A Generative Graphic Novel

Our task was to work in groups to create a graphic novel with AI. My group consisted of Margarethe Schäfer, Sarah Lutterloh, Ylva Fee Beischall and me. Our graphic novel is titled “What’s wrong?” or “Was los?” in german.

We started the project by brainstorming our ideas for a story. We settled on the narrative being about a man who feels that something is wrong with him, and in the story he figures out what it is - at first we could not decide between making him be an alien or having him have a crisis about being a string of code. Ultimately, we went with the idea of the protagonist discovering that he is an alien and coming to peace with it.

We wrote the story into bullet points and then made a hand-drawn storyboard to decide how many frames we need and what we want depicted in each frame.

Then came the difficult part; the generating of the images. We used midjourney to create our images. It was a bit complicated to get the person in the images to have a consistent look to them and to also have the art style be consistent. Though creating the website proved to be easier. We decided on a simple layout where the text accompanying the story is displayed under the images with the pages number under it where you can simply click through them.

All in all, I found generating the images the most difficult part, due to how inconsistent the results could be in quality. Nonetheless, I found it to be a fun exercise for storytelling and working on creative projects as a team.