Graphic Novel Progress
I’ve continued to work in the background on the graphic novel adaptation of The Man from Mittelwerk. The first and second issues are now complete.
It can take dozens of attempts to get an image just right.
The first issue was created using Midjourney and covers the first part of the book, set during WWII. The second issue mostly still uses Midjourney, but I also used stable diffusion via AI Comic Factory for some sections. And the second cover shown above was created with Ideogram which seemed to do a better job with action. Each issue is around 30 pages.
The second issue brings us to about 100 pages into the book, covering the first 12 chapters. In order to keep the pace fast, some scenes have been cut entirely. So the novel provides the most thorough treatment of the story whereas the comic is more like a movie adaptation. It’s got the same overall story, but less nuance and more action.
It’s a fun process to be doing the adaptation and I try to recreate the scenes and dialog as described in the book. The comic medium requires paring things down considerably, sometimes to just a line or two of dialog to capture the essence of a scene.
Often, I end up manually editing images to correct hair, clothing colors etc.
At some point, I’ll proceed with the third issue covering the middle of the book. But I may wait until there’s more consistent image generation and a proper web UX. My bet is Midjourney will get there first, but we shall see. I’m not sure how many issues this will take to get to the finish line but at least six and maybe a dozen.
Can you guess what English actor Asheton was modeled after?
Sometimes the AI generated images are quite bizarre!
