Randomly stumbled over the omnibus collection of this at the library…immediately took it home and blazed through the whole thing.
It’s a short-lived newspaper comic from the 60s about characters who know they’re running a comic. The fourth wall is in tatters, the meta jokes are decades ahead of their time, the crossover gags are exquisite. And beautifully drawn! Apparently people at the time were sure the parodies and cameos were an elaborate copy-and-paste job, or at least traced — but no, the artist was just that diligent about recreating the styles of the characters getting cameo’d.
It was the brainchild of Mort Walker (creator of the army comedy Beetle Bailey and its suburban spinoff Hi and Lois) and Jerry Dumas (who by then was his assistant/co-producer, and who did the art for Sam’s Strip). Honestly, I would put Hi and Lois on a list of the most blandly-generic newspaper strips, so I’m kinda surprised Walker had something this weird and innovative in him.
…Although it sounds like he’s not the one I should be judging, because the bland stuff was what sold. Sam’s Strip was beloved by the readers who got the jokes, but never caught on with a wider audience, and got canceled within less than two years.
(Then the character designs got repurposed for a much-more-generic comedy strip about small-town cops, and that was a hit.)
Skidding into 2025 with an aggressive effort to clear out my saved links, one broad theme at a time. (Did the same thing about a year ago, let's see if I can keep this up as an annual tradition.)
A writeup of the Moon Knight comics for pluralstories! I’m posting a draft here first, so I can share it around with other fans and get feedback. Because with 40+ years of issues to go through, the odds that I’ve forgotten or misremembered something are…high.
Specific things to look for:
Things to warn for? There’s no formal list of required warnings, and I’m assuming “canon-typical superhero violence” doesn’t rate. Just give a shout if you think I’ve skipped anything warn-worthy.
Creators: Let me know if I’ve missed writers/artists who had a significant role during a given volume. Doesn’t have to be “wrote the whole thing”, but at least make it “did more than one issue.”
Which runs to read: It’s not about quality, so please, no comments like “you should include run X, it’s so good!” or “don’t recommend run Y, it’s the worst!” This is specifically a list of “which MK comics to read for significant Headmate Content.” We have to include Bendis and Bemis. I’m sorry.
I’m also putting in some images, because this is long and I want to break it up a bit.
Small comics publisher Oneshi Press recently got hit with a “tricked into giving a real refund for a fake payment” scam. They gave a play-by-play of how it worked in their newsletter — it’s worth a read, especially if you haven’t heard of this one before, and/or if you take high-price commissions!
They’re trying to recover with a store-wide sale. I’ve mentioned their Spring 2023 anthology, Destinations, before — it includes a Leif & Thorn short story, which has not (yet) been published or released anywhere else.
So if you were interested, but never got around to buying it? Now is a great time to pick up the ebook or the paperback.
(Creators got an up-front page rate for their artwork, we don’t get any extra royalties from ongoing sales. So there’s no personal benefit for me if you buy these books now! All the profits go toward helping an indie comics company recover.)
“New hot meme for webcomic artists: upload one of your comic pages to Have I Been Trained, link to the first 4 webcomics (not drawn by you) that AI registers as similar to yours!” (Can I make this a thing? I’m gonna try.)
“Here is where it gets interesting. If I use the same prompt and add “Amazing awesome and epic”, the picture gets noticeably better. “Oh,” goes the neural net, “you wanted a GOOD picture”.” Rebloggable-on-Tumblr version of that AI art post from July 2021.
My favorite part of that one: the AI gives basically the same answer to both questions. It registers “this is a relationship help question,” and then it outputs Generic Relationship Advice — with a few brief details of the specific question pasted in, Mad Libs style — for both.
All these tech people boasting they’ve developed an AI that can replace human creatives (or are on the verge of developing one, please give them millions of dollars to finish the job) — dig a little deeper and you’ll find they’re just reinventing the Mechanical Turk with extra layers.
So the "forexposure_txt quotes turned into comics with Midjourney art" link from the last post is gone :(
Good news: Archive.org has a saved version! Bad news: it has a wild "getting stuck in an infinite loop of reloading" problem. Saving-grace news: it looks like if you hit Stop at just the right time, you can get a version where...most of the images have loaded.
Gonna quietly save the whole thing to my own hard drive now. Just for posterity.
It was originally posted back in August, btw. Some of this AI-art discussion makes it sound like it's a revolutionary new concept that just launched this month, and, no? This isn't the first iteration of AI art. Probably not the tenth, or even the twentieth. People have been refining it for years.
A couple weeks ago, DeviantArt announced a new AI art tie-in setup, including a “My Art Is/Is Not Authorized For Use In AI Datasets” option that you could toggle for all your art.
It’s not clear this will do much, since there’s no way to force non-DA art-scraping bots to respect your setting. But the basic framing of “this is an issue that artists deserve to have a say in” is good! Having a major art-hosting website stand behind that framing is valuable!
…They originally auto-set everything to “authorized”, and didn’t have a bulk way to switch the settings. Meaning that anybody who wanted a blanket opt-out would have to set it one-by-one for everything in their gallery. And if an artist has died, all their work would be marked as up-for-grabs permanently. Oops.
Honestly, this is the stuff that keeps me on DA. How many other websites out there will acknowledge “this decision, which was made by staff/stakeholders/the CEO/venture capitalists, is unpopular with our actual users, therefore we’re changing it”?
Tumblr? No. Facebook or Instagram? Heck no. Twitter? No, even before it got bought out by an egomaniac with unhealthy amounts of money. Patreon? …Okay, Patreon did it once, kudos to them.
Sometimes you’ll get a situation like Kickstarter, which announced their Totally Awesome Hypothetical Future Blockchain Protocol almost a year ago, and hasn’t developed a single thing since. I wouldn’t be surprised if, on the inside, they’ve quietly admitted it’s nonsense and given up on it. But that’s in response to “finding out the hard way over a series of months that they can’t actually wring a profit out of it,” not “listening to users who vigorously told them it was a heap of BS from day one.” And they’re not saying a word about it in public.
But DA has a quiet pattern of listening to users, and, when their big excited announcements don’t go over well, retooling their plans to address user concerns. Which I appreciate. It’s hard to find.
*
Look, here’s how I feel about AI art in general…
Hatsune Miku made her first stage appearance in 2009, and has been a wildly popular singer ever since. Here she is commanding the love and attention of a massive crowd in 2016, in a concert that lasted nearly 2 hours. She’s released chart-topping albums in Japan, and her adoring fanbase is international; she was booked for Coachella in 2020. (Canceled due to COVID, but I bet they’ll get her back.)
And if you explained this to anyone who’s not in the right nerd circles, they would assume Miku is a human.
She’s not! She’s a digital voice-generating program! You enter the text you want her to sing, set the pitches and the timing, and the software outputs a vocal track. Her concert appearances are in the form of a CGI anime girl, with a pre-programmed set of dance moves. She, and the rest of the Vocaloid franchise, are basically Animusic with a massive upgrade in processing power. (Also, thigh-highs.)
Kids who are currently in middle school do not remember a time when “humans pack stadiums to see a holographic robot singer” was a fanciful sci-fi premise. It’s literally just the world they live in.
And you know what we still have? Concerts with live human singers!
Computer-generated music hasn’t replaced human musicians. They have different strengths and abilities. They’re good in different ways. The one doesn’t make the other obsolete. Millions of songs produced with the Vocaloid software, over more than a decade by now, and they still haven’t put all the human singers out of their jobs.
Same deal with AI art.
Some of it is terrible. Some of it is pretty cool. It’s not as precisely controlled as Vocaloids, a lot of it is “turning the algorithm loose and having no idea what’s going to come out,” which is sometimes a drawback and sometimes the fun part.
Look at this robot’s best attempt to paint “Moon Knight drawn by Lisa Frank” and tell me that isn’t fun:
If you want a very specific image, AI art isn’t a great option. If you want to consistently reproduce the same character or setting across multiple images, it’s not great either.
Ursula Vernon — of Digger fame — has been making experimental comics with the MidJourney AI. it works! The reason it works is, she’s not a random non-artistic person who started with “here’s a comic I want to make” and tried to get the robot to produce it. She’s a brilliant comic artist with multiple series and at least one Hugo award under her belt, who put a lot of thought upfront into presenting the robot with “here’s a comic setup that takes advantage of your strengths, and doesn’t stress your weaknesses.”
In that link, for instance, you can see right away how it’s mostly disconnected vignette panels. (It also has human post-production touch-ups, and the art is tied together by human-written narration. More notes on her process at the end of the thread.)
So yeah, it’s gonna be fine. AI art makes cool new things possible, will lead to the creation of a ton of art that never would’ve happened without it, and some of it will even be good and worthwhile. It also won’t replace human artists. It won’t be the best option for every art-related job. Sometimes it’ll be a good-enough option — other times it just flat-out won’t cut it.
Anyone who thinks “just have an AI draw it” will be a magic answer to everything art-related needs to appreciate artists more. (Some of y’all are illustrators, who need to have more confidence in your own skills and potential! Others are just hacks. Probably the same hacks who thought “just put it on a blockchain” was a magic answer to everything finance-related, even.)
Three months after this post about getting a new computer, and things are going swimmingly. There was a building issue for a while with a Mysterious Hidden Process steadily filling up hard drive space, but this forum post had the fix, and poof, my free space went from 29 GB back to 129 GB.
I also did a writeup about Paint Shop Pro 7 back around that time, and figured it deserved its own post.
And hey, it pairs really well with this recording of the strip-creation process! Not quite start-to-finish, but most of the “cleanup-flats-shading-effects” process. (Light Quarantine Flashback spoilers.)
Legacy version of PSP: cropping, lineart cleanup, flats
Newest version Clip Studio Paint: tiled patterns, perspective effects, anything that uses nice brushes or complex assets
Either: shading, adjustment layers
Legacy (pre-subscription-model) version of Photoshop: files saved by Clip are just different enough to be unreadable to PSP, but re-saving them in PS fixes that
And here are the functions of PSP that make it extra-useful for basic comic-strip operations, i.e. the reasons I’ll keep using the program as long as it will run…
Opens real fast. Not as much of a bonus since I got the high-powered New Computer, which can even open Photoshop quickly, but still nice
Lets you paste on the layer you’re working on. I do a lot of “copy this bit of the lineart and paste it over that other part,” and if they generated a new layer every time, I’d be constantly stopping to merge them all
Same with adding text — which I write in another program, so it can be insta-copied as text into a transcript (I fully expect Clip Studio to add an “export all text into a plaintext file” option one day, it’s such an accessibility gimme!, but we’re not there yet)
Lets you paste a selection with one color erased to transparency. Lots of white backgrounds I get to auto-erase
Color/pattern settings don’t have to be universal, they can be different for every tool. So there’s a lot less referring back to the palette — you can just pair 2 lineart colors with the pen, 2 flat colors with the bucket, 2 shading colors with the brush, and then one-click switch between all of them
Keyboard-shortcut instant toggle between layers. Based on their order, regardless of layer names (lowest is ctrl+1, next is ctrl+2, etc). Working on one layer when you notice something needs fixing on another — toggle over, fix it, toggle back, without your eyes/cursor/attention being pulled away to rifle through the layer window
Switching between “view all layers” and “view current layer” also has an instant shortcut. No matter how many layers you have, pick one and see it alone in a couple of clicks, no need to go through and individually hide all the rest
This one isn’t about PSP working better, since Clip and Photoshop both have much more powerful vector tools…but PSP draws 99.9% of the lines I need that for, and it’s the one I already know, which saves me the effort of getting used to a whole new “click these points and drag those handles to generate this curve you have in mind” system
I could make a whole list of features where Clip and/or Photoshop have a fancier version, which is useful when I need to get fancy, but for a lot of these average daily operations, it’s overkill.
So: Clip has all these sophisticated content-aware fills — great, but you don’t need any of them to handle black-and-white lineart. Photoshop will let you do all this precise warping and twisting of vector text — sure, but I don’t need Fisheye Perspective Skew for the “click” of a door opening, just a little tilt and it’s fine. Both of them have amazing brushes; I don’t need any of them for basic cel-shading, it’s all covered by “freehand selection” and “multiply fill.” And so on.
And listen, if you got your start in CSP or PS (or any of the freeware programs still being updated), and learned digital-art skills there from the ground up, your workflow probably developed to fit that program anyway. So maybe none of this sounds like a huge improvement on what you’re used to.
But if it might be valuable, or sounds intriguing, or you feel like trying something new, or you’re just really into retro programs by defunct companies that are so well-coded they still run after 20 years and 5 OS upgrades…I’m gonna leave this link here. Have at it.
March 31: "When we talked, I was still so confident that this response was gonna look like the 2009 [H1N1] pandemic response, which was a good response. Initially, it had some problems… but once they realized what was going on, they kicked into gear and everything went pretty well. One thing that's super different is that the CDC in 2009 provided central leadership. They were proactively reaching out to state, regional, and local Health officials saying, ‘Here's what you need to be doing. Here's what this should look like.’ And people did it. I am scared and enraged because there's no central authority here. I don't understand what's going on."
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