You might anticipate a comic book series with fully AI-generated graphics to be full of bizarre scenes that make you tilt your head in confusion at what kind of sense-altering crazy you’re seeing.
Not so with the illustrations in The Bestiary Chronicles, a three-part, free comic book series by Campfire Entertainment, a production company with a reputation for innovative storytelling and based in New York.
The trilogy’s artwork is amazing and is thought to be the first comic book series to use AI-assisted graphics. They are also incredibly accurate, as if they were created by a skilled digital artist with a very specific narrative and aesthetic in mind.
The Lesson, the graphically stunning retro-futuristic third comic in the trilogy, is described as “the last survivors of humanity meet to learn about the monsters that have devastated their planet.” All three are currently downloadable from Campfire’s website and are also available as printed anthologies in hardback and softcover formats.
The photorealistic individuals in The Bestiary Chronicles don’t have altered facial features or limbs jutting at unusual angles, despite the tendency of AI-generated visual art to be extremely ludicrous. With their bright eyes and astoundingly awful teeth, the monsters resemble the love children of Godzilla and Vhagar and are almost indistinguishable from enraged animals.
The gloomy dystopian story, which borrows elements from George Lucas’ 1971 debut feature, THX 1138 and the 1960 sci-fi horror film Village of the Damned, seems to be created for this algorithm-assisted artwork.
According to Steve Coulson, writer of the trilogy and creative director of Campfire, which has produced immersive fan experiences for shows like Ted Lasso, Westworld, and Watchmen, they are witnessing the emergence of a brand-new visualisation tool that will fundamentally alter how stories are told throughout the comics business and in the wider world of entertainment. Their creators came up with The Blair Witch Project.
For The Bestiary Chronicles, Coulson used a tool called Midjourney, which quickly converts brief text passages, or “prompts,” into graphics by scanning a sizable database that has been educated on human-created visual art. It, Dall-E, and Stable Diffusion are examples of artificial intelligence technologies that are catching people’s attention online because they allow anyone to create intriguing and occasionally unsettling visuals from text.
A 114-page science fiction adventure about monsters created by man’s technological arrogance is called The Bestiary Chronicles. But it also demonstrates the amazing development of tools like Midjourney, which are generating visuals that are more and more refined and nuanced.
Over the past few months, AI picture production has made exponential and astounding strides.
Campfire Entertainment’s Steve Coulson
By the start of 2019, even a trained eye probably won’t be able to distinguish one generation of AI from another, according to Coulson. At the same time, it’s thrilling and horrifying. they are embracing the future as quickly as they can since it’s impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.
He continues by saying that The Lesson, which debuts on November 1, represents a noticeable aesthetic improvement over the trilogy’s first comic, Summer Island, a folk-horror tale inspired by Midsommar that was published in August. Midjourney underwent two updates in those three months.
AI, a creative partner
When the exhibit Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI opened in 2020 to explore the constantly expanding space where humans and artificial intelligence meet, Thomas P. Campbell, director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, said, Technology is changing our world, with artificial intelligence both a new frontier of possibility and also a development fraught with anxiety.
Some of that fear is brought on by AI producing visual art, music, and even authoring poetry and screenplays. This raises ethical and copyright concerns among artists and even attorneys. Art made by AI isn’t produced in a vacuum. It functions by ingesting and rebuilding previously produced human-made art. Will those real graphic designers, illustrators, composers, and photographers find themselves outsourced as machine-produced art advances and becomes more sophisticated?
Some artists weren’t delighted when an AI-generated image won an art award in September. One Twitter user stated, they are watching the death of artistry occur right before their eyes.
Coulson, who has read comics religiously since he was five years old, is among many considering the difficult issues brought by AI art, but he doesn’t believe that innovations like Midjourney will replace the comic book creators he has long admired. In the afterword to Summer Island, he states, Those geniuses have an eye for dramatic composition and dynamic storytelling that he sincerely doubt machine learning will be able to equal. However, it’s a tonne of fun to use as a visualization tool for non-artists like himself.
Midjourney will cheerfully churn these out 24/7, but he would never expect a human artist to simply create 100 splash pages and maybe he’ll pick the one he like the best. Then, after going over the visuals, he begin to piece together the story—almost like a collage—filling in the blanks as they go.
Although human beings had a crucial hand in which photographs made it into the final versions of each story, AI art is the star here. They played around with text cues and carefully chose their final photos from a variety of Midjourney offers, making the occasional Photoshop adjustment but otherwise leaving the machine-made art alone.
For instance, the Campfire team frequently utilised the style cue “olive-green, sepia, and teal-blue tritone print on watercolour paper” to give photographs a painting appearance because they enjoyed the rich impression it provided. The Lesson’s ideal retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic refuge was a futuristic underground bunker designed in the manner of J.C. Leyendecker.
They also called our heroine “Hitchcock Blonde,” and more often than not, she ended up looking like Grace Kelly, Coulson recalled. Without misplaced ears or a dog snout, there is a Grace Kelly that is easily recognized.
According to Coulson, AI picture production has advanced exponentially and mind-blowingly over the past several months, and this technology will only improve — quicker than we can anticipate.
