Comics – MRAAKTAGON

Stable Diffusion craziness

AI image generation is a fantastic new time waster, and I’ve been very guilty of it recently! I messed around with Stable Diffusion in online generators, but after awhile got sick of the wait, the censored images and the fact that you can only do a few at a time and bit the bullet for a local install with a GUI over the top. It was easy to set up (mostly just had issues with the python/torch install), and I was off to the races.

While stable diffusion has massive limitations on what it can generate successfully, it is simply amazing at what it does well: Single subject images and landscapes. Combine these together and you can get some awesome pictures– try anything compositional and you will get total crap every single time.

Syntax wise I did a bit of searching and found this below, which has worked very well. You can put in anything you want, but fine-tuning your prompts is very important to the output.

“A [type of picture] of a [main subject, mostly composed of adjectives and nouns -avoid verbs-], [style cues]”

Use of parenthesis apparently increases the weight of the item in the list, such as:

A painting of an alluring young woman wearing a (((translucent dress))) wading under a waterfall. Chiaroscuro. Volumetric lighting. Highly detailed. Realistic. Sensual. (Silky straight long hair). By Luis Royo, William Adolphe Bouguereau, John William Waterhouse, Terry Moore, Daniel F Gerhartz, Thomas Kinkade.

You are going to get those ((two things)) almost every time.

Running Prompts

You may get good results with a couple tries, but usually when I have a solid prompt, I run a few hundred or more images and then delete all but 4-5 of them that are good. SD cannot do HANDS and cannot do EYES well, or we are very good at picking out the fact that those are messed up compared to other parts of a person. Just remember when you run prompts– most of the results will be just OK but not perfect. When you find stuff you like, that’s when it is time to upscale the image.

The easiest ones are just: [Subject], [Artist name]. James Jean, Ashley Wood, William Waterhouse and Peter Paul Rubens are some of my favorites to add. For example:

Grace Kelly by Peter Paul Rubens.

great composition, good background, excellent face, terrible hands.

Favorite Prompts

Here are some of my favorite prompts so far:

(Monstress), centered, award winning line art illustration, detailed, isometric illustration, drawing, by [Any artist you want]

adriana lima [wearing something] in world war one painted by Jan Steen

The above are all paintings for the most part, when you get to photography, you can select the type of camera, the mm and the focus. Since these are all TAGS on the internet that millions of pictures have, the engine will know what to do with them.

Below is my absolute favorite prompt. It generates some silly stuff. I usually use Barbara Palvin/Kate Upton or some other very famous actress/ model that has thousands of pictures tagged online. You could put in any superhero/villain but I would say roam on the more obscure level so not every picture is exactly like your chosen hero. The Tilt Shift with 34mm just makes something special every time. If you put in “superhero” every picture is basically Superman.

Kate Upton as Big Barda, 35mm, Tilt Shift

You can go to town with the photo details as below. Remember, images are created via tags online, so if a tag has tons of images, it should generate something close to your intention.

Eartha Kitt with wavy blonde hair wearing a tuxedo, athletic, wide shot, award winning photo, sharp focus, detailed, photography, 50mm

Any ‘composition’ will turn out shit, but will be pretty silly.

A painting of a Redneck Rampage by William Waterhouse.

Nothing makes any sense.

Feelings

You can add FEELINGS to prompts and the engine will try to render them. Anguish, rage, happiness, love, sensual all work well and will show up in subject’s faces.

multicolor drawing made of smoke texture of Richard Prior warrior with a giant hammer crushing a horse skull by william waterhouse in 4k ultra high resolution, with feeling of love

The key thing is to make a hottie, you have to select a man/woman that has many, many many pictures of them on the internet. This is why I think Chris Evans, Sylvester Stallone, Arnie, Brad Pitt, Lana Turner, Grace Kelly, Kate Upton and Adriana Lima worked so well paired with basically any artist in any era/genre. If you pick, say, Pricilla Huggins Ortiz, you won’t get as consistent results because there aren’t many images of her tagged in them in comparison. or she is confused with 1000s of other people with a similar name. I suspect highly the models were trained on Adriana Lima based on the output I’ve seen because how could they not be?

More monstrosities!

Your Mom Has a Tank Ass – Albrecht Durer.

Farah Fawcette as Big Barda. excellent hair.

Masters of the Universe— except a KEN DOLL.

I won’t put any nudes up, but I don’t see how SD can do boobs so well, but hands so terribly bad!

2021 -EoY Favorite Comic: SPACE BASTARDS

After about 9 months of slowly collecting and reading the Invincible series, I was looking around for something GOOD in the comic store. There are tons of excellent comics tucked away between all the endless trash that comes out every month, but you have to search for them. While amazing art abounds, good or even passable writing is VERY hard to find in comics these days. I was looking for issues of the GODDAMNED (a story about Cain pre-flood that was pretty solid in the beginning) and came upon SPACE BASTARDS.

Space Bastards is a multi-writer, multi-artist affair and usually I hate those types of titles, the lack of a consistent artist to me is usually super annoying (BPRD and SUPREME by Image comics are good examples of this). However, Space Bastards has good artists, not all of them I like or I think are fit for the material, but there are a few that just NAIL it, like the esteemed Simon Bisley. I gave it a shot and the first issue I read was #6 and it had a part that I laughed out loud at– read again and laughed again. That has happened so rarely in most comics (with the exception of Groo!) that I can count the incidents on one hand. The story is a biopic about Chuck “Magic” Wagon and how his alcohol fueled rampages lead him to join the Intergalactic Postal Service; which is what the overall story is about. This particular comic goes completely off the rails as Chuck Wagon spirals into drug induced madness from which he never recovers. If you only read one issue, this is it.

Later issues concern the meta-plots more and having jumped in mid-series, I’m not super sure what’s going on, but that’s half the fun. Number 8 starts with an incredibly long rant/speech by one of the characters which is normally something comic readers can rarely abide, but this shit is psychotic and sociopathic GOLD. Not only are the characters violently insane for the most part, they are manipulative, capricious and none of them trust each other. While this is no League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with it’s both subtle and overt betrayals, it’s extremely compelling to just not know what the hell some of the characters are going to do and say at any given moment as they are prone to bouts of complete madness and mental breakdown. Recommended.

New Marvel RPG in the Works

This is a bit OFN, but the original teaser was so sparse I was waiting for more information before posting anything, but it looks like it’s all still under the covers except for the press release. First off, this looks like it will be heavily influenced by FASERIP, using it’s own acronym for stats (M.A.R.V.E.L. – Might, Agility, Resilience, Vigilance, Ego, and Logic) which is good because FASERIP has influenced nearly all Supers RPG’s since it’s release. The system it’s using is new, called D616?

When we pulled the first Marvel RPG out of the shrinkwrap and realized you couldn’t create characters, it was a bummer, especially after having played Champions for quite some time where frankly creating characters is the best part of the game. They ain’t messing around with this new one, you will be able to create characters right away, they’ve made that abundantly clear (see the image below). After reading Invincible, there’s no reason NOT to start from scratch completely rather than be bound tight in the hidebound MCU.

Lastly, you can buy the “Playtest Packet” for 10$ off Amazon here (not out until March 2022 though).

Invincible – Comic to Cartoon Show – Season 1

I finished watching the last episode of Invincible last week and can speak to the series so far in comparison to the comic. Generally, I think they are doing a great job with the cartoon show and the pacing is solid. The Invincible comic starts slower and then ramps up a bit quicker when it does get going than the show–then it starts to cover a LOT of ground. I’m over halfway through the comic series and unfortunately the writing quality really starts to drop, I THINK due to the tie-ins with the other Image comic heroes and what looks like some sort of cross-over event? The middle of the series has an interesting world-effecting plot line that seemed phoned in and didn’t mesh well with the overall metaplot of the series at all. I can’t tell from the trade paperbacks what else was going on with Image at the time, but I’m hoping the comic gets back to form.

But that’s far, far in the future for the Invincible cartoon show and I’m sure they will clean that part up (or even skip it).

In terms of the show’s pacing, the cartoon did the Omni-man plot much slower than in the comic, but did the ‘guardians of the globe’ plot much earlier. The Mauler Twins/ Robot incident doesn’t happen in the comic until long after the main ‘twist’ to the series is revealed. So we got more time with Mark and his dad and less time with development of the Guardians (the new ones that is, I’m trying real hard not to have any spoilers).

The coolest ‘added’ part in the show which isn’t in the comic is when Omni-man goes to the other dimension where the invaders keep coming from and fucks them up, big time. This was eluded to in the comic but never directly shown (as it would reveal too much about Omni-man at that time in the story). That was great.

The battle in the very first episode and the team battle in episode 5(?) vs Machine head were both superb. The comic handles the first Omniman battle quite differently and the Machinehead fight just hit all the numbers with even more intensity than the comic. Image comics (the good ones) have always had solid fight scenes, especially Savage Dragon, and I think Invincible deftly pays homage to Eric Larson’s masterwork.

Of course, there’s shit I didn’t like. I do not like the show’s version of Amber. The girl that Mark was protecting from that bully guy in the comic was not Amber, it was another girl and that girl had no interest in Mark at all. The issue has nothing to do with the fact that they changed her to a different character/skin color, it’s that Amber in the comic LOVES Mark, and it takes a really long time for things to go south because of his duties as Omni-man v2. Comic-Amber doesn’t ever tell him to fuck off and frankly, the way he’s treated by cartoon-Amber in comparison– she has no value as a girlfriend at all compared to the Amber in the comic book. It’s very strange. It’s like they wanted to make this empowered woman that won’t take any shit but that’s not at all what Amber in the comic is about, and Mark really tries to be a nice guy (albeit with anger management issues) and doesn’t ever give her any shit to deal with except the fact that he has to run all over the place to save the town/city/world at times.

Multi-hued Viltrimites. In only one scene there are darker skinned Viltrimites. Typically the Viltrimites are pale with black hair– they all look pretty much the same except for a couple I’ve seen in the comic with different hair colors (usually older ones). While I’m not going to spoil anything about what they actually are, seeing them with different skin colors was very strange and didn’t make a lot of sense. Part of what makes the Viltrimites.. uhh… what they are is that they are all the same and if they aren’t the same, part of a plot later on that’s critical doesn’t make a lot of sense. Let’s see where they go with this one. I saw three of the main Viltrimite characters in the short cut scenes in the last episode and they all looked like they did in the comic.

Final episode pacing. After the big battle, there was a very long period of mellow scenes to roll the episode out. Frankly I would have left it with Omni-man flying away, then cut. I don’t think they knew they would get another season (they did) so maybe that’s why they ended it a bit like a movie.

Anyway, these are minor quibbles to a really awesome series with incredible violence and a compelling meta-plot to hang everything off of. I loved that the lines that Omni-man was saying to Mark in the last episode were things that many dads would say to their teen-age sons. I certainly heard such phrases from my dad, basically “I should have raised you differently, you don’t understand what you are supposed to be doing, you’re not listening, none of the things you think are important now are important at all when you put things in perspective.” Etc. Just like dad’s saying those things…. the eerie part is: many of those things end up being true for many sons. Let’s see if that’s so for Invincible!

One thing you can absolutely count on if you haven’t read the comic is that the level of crazy superhero graphic violence will continue on and on and on.

“I suspect that we are ill-formed for the path we have chosen. Ill-formed and ill-prepared. We would like to draw a veil over all the blood and terror that have brought us to this place. It is our faintness of heart that would close our eyes to all of that, but in so doing it makes of it our destiny… But nothing is crueler than a coward, and the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining.”

Invincible Series debut Friday

While my daughter said “this looks like it has a 2$ budget” from the trailer, she will be forced to watch at least the first episode of Invincible on Friday.

I passed the comic up at the comic store based on how…. lame the main character’s uniform is. It’s striking, but looks like Elastic Man with different colors. However I gave it a try and the comic is good, easy reading, especially after I’ve been on the Alan Moore stuff for so long that is both text and artistically dense as hell (mostly due to Kevin O’Neill–wow) and let’s see how the show follows suit. There is a BIG twist in the series that doesn’t suck at all, mostly because when the twist happens, that’s when the story really starts– If you find it slow at first, stick with it early on until, well, you will know.

There are some parts that get tedious, but when the fighting starts it gets good in the same vein as Savage Dragon (who is in the series as well). The super hero battles deliver on a level rarely seen in DC or Marvel stuff and because the characterization and development is so strong outside the fights, they don’t turn into just your standard early Image constant battle comics (see 90’s Cyber Force, Brigade, Youngblood, Supreme, WildCATS, Stormwatch… did I miss any?).

Red Sonja #7

With the passing away of Frank Thorne, I pulled out Red Sonja #7 which I think is the only Red Sonja I own. I would have been to young to see this on the comic rack, so I must have picked it up in either a box grab situation (where older kids would let you grab a handful of comics from their box for 5$) or some other random set. I gave it a good read.

It was fantastic. It has Conan and Belit, as well as Red Sonja, of course, and they are after some sheet of paper that various sorcerers want for their own nefarious purposes. Sonja tricks Belit, Conan tricks Belit, Sonja tricks Conan–and they all get tricked by some priest. The art (Frank Thorne) is fantastic and the interstitial prose and dialog is just crazy good for a comic book of this era. Frank Thorne was an artist that we all noticed as kids, but of course never knew the name of. RIP.

I’m going to track down either a trade or more of the original Red Sonja comics– I gotta find out what happens!

New Mutants, what happened!

Maaaaattt and I tried to go to the movie theater Friday and it was great: we were just spaced out and had to wear masks when going into the theater itself. If we skip the masks, it would be a fucking AWESOME experience as it is a completely non-crowded theater by design. I recommend going to see movies now before things get back to normal as you will not have crowds.

However, our attempt to see New Mutants failed as Mother Nature had other plans. A GIANT supercell went over the top of the movie theater before floating angrily out over the lake and knocked the power out all over the area, including the theater.

And, of course, it was right when the movie was starting to get interesting.

As far as I can tell seeing only about half the fim, New Mutants is a horror movie with super heroes, which due to my love of BPRD (Hellboy), Call of Cthulhu and CMON’s The Others, is right up my alley.

And who is not a fan of Magik?

Justice League – The Giffen/DeMatteis years

I found the video below and wanted to post it for those of you that may have an interest. Even though I was a little kid, I was definitely OFF normal superhero comics by the mid-80’s, especially the DC ones who seemed super cheesy next to the Xmen– that is until Crisis on Infinite Earths, which was amazing beyond compare. Note: generally people think Marvel got WORSE after Secret Wars, and DC got BETTER after Crisis and set shit straight that DC was and is better than Marvel. Out of that came a new Justice League comic that was pretty much one of the best –and certainly my favorite— comic runs in the history of (standard) superhero comics.

This series takes a bunch of second run heroes, many of which were acquired from other comic companies over the years, and mixes them up in some high-stakes trouble while following many of their domestic lives. The core series with the writers lasted for 60 issues and is collected in trades. Like Swamp Thing, Groo, the Claiborne Xmen and Byrne Fantastic Four, JLI is a must read series even today and has had a huge influence on the direction of DC. The also excellent and much more recent Mr. Miracle series is almost a sequel to this work.

Comic stuff 2016!

Sheet. I haven’t posted in a long time here. Work has been kick me up inside the backside and I pretty much come home, do stuff I have to do and then veg out in Fallout 4 then it’s up early and back to the grind.

First, I found on drive thru a FREE updated version of FASERIP. This is that old yellow box Marvel game TSR put out that we tried to play instead of Champions or TMNT for once… and at 12 years old or so, failed utterly. I owe it to myself to try it some time as I tossed the yellow box and contents into the garbage about 10 years ago.

I’ve read some comics recently, some good, some bad, some in the middle. Needless to say, the superhero genre is only loosely represented in what I like to read.

Legacy of Luther Strode

traddmoore

This was an interesting series, 6 issues, and the very end of the Luther Strode series (really?). Tradd Moore’s art is unique and very clean. The first few issues were excellent, though light, fare. However, near the end and especially the last issue, It was a bit of a let down, just not dense and at the end of the last issue, I was like: why did I pick this up? I felt like I missed everything and had no idea what the characters were talking about when they were talking and not throwing down. However, many of the fight scenes in these are fantastic. Maybe you had to know all the characters first? Looking forward to more Tradd Moore stuff though after this taste.

low1

LOW

I liked this book a lot, until the mutant mice appeared and then… I just kept plodding along with issues. I’m hoping it concludes. It had moments of absolute brilliance early on. Tocchini is amazing. Read about the first 12 issues. Then stop.

lopper1

HEAD LOPPER

Adventure Time style art and Ultra violent viking shit. What’s not to love? It’s a lighter book (what did you expect?) but quality through and through.

bprd-monsters

BPRD

This series has been going strong for awhile now. I picked up some of the older trades in a used bookstore a few weeks back and was very impressed. BRPD is an offshoot of HELLBOY: this series is the fish guy, the fire girl and some others who are paranormal investigators and destroyers. It’s a bit like THE OTHERS board game or Xmen vs Cthulhu, and of course, could be compared to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with a lot less tracking of allusions! Recommended.

The FUTURE

Looks like fans of Moebius and Numenera/The Strange has another friend in Rick Remender with his upcoming comic: SEVEN TO ETERNITY. First issue looks like it’s out now.

Comic Recommendation

Head Lopper. Get it.

While I think LOW, one of my current favorites, may have jumped the shark with sentient MICE, I was happy to find issue 3 of Head Lopper sitting on the shelf and it’s superlative. Think viking violence mashed in with adventure time. I also picked up Miracle Man Olympus from the Alan Moore period where he teams up with the soon-after-to-be Swamp Thing artist. Also just finished Junji Ito’s UZUMAKI, which I had only read parts of on the internet in the past. Highly recommended.