liked (and that gave relatively consistent results) and generated a whole bunch of different images using this prompt.
“A 60-year-old woman with short salt and pepper hair, wearing a plain t-shirt and pants, full-body shot in the style of a classic comic strip, character sheet, different angles, white background.”
But as you can see, there are a huge variety of images even with this clear prompt. And they don’t all follow the prompt precisely (sorry, I don’t know why).
Either way, I can’t use these very different characters to represent the same character in my comic strip.
That’s where seed comes in.
Using Seed with AI Art
A seed is an auto-generated unique number that kickstarts the image generation process.
Usually, you don’t need to think about this number, however when trying to create consistent images, controlling the seed can help generate consistent images or play around with different parameters and prompts.
What does this mean exactly? Well, if you keep the parameters, prompt, and seed the same, you’ll get an identical image each time. But by tweaking these factors slightly, you can create similar yet varied versions of the same picture.
So, back to our example, I chose my favourite version of the image and noted the vital information about it. Especially the Seed.
Seed – 1130109767
So I cropped my image to just the front view of my character and uploaded it back to SUPERMACHINE and then tweaked the prompt a little bit.
“A 60-year-old woman with short salt and pepper hair and glasses, wearing a plain t-shirt and pants, full-body shot in the style of a classic comic strip, character sheet, different angles, white background.
Have her sitting at a desk in front of a laptop.”
I also used the same seed and increased the Prompt Guidance to 12/12 and the Strength to 1/1.
Despite these potential pitfalls, creating a comic strip using AI can be a fun experiment at minimum or a fabulous traffic generating and engagement building tool at best. It offers an affordable entry point into this innovative marketing strategy while putting you at the helm of creativity.
So gear up…your journey towards becoming a self-made digital cartoonist awaits!
Go Forth and Create Comic Strips for Marketing Your Business
Whichever path you choose — illustrating or collaboration or AI — remember to create your comics to engage, entertain and subtly promote your brand and your products.
So go ahead . . . unleash your inner comic book creator and bring some joy and laughter to your readers while subtly promoting your brand with engaging comic strips.
