Trying to Find a Comic Book Artist

Part 8: When Human Artists Fail...

My efforts to find a comic artist had been a disaster so far. Most had wasted my time and money for a single unusable page. The very best I was able to find wasted a whole lot more of my time and money on considerably more (unusable) pages.

For reasons mentioned before, I would have rather sacrificed money to pay an artist than learned how to illustrate these graphic novels myself. But it now looked like that was the only way forward.

Snobs and Karens in the geek world will complain about line art, about colors, even about dialog font and balloons, but generally speaking, most readers will forgive substandard panel art if the writing is solid. (Yet illustrators earn more than writers in the comic biz.)

One day Scruffynerf suggested I consider having A.I. generate the art I needed.

I probably balked at first—similar to how I once balked at self-publishing. But I saw examples of AI art and the quality was surprisingly good. Better than I could probably produce, myself, and better than what was needed for my graphic novels. Some pay-to-play services were around already. But there was also an open source program a creator could install locally on their own computer for free.

Having a machine do the heavy lifting for free beats the stuffing out of paying artists to frustrate me and waste my time. Why was I balking?

I began to look at this possibility more seriously.

No question that AI could produce quality good enough for comics. My concern: was it capable of consistency? Could it produce the same character repeatedly, but in different poses, wearing different clothes, and with different facial expressions? Could it produce the same vehicles and objects in different positions and angles? How about backgrounds?

Scruffynerf pointed me to some videos which proved consistent characters could be rendered via add-ons/extensions to the main program. And the software was improving all the time.

Okay, sez I. This is obviously the way to go.

Every week or so I come across a thread on Twatter or Substack in which two or three commentators opine that using a user interface which accesses complex algorithms for art is immoral, somehow. Like I’m stealing some theoretical artist his fare share of money (for ignoring the requirements of my story, then flaking on me). By this point, I had wasted a lot of time and money trying to get that theoretical artist to work with me. And for what? They showed absolutely zero loyalty to me or my project. Why did they deserve any loyalty from me? I had tried repeatedly to give artists a chance to earn a commission, only to be repeatedly stung.

Is it morally wrong to use computer software to write a resume? To draft floor plans for a house? To design a machine part? To do your book keeping? To play a game? Why, then, is it immoral to use computer software to produce art for you?

Anyway, the first order of business was to get a powerful computer. My desktop was at least 10 years old, and refurbished when I bought it. I needed something with a lot of RAM, a lot of hard drive space, and a powerful video card with a lot of VRAM. My desktop had none of that, by present standards. (“Present” being circa 2022.)

I went cyber-window shopping. What became immediately apparent was that the level of horsepower needed was expensive. Also, there were several video cards which boasted specs that seemed to meet or exceed requirements, but they weren’t REALLY as fast as the specs suggested because they didn’t have the RIGHT kind of this or that component. It was all pretty confusing.

I had some bucks leftover from what I had saved up for the artist fund. But still, it looked like a used or refurbished machine fit better with my budget, again.

I found a guy selling a gaming computer on Craigslist, located a few hours away from where I live. We communicated for a while and it turned out he was willing to build a tower that would fit my needs better out of used stuff he had laying around. When I made my decision, we figured out when our schedules lined up, and coordinated. On a day off, I drove out to meet with him. I bought the tower and brought it back home. I already had a spare monitor, mouse and keyboard, so I should be in business.

The first hiccup was, my monitor wouldn’t connect. The “new” tower didn’t have a VGA output. So, I went shopping for a monitor with an HDMI input. It arrived in about a week.

What I haven’t covered yet is what operating system I decided on. I’ve been sick, sick, sick of Microsux Winblows for a long time. It works a lot like government—progressively absconding with greater and greater proportions of your resources, wasting it on garbage you don’t want, didn’t ask for, and that makes everything worse, while demonstrating a diminishing ability to perform the tasks you bought the damn thing to do. It’s full of bloatware and is so inefficient that on a cold boot, more than half of the memory is burned up just sitting there, before I’ve started a single program that I actually want it to run. Then there’s its relentless self-corruption, “updates” that make it even less efficient, and its hidden mechanisms to spy on you which even normies are becoming aware of. Also, I’m sick of all the garbage that’s put in it to make it easier for idiots and smartphone zombies (forgive the redundancy) to use. It’s beyond irritating when I’m working on something and my cursor strays too close to the bottom of the screen, so their infernal weather app and/or MSN news updates pop up, blocking the view of what matters to me and often only clearing after repeated pounding on the Escape key—which sometimes also closes what was underneath it, that I don’t want to close. Whoever at Microsux forces these idiotic Winblows “upgrades” are the most obnoxious, arrogant, myopic, educated idiots working today.

You go, Microsux Girls. You’re rock stars! Your customers couldn’t possibly want anything different than what you believe we should want. After all, people keep buying your dogshit products. Right?

The only advantages of Winblows is that it’s cheaper than Apple and everything is compatible with it.

I like Linux. It’s stable, efficient, and has longevity. Its Achilles’ Heel is compatibility and user-friendliness. Or rather, the lack of those qualities. I have an Ubuntu Netbook which has outlasted all the Winblows machines I’ve owned since buying it. It can do most of what I need. But there are certain Winblows-compatible programs I use that randomly shut down for no apparent reason under that operating system. And when you do run into a problem, you are gonna have to do some research to resolve it—probably on a different computer.

Well, lately I was hearing good stuff about Linux Mint. That it was even easier to make it run Winblows programs; the user-friendliness was much higher, etc. I liked the idea of having a stable system, and a greater degree of control over how my expensive computer’s substantial resources were allocated.

So I went with Mint.

Of course, all the tutorials for downloading/installing/setting up Stable Diffusion were targeted at Winblows users. But I had Scruffynerf and some other intelligent friends to turn to for advice. So I took the plunge.

Even running familiar software on an unfamiliar operating system probably isn’t for the faint of heart. I would be running esoteric software on an unfamiliar system. Strike Two. Stable Diffusion is new. There is no user manual. There’s no help center you can call. There are a lot of tutorials to watch, which probably help most people running Winblows. But doing it the way I tried it was not idiot-proof.

I didn’t even know it at first, but I successfully got Python, Stable Diffusion, Automatic1111, etc. installed on the Mint machine. Finally I could begin learning what this newest artist could do for me.

I can’t remember what exactly I tried to do, but it crashed the system. Crashed it so bad that even though I set up restore points (or images—or whatever it’s called in Mint), I couldn’t repair it. Somebody more familiar with Linux probably could have, but honestly I was kind of lost even when everything was working right. Now I was hopeless.

Scruffynerf had warned me from the beginning that I should use Winblows. As much as I hated it, it is well-supported and widely known. Stable Diffusion is difficult enough to learn without a niche, esoteric operating system to contend with as well. He was right.

So, I was gonna have to start over. I wanted to make it a dual-boot machine so I could use Winblows only when necessary, but use Linux for most of what I do.

Well, that turned out to not be an idiot-proof task, either. I forget all the details, now, but in the end I threw up my hands and started over with just Winblows on the machine.

To be continued...