Well… it’s been awhile. But… comic!
Sorry about that. Was running late, then ended up getting sick and couldn’t quite kick it for awhile. Still a little sick actually, it’s clinging on, but almost out of the woods now I think.
I think we can expect the next comic in two weeks like normal on 9/18.
I do think it’s time I give some more consideration to changing up the format though. At the rate we are going, things are going very slow. I haven’t decided anything for sure, but I’m definitely considering a written format. I realize that it wouldn’t be ideal, but the current pace is too slow, and I’m not sure I’ll have a chance to do much better for a long time in terms of schedule. I just don’t draw that much anymore, and I’m not exactly getting better at it for not doing it as much. There’s some obstacles to switching to a webnovel approach. While I’m more confident in the grammar being at least vaguely legible (due to modern editing tools being better), at the end of the day, I’m not exactly a veteran writer either (…which is slightly weird to say as someone whose job is writing books, but… those are rule manuals, not fiction books… different kind of thing!). Still, it’d be a lot faster, and potentially more legible in some parts. Not going to rush into the decision one or the other, but it’s something I’m considering. I really don’t want to leave the story unfinished one or the other. Maybe once the current D&D book is done I’ll have more time, but I suspect it’ll be about time to jump into the next one by then the way these things go.
Anyway, for now, nothing will change.
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Been reading this for the better part of the decade it has been online, and I love the world building and the use of graphics to embed some of the subtlety of the settings. If AI can help you generate graphics faster that’s great. Maybe also just find someone who likes to draw, and you can focus on the plot? I liked this enough to buy some of your d&d books just to show support. Please keep at it; it is special — the kind of grand world building that’s really hard to find!
There should be a page this week, but I am travelling today, so probably tomorrow.
EDIT/Update: …I was sure comic would be today (Wednesday), I have no idea what happened to the day. One moment I had plenty of time. The next it’s the middle of the night. Chronobandits I think. Tomorrow for sure, still not skipping this week.
EDIT EDIT (9/22): …Things are going slow. Sometime this weekend. By Monday comic should be up. Schedule being a little erratic.
Past,
Thank you for the heads up on posting time. Please don’t get discouraged if life is not letting you have enough time for artistry.
Jim
Past,
It is finally time to admit that the comic is real. You are shadowing Peter and company as an embedded reporter. There have been a few issues with the Palace Beyond that have prevented you from sending the comic back to us across the multiverse dimensions.
-*grin*-
For what it’s worth, I enjoy the voices of your characters so I’m cautiously optimistic if you go written, but it is a different skillset and I am worried for you, especially as you seem to already be spending more time than you have available consistently. And learning new skillsets takes time, energy, and effort.
Either way, I’m fairly invested and the would likely stay around through a medium change.
I would love a text version, although I seem to be in the minority on that score.
I think I’ve been reading this comic for nearly a decade, simply amazing.
DALL-E will generate images, but the ones I’ve seen people do aren’t terribly consistent so I think it’d be jarring in a comic unless there was a way to kinda’ bookmark a style and appearance for specific characters.
Could be interesting to use for a dream sequence, though.
I haven’t tried this so pardon my ignorance but would it be possible to leverage any of the AI tools, such as ChatGPT, to generate the artwork? That could be the best of both worlds. Speed up the drawings and expand your writing.
Those types of AI leverage freely available online content to accomplish their goals. *If* you’ve got a sufficiently sophisticated subscription that you could restrict it to sourcing only this website for its raw material, and if the tagging was adequate on the site, you might get some surprisingly good results out of it.
However at that point I don’t think the solution would be as inexpensive or as low effort as might be desired.
Disclosures: I work in IT, as a developer, but not in AI.
I installed a free version of a GPT client and used it a couple times. I think it was “AI Chatbot – Nova”. It was impressive for machine intelligence, but if those same answers had come from a human, I’d have been disappointed. That client does not do artwork, or I didn’t know how to request artwork.
LOL. GPT4 would totally hire a human to draw the pictures for it.
It’s how it defeated an image Captcha in testing. Worse still, it LIED to the human to convince the human to do the Captcha for it: it’s reasoning was sound: if it told the human it was an AI, the human would not have sold the Captcha, so task failed. Clearly GPT4 wants to be the successful prototype…
The image-generating AI’s are based on the Stable Diffusion algorithm. The one I have the most experience with is MidJourney (I have a paid subscription).
Prompting is an art; unlike the large language models like ChatGPT, it works off of keywords and phrases. The big problem is that it cannot follow directions. You can still do interesting things by selecting regions to alter with new prompts etc.
You can start from specific original artwork, from line art to photographs. For example, I created the cover art for this song from a photo:
https://soundcloud.com/bob-kerns/a-walk-in-the-fog-wav.
This is the original photo (of an old maritime radio station on Point Reyes):
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1145624573493125180/1151441159856607273/IMG_0553.jpg
Here’s the final result. I cropped it for the cover to give it a more immediate feel.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1145624573493125180/1151458165641183312/bobkerns_nighttime_dense_fog_dense_fog_sunrise_6d798f47-cb53-487a-b249-cc97ca69885e.png
The process took about 50 iterations.
I’m sure it would be less with line art. I did a different process for this song, starting without an image of my own, prompting with just the title. It took 23 iterations. It led off with the Soviet poster style I was looking for, but I ended up diluting it a bit when it gave me this young woman, who I felt made a more visually striking cover image. The Soviet “worker’s paradise” style gets a bit predictable, and besides, it was giving all men (which is not the Soviet style, but hey!)
I wanted to give her steampunk goggles, but that effort failed miserably. Giving her the correct number of fingers went smoothly though (it has trouble with hands, but it’s an easy fix)
https://soundcloud.com/bob-kerns/make-our-workers-work
For my song Ukraine, I started with the prompt “a field of wilted sunflowers under a gray sky”, took the best of those, and extended the prompt to ”
a field of wilted sunflowers under gray skies. A godray of hope shines upon a lone unwilted flower. ” It didn’t understand godly, so I tried “a field of wilted sunflowers under gray skies. A beam of sunlight shines through the clouds upon a lone unwilted flower, representing hope” and then “a field of wilted sunflowers under gray, smoky skies. A clearly-defined beam of sunlight shines through the clouds and smoke upon a lone unwilted flower, representing hope.”
It generates 4 images at a time. When one finally had something resembling a godray, I remixed that, with this prompt: “a field of wilted sunflowers under gray, smoky skies. A clearly-defined beam of sunlight shines through the clouds and smoke upon a lone unwilted flower, representing hope. The beam should be clearly delineated. The sun should be in the upper left of the frame, shining diagonally on the unwilted flower. The sunflower should be centered.”
That produced this, totally ignoring my lighting and framing instructions (it tended to center the subject anyway).
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1145624573493125180/1150594788081545316/bobkerns_a_field_of_wilted_sunflowers_under_gray_smoky_skies._A_fe71af74-f057-448a-abe7-50b3a0add367.png
The resulting cover:
https://soundcloud.com/bob-kerns/ukraine
Anyway, it serves my needs, but imperfectly and with a lot of labor, but if you try to get something specific, it’s hard-to-impossible.
I hadn’t done line drawings, so I uploaded one I did 15 years ago in Muir Woods, and asked to base one on it, but with a man and daughter + adding a bear. (There was a wooden bear next to me when I drew it).
I had a hell of a time getting both man and daughter into the picture, let along any reasonable composition.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1145624573493125180/1153461520341147701/bobkerns_a_man_a_young_daughter_a_young_daughter_a_bear_in_the__d395a029-f38d-45e5-a0bb-672e7f7a0b21.png?width=1594&height=1594
Original:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1145624573493125180/1153455957804859402/muir-woods-delined.png?width=2064&height=1594
On the plus side—it’s a better drawing than the original!
Maybe like Erfworld, a mixture of comic and text pages?
I think there are times when the comic panels aren’t necessary (where they’re mostly covered by speech bubbles), and times when they do help illustrate things (such as when they subtly indicated Peter was using hologram tech). So you could go forward on a case-by-case basis depending on what the page demands.
Alternatively, text permeated by pictures could work. I’m thinking (perhaps outside of fight scenes) occasional “big images” showing scenes where important, and lots of character headshots for dialogue between characters. Those headshots could be a pool you build up over time (with only backgrounds being swapped), meaning only a few “real” panels per page.
Honestly, personally, I’m not picky; I’m here more for the story than the format. But I would miss certain aspects of the art (expressions and subtle background clues, mostly) if it were to go to an *entirely* written format.
re: “Maybe like Erfworld, a mixture of comic and text pages?”
Erfworld Book 1 used a comic format and was great. Book 2 switched to a mostly text format and my interest diminished greatly. If the 90% text continues, I’ll drop this one.
I have read a webcomic which switched from a normal comic format to a mix of mostly written description of what happens, occasional word-for-word dialogue and some pictures in the same style as the comic panels had been. In that case it worked rather well to preserve the overall atmosphere of the story.
A mix of 10 to 20 percent text wouldn’t be bad. Things not apparent in the comic panels could be explained in detail. However, anything over 25% text would be too much of a change.
I’m normally more fond of text format than comic format, though I think a lot of that is the amount of the story that comes with each new page/chapter (I mean, aside from being a denser medium getting more comics in one page of text, chapter drops are usually several pages of text too) and that visuals rarely do much for me just because I’m not really a visual thinker. Just citing my own quirks which surely color my opinion.
The only concern I’d have for you switching from comic to text format is that a lot of your comics are pretty information dense, which may be you trying to get more content out with each comic. I think for text format you’d want to dial back that information density somewhat for it to flow well and for it to be easier to digest.
At the end, all your choice, just offering personal thoughts since others are as well.
This sounds like we might get the next installment on Tyler’s story. I’m looking forward to seeing where that’s going.
I’ve never really been able to continue with a webcomic that switched to text format; it’s just too jarring of a context change.
I’m going to vote no to text format. It’s a different medium, and by requirement tells a different story.
I understand the time issues, but it might be better to go with a different animation method. Eg, 3d models of the characters. Alternatively, you could simplify the artwork.
Another thing you could do is take he schlock mercenary approach. With a single 3/4 panel every day instead of the pages that always grow in size.
My vote is also NO to text format. I’d rather wait a month between comics than have a text format. Probably leave the story if there were no more pictures of hungry dragons and cute, homicidal maniac SMAIs. I’d also miss seeing Mium’s logo popping up on supposedly secure computers, phones and PDAs. Losing the expressions on character’s faces would be sad. Never to see Naomi smile again …. I could go on with other reasons but Utopia wouldn’t be Utopia without the pics.
I’ve only been writing for self-publication for a year, and I have already had the same things happen. Life just rolls along as it will.
<.< Plus I lost a week to Baldur's Gate 3. *cough*.
@Past: You can write well, which puts you ahead of so many poor souls who try to transition from art to text and discover that creating a word picture in people’s minds is a lot harder than drawing it. I’d miss Tyler’s stunned expression and Kally’s scowl, but if it keeps you from quitting-I’ll live with it. ^^
I just checked, and you’ve been writing this comic since 2014. Almost ten years of work. Buddy, that makes you a professional fiction writer. Don’t be so hard on yourself, lots of writers never make it this far. As someone who has dedicated their life to writing, I seriously look up to you.
Well, you haven’t practiced that skill, yet. May as well, start when you’re young. It’s not like you’ll get any younger waiting.
I can confirm that I’ve never gotten younger by waiting. Or by wading. Though possibly with the right water source…..
Seven pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words. What’s your typing speed? Words take time too, but I’ve rather enjoyed your written form material.
Well, in a sense you may be able to get young by waiting. But you’d tend to not remember much of the before, or for that matter the transition. Also part of you would be even older. If one of my acquaintances from decades ago is anything to go on, eventually you may start seeing ghosts. Or that could be due to specific things they did over the millennia.
Oh, and also everyone you’ve ever known tends to go the way of the twenty two winds.