MIDJOURNEY PROMPTS - Top 5 Artists Prompts To Make a Comic Book

Midjourney is becoming hugely popular and my last video was met with quite mixed reactions. I thought it was an opportunity to explore some of my favorite comic and illustration artists and what Midjourney would create based on using the same prompt across 25 different artists.
For each of these artists I show an example of their actual work then a couple frames of what Midjourney decided their work looked like using the same prompt for everyone. It's interesting, strange, and pretty cool to see who Midjourney can replicate and who may not have been included in their data set. Check out the artists below.
0:00 An idiot talks about their last video
2:03 List of artists covered in the video
2:30 The experiment prompt
3:00 Jack Kirby
3:21 Osamu Tezuka
3:30 R. Crumb
3:36 Charles Addams
3:47 Mike Mignola
3:54 Bill Sienkiewicz
4:02 Charles Schulz
4:10 Alex Ross
4:18 Shel Silverstein
4:26 Frank Miller
4:34 Charles Burns
4:42 Matt Groening
4:56 Dr. Seuss
5:04 Bill Watterson
5:12 Steve Ditko
5:20 Chuck Jones
5:28 Gary Larson
5:37 Will Eisner
5:48 George Herriman
5:56 Jamie Hewlett
6:05 LIST OF TOP 5 ARTIST COUNTDOWN
9:23 An idiot recaps and tells jokes
Just to be clear. I'm not advocating that everyone drop their pencils and move to AI only art. It's a tool in the artist's arsenal just like photoshop or vodka. Use it when appropriate but some discretion is advised....
Check out my first video on making an entire comic book in Midjourney and Inferkit here:
• MIDJOURNEY - How To Cr...

[@markbrown2206]

A tip, for free (so value it accordingly) if you change your prompt to end ", made by XXXX" it seems to do a much better job of understanding that you are looking for an art style, as opposed to including the artist in the image or redoing some of that artists work in another style. I've been using prompts like yours to get consistent characters between panels. So a prompt may be "Cristiano Ronaldo walking a dog in a city, made by Jack Kirby".

[@philftw]

Ohh, I like this! Thanks for the tip. The community sharing is what's going to improve the output overall. I'll mess around with this and include it in an upcoming video.

[@_TheDudeAbides]

your tip is immensely useful for a lot of people, thanks

[@thefertilemind]

Which also means these artist reference photos would've been MUCH better if prompted that way.

[@reidmoto]

Wow, what a labor of love with HUGE, GIGANTIC, VALUE! Thank you for making this and I feel like I have such a huge palette of choices to work with in the Comic Book/Graphic Novel niche now. Awesome job, thank you!

[@mygad]

I do love the perspective you bring to working with midjourney. Thanks so much for taking the time to help us see things from a different angle than many of the other enthusiasts who have come from photography and photoshop strengths.

[@artmonkey22]

I have been intrested in this AI picture making things for awhile. I am an artist who has been been making drawings, paintings for a very long time. The process you discribe from this video and the other comic making video reminds me alot of collage work. The process has more to do with hunting down images as you would go through countless old magazines to find useable images which you then would splice, paste up and the like to create the work. The computer kinda does alot of that type of leg work. It's nice to see this topic covered from more of an exploritory artist perspective. I hope to see more. 😀

[@thebarbaryghostsf]

I keep defending AI Art, by comparing it to making a photo collage. Because that's what it is, as you correctly noted.

[@chopperking1967]

Another excellent video Phil!

[@Zefrem23]

Yup, there's definitely no putting the genie back in the bottle, or putting the demons back in Pandora's box, however you wanna slice it. Looking through the community feeds on the MJ site, I was gobsmacked by the sheer breadth of creativity that's being showcased and enhanced by these new tools. The weekender types will soon tire of Christina Hendricks in tight dresses and Winona Ryder as Trinity in The Matrix but the true creators will keep finding more and more interesting ways of using the toolsets to produce amazing work that wouldn't likely have seen the light of day outside of this fusion between human and computer minds.

[@netanelaker4437]

There is though. Stop feeding the beast with good art. Start feeding it with watermarks and low res.

[@danielrafferty4108]

@@netanelaker4437 That's like asking the internet to stop having content. Bit late for that.

[@netanelaker4437]

@@danielrafferty4108 . Cool. So at least pay reparations to the artists you stole from.

[@danielrafferty4108]

@@netanelaker4437 Yeah not disagreeing with that. Will leave it to better minds than mine to figure out how to make that a feasible option. I've been using Midjourney as a visual library for ideas for the past two days, but I am an amatuer artist and wouldn't pass off the work as my own. Just in the same way that I like to draw using references from my favourite artists, I've been using it to create reference pictures in general styles and some of my favourite artists that I will then recreate with my own style of illustration. I don't like the idea of someone winning over actual artists in say a competition or edging them out of job opportunities, but OP is right. The genie is out the bottle. The landscape will change regardless of yours or my reservations.

[@netanelaker4437]

@@danielrafferty4108 Right now it's an unregulated "wild west" and probably a nightmare for artists that might/did lose their jobs. If you use it as a reference - more power to you, I just don't like "artists" that think that if their write a line and a half in Midjourney and suddenly they are "artists". Idk, if all the artists that their art is stolen would get compensation, I would be happy, but we must fight for it - or else other professions might be in danger.

[@madmania5080]

I think your videos are really fantastic. Keep going. The advice is super helpful

[@AethyrPrime]

I’m an artist and writer, and I’ve been closely following this ai creative explosion. I tried a few names myself and most of it came back as gobbledygook like you did. But it is interesting to know that once the algorithm has been fed enough samples, it can start to mimic an artists style. Strange days ahead for sure.

[@robojobot77]

Thanks for doing sharing all this work. Very cool for someone like me, little knowledge of artists styles, but interested in learning more. This MJ stuff is proving to be a free way to learn. Dig the subtle but engaging pokes of fun at your self too. Fun! Thanks dude.

[@jeremypajotart]

Awesome! Please keep making this type of videos, this is quality informations 👍 thanks a lot for these, you really motivated me to make a graphic novel with A.I, this topic is gold, keep on it ✌️

[@nicholassanders527]

Keep this stuff coming!

[@CalBain]

Absolutely fascinating, thank you!

[@MikeKleinsteuber]

Great stuff and very useful. Thanks

[@thehidden2642]

Dude... Thanks for this video, this will set me on the right path with midjourney again.

[@taehanlee4198]

Awesome bro! thanks for your effort! yes, Mike Mignola deserved it!! his style worked for me! MJ caught the right style of him!!

[@MobileFilmmaking]

This was an awesome video. by accident I combined two different set styles: Hayao Miyazaki and HR Giger and the results weren't bad.

[@PestilencePage]

congrats u did science :P

[@sethsherwood5985]

I’d love tips and tricks for establishing consistency frame to frame, like sat for characters. I notice some MJ comics use celebrity likenesses so that they can have characters look consistent from page to page, but what about cars, objects, locations, etc.

[@MirrorValley]

Great reference! Thanks so much! Very helpful. I use MJ, Dalle2, and Stable Diffusion. Not only hoping to use them for my own graphic novels and picture books, but trying to figure out some interesting ways to incorporate them into my youtube animations as well. Exciting times!

[@Eli-of5D]

Thanks, I really like your videos!

[@s7ventude]

subscribed - great vid!

[@Eyeolair]

You can upload your own image to MidJourney and use that as reference. How to upload an image into the chat (no larger than 8mb) 1. Press the + (plus) Button to get the option to upload image. 2. Right click on image and view source 3. Copy the sourcelink from the browser 4. Type the Imagine command and insert the address you copied from your image. I havent been able to use this yet due to my trial period having come to its end but Im sure some of you will find it useful :-) Cheers and cheerio

[@thebarbaryghostsf]

Wow that's pretty dope. I wonder if you could be able to give MJ some sort of a rough storyboarded comic panel layout, and use that as a guideline?

[@happyfreeky]

Aha! I thought I saw a lot of Robert Crumb influence in the comic book video that you did before (?) this one. Great list of comic/ comic book artists. Or maybe I'm seeing Wolverton in your comic book and thinking it's Crumb

[@laststarfighterz]

Awesome video, appreciate the insight on the different styles didn’t realize it was Ralph McQuarrie who made the stars wars artwork (now down the rabbit hole I go with these prompts). I’ve tried these artist as well and gotten back some good results, Kim Jung Gi, Masamure Shirow (ghost in the shell) katsuhiro Otomo (akira), and also Boris Vallejo(Heavy Metal)

[@philftw]

Thanks for the comment! If you haven't been using the "-- niji" parameter in Midjourney you'll be stoked to see what Shirow and Otomo look like coming out of that. Just add it to the end of any future generations that involve manga/anime. It's using a library trained specifically to highlight those styles.

[@SeymourClevage]

Finding your videos really interesting. I would love it though if you could do a deep dive into comic life. A slow tutorial on how to use it would be great.

[@chadclay1643]

Cool, do more like this?. Very interesting results

[@anthonyzeal6263]

Good work bro.

[@VaibhavShewale]

well all i can say is that by this way we can only create a short story but it is still awesome like anyone can create the story that they have in their mind for long

[@thebarbaryghostsf]

Haha awesome, McQuarrie was one I thought of using for a Sci-Fi piece I was working with. I thought it would look pretty great. The piece I was trying to create was supposed to look like a 1980's movie poster, so I used "inspired by John Alvin" as a prompt, and the results were awesome! Try him if you are looking for something with a really painterly/cinematic feel. He created tons of posters but is really famous for his Spielberg/Lucas collabs. And Blade Runner.

[@philftw]

Love this, great prompt tip. This video is pretty old (by AI standards), it was done in v3 of MJ so I'm going to do a new one because v4 really changed the output from these prompts and adding John Alvin to the next set is a no-brainer. Thanks!

[@JohnSeabourn]

I really like Yuji Shinkawa or Akita Toriyama as artist prompts. I dabbled with Todd McFarlane as well and got some interesting returns.

[@peterson61]

Many thanks for your time and effort. Any ideas on how to control perspective/camera angle? I'm thinking worms eye view, aerial view etc. etc. Also, love the --stop command however, once upscaled it loses the soft effect no matter if --uplight was used in the original command or chosen asn a main setting...

[@user-on8bz8cy2f]

thank you!

[@TarlTelford]

Appreciate the information. I enjoyed the surreal journey of your first AI derived graphic novel. Now I am enjoying your informative videos on the AI assisted creative process. As another commenter mentioned, this process seems to be a lot like collage. Maybe this is where scrapbookers/junk journalers and comic creators collide ...?

[@NathanWind99]

More great information here, thanks for sharing your efforts! I've had interesting results using Walt Kelly as a prompt, it mostly works for cute animals, not sure if it's usable to make a comic but it usually has that old newsprint look. Any tips or ideas on how to get it to consistently spit out the same character in different situations? I think it will sort of work if you use a celebrity as the main character but that's not always desirable.

[@bradleeedwards]

Any tips for keeping characters (etc) consistent throughout a storyline?

[@sancho5198]

I am trying next thing: will generate a character based on famous actor, and then fix facex, and switch face with deepfake

[@FloKorp86]

Apparently it's best to work off of famous actors to keep the characters looks consistent between panels...

[@sancho5198]

New ways: 1. MJ: use famous celebrities parts and build a unique character. Like Brat Pitt's cheekbones + Stallone nose, etc. 2. SD: train with dreambooth. You can even use your face as a model, and then generate in different styles, genres, settings

[@daviddunstan9392]

Great taste in comic artists, but I cant help seeing the irony of acknowledging an artists work as 'unique' and 'iconic' and then proceeding to try and get an ai to replicate it. Artists who I'm sure when they shared their art on line would never had thought or consented to it then being used by an ai.

[@xfilms195]

You are Idea is great!!!Ai will not make good comics,without good intentions, and a clear vision, thanks for sharing your great idea with us!!!

[@GameZedd01]

I love your website! How did you make it? Can we get a video tutorial on that also?

[@Cowboytoycollector]

Also would appreciate a good recommendation for printing on demand preferably your book looks amazing

[@HorribleHomeVideo]

you are an artist now!

[@morpheus2573]

Many thanks for your comic creation videos. Very helpful. I see you haven't posted any more in over a year. Everything OK?

[@cobaltplasma]

Ashley Wood is a fun one to play with.

[@Amelia_PC]

If I recall correctly, Midjourney has something similar to Stable Diffusion img2img called "Remaster" (does it have it? I'm not sure. Can't remember). With that, you can add your sketches or photos as guides to generate images. I don't know if Midjourney has a tool to keep the consistency, like Textual Inversion, a way you can train AI to understand a character and reproduce it in any generated image later.

[@Uratz]

Anyway to prompt it create more superhero poses?

[@Hyper5nic]

Indeed Ralph and Moebius produce excellent results. Will give either (or both) a go, now that I have some time on my hand. 😉

[@Cowboytoycollector]

Been sending my work to u on Instagram I wonder if you could do a video that's character design related for adding dialog between characters also thinking of some original art into the story thanks enjoying the journey think it's just the beginning of the possibilities my story is looking great

[@TroplandUniverse]

Cool video. Watched your other graphic novel vid. Subscribing. Don’t about about the Reddit trolls. Keep at it.

[@yannberte8291]

For Ralph Mc Quarrie, perhaps try this one "...+ painted by artgerm Alphonse mucha, Akihiko yoshida, sakimichan, krenz cushart,..."

[@realgenghiskhan]

Please make a video on how to create manga with midjourney. Thanks 🙏

[@montanadivacreations9267]

I hope you redo this again with Midjourney v4 and newer as I think you find you will get very different and more satisfying results.

[@philftw]

Working on it! The v4 options are so hit and miss for me. I love some of the dirty weird I get in v3 but anything photo related is 100x better in v4. Any artists you recommend that show up best in v4?

[@totempow]

I'm getting some good results with Frank Miller and Alan Moore when it comes to their original characters. Frank Miller is doing good with Daredevil, Batman, and Sin City. While Alan Moore is doing pretty good with Dr Manhattan. Just a few I thought I'd bring up.

[@bustedd66]

i like that you didn't apologize even though you love and respect this art. when i was in college our computers had 4 colors s when i took art classes i took them with what we called "advertising art" students. they were very good. everything was done by hand and what was most impressive was how clean their projects were. barely ten years later and adobe has taken over. design is made so much easier to do. it's going to happen. the issue that will be interesting is copyright. right now US law says all this stuff is in the public domain. if midjourney spits out something no one owns it despite what their tos says. it has already been ruled on.

[@JedAlexanderify]

It's considered public domain until someone decides it isn't. Which could happen. Because this is very very new technology. And nobody fully understands what it does. So don't be surprised if somewhere down the road there's a precedent setting court case that says some kinds of images an AI can make are public domain, and some kinds of images aren't. Because there are still millions of images Midjourney has yet to make.

[@bustedd66]

@@JedAlexanderify i think what will happen is that there will soon come tools to better create exactly what we want. at that point what we make will be considered copyrightable. also. if you use the images in like in your book. that book fall under copyright law. because you created something

[@JedAlexanderify]

​@@bustedd66 what's interesting about art making is artists who do it the old fashioned way can't create exactly what they want, either. What a piece of art looks like is discovered through the process of art making. Artists can't take an image in their mind and project it onto the page or screen. So an AI is not going to be able to read your mind any better. You're always going to have to fuss around with prompts, and compositions, and manipulate the images until they come out the way you want them, and they're STILL not going to be exactly like what you imagined them to be. Better yet, you discover something new in that process that you like even better than what you imagined. This, by definition, is a different process than the traditional process of art making, and you're going to get very different results. As for what is or isn't copyrightable--you can think anything you like, but neither one of us know that that's how this is going to happen. Again, my own thought--since we're both speculating here--is that some kinds of images using this process will, and some kinds of images won't be copyrightable depending on how derivative the work happens to be.

[@bustedd66]

@@JedAlexanderify its not speculation. AI artists have already tried and failed to get their art copyright protected. I agree i think as the tool becomes more interactive and less of a crap shoot then one could argue that the piece is created by a human being. If you are curious Legal Eagle did a great job covering this in his video on NFTs. He is an attorney and he was not speculatiing. Right now. The art on midjourneys site is public domain. Now if you grab it and bring it into photoshop and edit it you can claim copyright but Midjourney holds no rights over that artwork.. that was my point. Under US law those pieces of Art are in the public domain and can be used by anyone. And to address something else. When a piece goes into public domain it can not be taken out. Perhaps future works will have some protection. But until US copyright law changes the definition. Artwork created solely by AI is not protected by copyright. If I wanted to go to Midjourney and grab all the best art and put it in a book and sell it I could. I wouldn't. But legally I can. And there is nothing Midjourney can do about it. And for now this is great for us. Because if Midjourney had the rights to that artwork. They could charge you a fee to use your own renders. And i think they would. Midjourney and DALL E are keeping their stuff locked down to do exactly that. I will be very interested in what the courts decide on copyright. because i don't think sites like DALL E should be allowed to force you to give up rights on a work that does not exist yet. You should be given an option after the render to let the site have limited rights to it. but that should be the choice of the AI Artist. For my part. I use Standard D exclusively. And support that work as I think it is moving in the right direction. Whe i create something. It is local and no one else can see it. If I sue it. No one knows if it is AI created. OR if I touched it up or created it from scratch. which will keep people from swiping it.

[@bustedd66]

@@JedAlexanderify remember. when something goes into public domain it can not be removed. This is why Disney has lobbied for decades to keep Steam Boat Willy protected, and why copyright has gone from 25 years to 75 years. they are terrified what will happen when it goes Public Domain because they know that can not be undone.

[@blurtam188]

How do you get a a consistent character image out of Midjourney?

[@flickwtchr]

image prompt plus consistent description relative to that prompt, and once you have a look you like in a portrait for a character use the seed as reinforcement to the image prompt. I've had decent success doing this. When the character starts to look different don't reinforce that output by upscaling, etc.

[@bohomazdesign725]

I have to say that Stable Diffusion does a way better job at "copying" styles than MidJourney and you can run it locally if you are rocking a GPU with tensor cores (the oldest would be the NVidia GPUs from the Turing architecture like the GTX 1660). Btw, someone already said it, but if u put the artist prompt at the end "by xxxx" it will give u better results. Also adding characteristics of the art style may help.

[@shinniehildebrand]

Hello! I got your videos suggested and I love it. It was exactly what I was looking for. What is your experience with creating a comic book with the same character across multiple panels and pages? Do you think it could be done?

[@philftw]

Working on a video on this exact topic. My first video showed how to put a book together but your question is more specific and worth exploring.

[@HeyHedgehog]

I’ve been thinking about incorporating Ralph Mcquarrie elements for all my AI generated art!!! I knew it was the Star Wars guy but I didn’t k ow his name, thank you!

[@jacobross6897]

Dude. I really second Winsor McCay. I've done some like from him, and it's really cool.

[@kpr2]

"like photoshop or vodka" - rotflmao! love it!

[@uwedettmann9061]

There are actually more good, if not better comic artists if you look beyond the American horizon. Here are some examples, each of these artists has their own distinctive style Hergé E. P. Jacobs Maurice Tillieux Grzegorz Rosiński Moebius (Jean Giraud) Philippe Druillet Tsutomu Nihei Jiro Taniguchi and more and definitely worth a try. And I got better results when I entered "artwork by ARTIST" or "drawing by ARTIST" at the end of the prompt. By the way, I never heard the name Basil Wolverton before. I did some googling and learned that I missed something great.

[@jfc_whyte2944]

i really like this and the last video about this topic keep up the awesome videos.!!! I'd love a more dive into the publishing and printing routes of it too if you would

[@toddzircher6168]

The best style match I got from midjourney was when making space ships in the style of Chris Foss.

[@TheSoapbox77]

"There is no Spoon" - Watch Phil become a millionaire by next year... "Heed his word"

[@philftw]

Step 1: Make videos about comics and AI. Step 2: ? Step 3: Profit! I like where this is going, now I just gotta figure out Step 2.... 😬

[@stoshmaster]

Fascinating and informative. I also appreciate the diversity of genres and art styles you used to sample from, though I would love to have seen at least one female artist's work. How would Midjourney do with Alison Bechdel or Julie Doucet or Renée French or Tove Jansson or Rumiko Takahashi or Pia Guerra or Emil Ferris or Posey Simmonds or Jessica Abel or Aline Kominsky-Crumb or ...?

[@snaabras]

Let's just say we respect women enough to not parasitize their work.

[@AbdessalamAlaoui]

Love to know how to turn those AI graphics into t-shirt design!

[@bobsolem6034]

Good way to approach it. So how can we get an AI storyline?

[@philftw]

Check out my previous video to see how to use Inferkit to create a story!

[@ArtwithAmarBrisco]

I think with midjourney if you are going for a style it is due to the amount of content available to and how smart the AI is at this point. So the issue now is scrapping the internet and finding the best images that will give the AI what you need at a starting point.

[@dwainmorris7854]

THE FIRST AI COMPANY THAT GIVES THE USERS CONSISTENT CHARACTERS THAT CAN BE USED IN COMICS AND ANIMATION WILL RULE THE WORLD

[@PaladinCiel]

Adapt to the tech or get buried by it. I've noticed they had been making changes to the algorithm recently, old prompts I loved using Dark Fantasy now just churn out crap, i had 1 or 2 prompts i'd tried greg rutkowski and chris rahn with and they are broken completely now. I'm guessing they did that to escape future law suits, but the results those identifiers put out were rarely ever in their direct style. I can't find a way to get it back.

[@philftw]

They've actually defaulted the algorithm to a new data set called v4. If you use "/settings" you can change it back to v3 and you may be able to get the results you're looking for. I do agree though that the changes being made aren't as good at getting interesting illustration results, MJ seems to be moving to a more photorealistic output target.

[@Sketchflix]

Isn’t this all based off of scraping other artist work without their permission or being compensated for it? The tech is amazing but ethically I can’t support it. The short term gains are great but this doesn’t encourage future artist to make new original work that will just be eventually scraped but someone making ai prompt art for a but or clout. It takes years of hard work and sacrifice to develop these skills. I dunno. It just doesn’t feel right.

[@tyjohnston8573]

For comics and graphic novel work at Midjourney, I've had much better options using black and white instead of color. Also, Geoff Darrow is another artist with a fairly unique style who has enough work for Midjourney (or at least it worked for me).

[@madmania5080]

I was able to make some amazing high quality art. Right now the art is being used for book covers and other things. It really works

[@CultofThings]

Can you tell me where you posted it on Reddit so I can post my work there as well? I want to see what kind of hate I'll get. It would make my day.

[@bicraveurtactics4908]

Mark Brooks and Geof Darrow works well for me.

[@cesarmiranda2477]

Please, keep developing videos about mj

[@NoFearZero]

Ai storyteller,ai artist,ai musician,ai videomaker, ai coder...Seems like the whole human creative process is being trivialized and we are going to be left with only machine operators not artists

[@DKMaester]

Can you do the same for manga?

[@Uratz]

What about Simon Bisley?

[@djeby6697]

David Finch .... you're welcome

[@philftw]

Love that David Finch plus a prompt gives me real world Sam Kieth in MJ. Great suggestion!

[@shakostarsun]

I like Kentaro Miura from Berzerk Rob Shields from Neon Cyber Ben Templesmith epic vampire stuff and Dike Ruan epic too.

[@shakostarsun]

I blend three of them together and everyone uses Artgerm constantly too.

[@camiloos1304]

I have a doubt, there is a lot of talk about the image rights of the images created by the ai, but what about the images that are used to feed them. For example, if I want drawings like Frank Millar, I had to feed the AI ​​with Internet images of Frank Millar that may have copyright because they are living artists and their works are not in the public domain. this does not cause problems. apart from the ethics of having a frank millar zombie in ai.

[@PestilencePage]

...i might say try diversifying ur artist list a little and also using a grammatically correct sentence is always good as it does seem to understand plain english eg "a portrait of xxxx by xxxx in the style of xxxxxx, xxxxx, xxxxxx" these last 2 prompts are extra styles u miight like to add eg dramatic and/or 80s etc.. i dont work in midjourney but i have and it seems to work generally the same across... working on something similar and altho i dont wana give my whole formula away it seems like some pointers is fine at this point XD

[@Firetrainer60]

You should remake this video now that sref prompt is out. Good luck

[@mudge843]

You know what people love about comics? That comic artists made them. If you love comics and graphic novels and want to make them, do what the rest of us did and devote years/decades of your life honing the multidisciplinary craft that includes but isn’t limited to: storytelling, composition, line control, anatomy, perspective, camera work, design and layout skills, in addition to just plain old draftsmanship. This should be one of the only places in entertainment arts that should still be held up as an honorable place for under appreciated ARTISTS to thrive creatively and this kind of new-tech tourism is the artistic equivalent of invading another country because they’ve got resources you want. Shame on all of you.

[@larslarsen5414]

What about Bilal?

[@CriticalNerdTheory424]

My question is can you legally use this AI art and sell it? If anyone can use these prompts can't multiple people have the same art?

[@philftw]

Yes, the Midjourney TOS gives you the full rights to do anything commercial or personal with the art as long as you make less than $1 million a year. Technically no image from MJ would be exactly the same but someone could use all the images you already created for their own work and I'm not sure what would happen then? These are good questions!

[@CriticalNerdTheory424]

@@philftw thank you and super thanks for both vids on creating a comic with this technology. I'm going to give it a try this week and I'll let you know how it turns out! I love the vid you did with the different artist so it looks like it does better with the non-superhero artist for the most part.

[@justMikec]

I'm a newbe to Midjourney, but not to comics. What about Frank Frazetta???

[@alltheserobotsshallfall]

AI still sucks big time with outlines, that is clear. The best results are from painting, photography or renders, anything that doesn't rely on the outlines but mostly on color shapes. It picks well brush strokes, but not well defined lines. Well, thank god.

[@davidpaxton6402]

Great video again! I duplicated every one of your 25 prompts by an artist with Stable Diffusion. The only difference is I appended the artist's name at the end like ", by ralph mcqarrie". My settings were 768w x 512h, 50 steps, CF Guidance Scale 10, Sampler Method - k_euler_a, and did 4 with a random seed. My results were far closer to the artist than your MJ in most cases. Just need to play around with settings and the prompt. It takes a while but is great when you get the desired result. AI art isn't just straight forward instant art. It takes a lot of work too. I know as Ive created over 10,000 AI art images this year already! lol

[@alexzandriathegood]

I noticed that some people are very resistant to AI in art and other creative endeavors, and I mean practically intolerant of change. But, to be honest this is the world we live in now and most people use AI every single day without even thinking about it. I'm not sure if they are intimidated by these tools or dislike how accessible it is. There's so much gatekeeping that aims to restrict, quantify, and even diminish creativity. This is kind of funny considering that these tools are somewhat useless without intentional guidance from a creative person!

[@JedAlexanderify]

These are definitely five artists whose work you can use Midjourney to manipulate and then reformat into a comic book. Then there's the ethics of doing this, which you don't discuss or even seem to consider. All five artists are no longer living so they can't complain. But not all of the work is in the public domain. You're not selling anything as far as I know. Of course as soon as you even attempt to sell anything you've made this way, you could be guilty of about a million copyright violations. There's been a number of instances where Midjourney even copies some mutilated form of the artist's signature. That's a very important part of this exercise. You should probably mention that if someone's going to do this, they shouldn't try to sell it. This is fan art, until it is not. When it no longer becomes fan art is when you're making a profit from it. Then it becomes something potentially illegal. So ethical question #2: what if these artists were living and found themselves on this list? I could tell you what I would think. If I found myself on this list, I'd think that someone is using software to attempt to replace what I do, and that would make me very unhappy. Not just someone copying my style, but someone using my work, my actual work, to make something resembling new work that I did not make. Could you see why, if you were that artist, how what might be a fun little experiment for you, might seem like an insult to the meaning and purpose of what they do? Because the software doesn't make art for the same reasons these artists make their art. It doesn't have their intention or motivation. It just regurgitates style. And art isn't just style. While I think what you're doing is intriguing, I don't think you're doing it in a thoughtful or responsible way. You're not thinking about anything but the results you can get. There's a whole conversation to be had here that you don't seem that interested in. And I think that conversation is potentially a lot more interesting than these images you're throwing together in a day or a few hours.

[@philftw]

I don't disagree with anything you say but I'm not sure my POV matters. I'd love to see a copyright lawyer do a video on this topic or someone with expertise on prior legal rulings. The digging I've done has consistently said that this all falls under fair use just like stock music "soundalikes" or even satire comics like MAD are considered ok despite spoofing specific artists. My goal with these videos is to share my experience and educate, but you have me wondering if there's an ethical responsibility too. Thanks for giving me another thing to keep me up at night stressing out about!!

[@JedAlexanderify]

​@@philftw you may be right--I'm not a lawyer either--but at the very least, there's still a lot of questions, because the people that wrote those laws for fair use couldn't have anticipated a thing like this. So I wouldn't assume anything. At best, we're still figuring it out. In the meantime I wouldn't try to sell your graphic novel. You might be safe with Wolverton but Ralph Mcquarrie? I think you're on less solid ground there. I'm sure his estate would have something to say about it. Because it's not parody. And I could make just as good an argument that it's more like sampling, and there are a lot of legal issues with sampling. When someone's actual signature ends up in the work, that feels more like sampling than satire. The Mad cartoonists were making new and novel work, not compositing existing work. But it's not just about what you can legally get away with. The key here is that it's drawing upon the artists OWN work, to make new work that looks like that artist's work. It's not someone drawing in the style of, like your Mad magazine example. It's repurposing their existing work. Without permission. And it's one thing if the artist is long dead, but if you do this to a living artist? Most artists I know wouldn't be too happy. You're taking what's theirs and using it to make something that looks like they made it. And the way you're presenting this, without looking at it in any way critically, gives people permission to do just this. You're not just "educating" people. It's an invitation.

[@JedAlexanderify]

@@Onnya-Lemox thank you. My intention is not to scold. All I want is for him to give a little more thought to what he's doing.If he's truly interested in education, then these are things he should be thinking about and actively discussing.

[@danielrafferty4108]

Great questions. Looking through the comments section here and seeing and replying to a lot of thoughtful people like yourself. As an amatuer artists I am using midjourney for the interest in where this trend is going and as a means of creating a visual library of references I can use to sharpen up my skills again in illustration. That being said I have been using Greg rutkowski's style the other day because I'm a big fan. This comment section did getme thinking, some part in shame that this is a bit weird, especially given some incidents on the chatroom i'm in using the bot and the images themselves. First, I had the images start to crop up with warped imitations of artists signatures, then I found people were liking my prompts and art that they were quicker to upscale or reiterate the process than I was. This made me realise that while I'm only using my visual library for reference that everything i do is within the public domain and someone else might not be as ethically minded as myself in terms of claiming it as their own. It also shows that while it's interesting and engaging it's not as rewarding as creating a piece of art myself, especially when you see that warped signature and you get a pang of guilt for what you're doing. Thirdly it also exposes me a bit to myself, that while my intentions may purely be for research, there's a tiny bit in there that goes "HEY!" when someone reiterstes or upscales what I'm doing that shows that no matter how hard I try to remain impartial to this new tool that there's a propietary knee jerk reaction to what I'm prompting the A.I to make even though I have a minimal part in the process, which doubles the shame after when I realise that they're creating a copy of a copy of the work I'm prompting this thing to emmulate. If I took it out of the digital domain, but all the facts remained the same it would be weird. Like if I printed out my collection to hang on my wall and for some reason Greg Rutkowski visited unexpectedly, saw this collection and was like "Wait a minute, I don't remember doing these pieces?!" and I was like "Well actually they're mine." and then someone else broke into my house and took them off me going "Well, actually their mine now as I've published them in books and comics."

[@JedAlexanderify]

@@danielrafferty4108 I think you've explained very well some of the ethical issues inherent in using the software. Especially when doing work, "in the style of." An old childhood friend said they had used one of these AI image generators to emulate my style and asked if I wanted to see the result. they said that I might be either flattered or insulted. And knowing that I couldn't stop them one way or another, and that someone was probably going to do this eventually anyway, I guess it didn't matter which. I told them that I did not want to see these images, that it would only depress me, and that I would appreciate if they did not use my art for this purpose. They said they wouldn't do it again. But I think many artists are going to find ourselves in this position, put their by either friends or strangers, and they're not all going to be so understanding. Our work has value. Qhen you do something "in the style of" you're nor just emulating the style of an artist but drawing directly on their body of work, to the extent that little bits and piece of their work sometimes show up in the AI image. Like signatures. Just after the artist Kim Jung Gi died, someone made an AI designed to emulate his style. It seemed ghoulish and in bad taste. Before he was even buried in the ground, someone was making an APP to replace him.

[@manmademythstudio4728]

Is there a place where we can have share all this comic book, in a common place? I mean, feels like everyone needs to have at least made one comic book in there lifetime having access to this techromancy.

[@haydenmaines5905]

I'm a computer science programmer first and foremost, and a business major second, so with that said, I'm mainly concerned with the legal ramifications of AI generated art - if it's all proprietary, where did the training data come from, who owns those rights? In the long run I'd say that, just like how photography didn't replace lifelike drawings, and digital art didn't replace physical art, I can't see AI art replacing digital art. It's just another tool, to serve as inspiration or a starting point - to be touched up, modified into what you need. Personally though I'm just concerned on a societal level on the fundamental architecture this AI method works on. It doesn't create anything original, it just regurgitates what it thinks we would like based on what already exists - and when you can control what exists and what doesn't (through what it gets trained on), you can lead to issues of overrepresentation or reinforcing of harmful stereotypes

[@sanguinetales]

I wonder how reddit would have reacted if you didn't tell them it was AI

[@philftw]

We both know the answer to that but I don't want to say it out loud or someone will find a way to downvote me on KZbin too!

[@timgoogsaccountsaresoconfu3458]

Don't hold your breath for the artist community to accept this anytime soon, but you're right, the cat is out of the bag. I once dreamed of being a comic artist but long ago realized the competition was too intense. Now with AI art generation only going to get better and better, better to find other ways to make a living!

[@diegomolinaf]

As thing goes, if the comic book community doesn't accept it, they will be left behind. I'm sure a new community will emerge with many, many creators that are now able to make comics for their stories and they will gather their own followers. "The genie is out of the bottle". "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me" is the saying :)

[@corvuscorax8941]

Did all them consent to give you the right to generate illustrations from theirs style and theirs names? This AI technology ask many questions about copyrights and how you can generate things or using trained AI from copyrights pictures for your own entertainment. i hope anybody will sell pictures or books from this videos with living artists or copyrighted ArtStyle.

[@fourth1000]

problem with these AI renderings are the compositions are flat as hell.

[@philftw]

I agree. There's still a lot of room for improvement but I imagine you'll end up with very niche data sets used to train for certain functions (like comics/manga or architecture) and that will help address that. We're still in the infancy of the tech so these issues will get addressed over the next 6-12 months. Even MidJourney v4 was a big leap forward for dynamic layouts.

[@chucknagillum1221]

When AI gets better at copying certain styles of art, eventually there will be loads of lawsuits against AI artist... The art community already encourages to NOT buy AI art.

[@reimagineuniverse]

Basically teaching how to steal other peoples work

[@netanelaker4437]

Nice, promoting tools that would make millions of people lose their jobs. Very, very nice.