A new ‘fannish-but scholarly’ site of possible interest to Tentaclii readers, Comic Book Historians.

More delving into the options for ‘add-ons’ that can steer the Stable Diffusion 1.5 AI image generator toward certain styles or objects in its images. The community’s work on SD 1.5 add-ons now has an excellent range and depth (things move fast in AI-land), and also a healthy dash of ‘quirky’. The ethos is ‘free’, and there’s no payment involved so long as you run the image generation on your own PC. Image generation can be helped along by ‘guide poses’ created from 3D-figure desktop software such as DAZ Studio and Poser.

For the style of the French comics artist Moebius with SD 1.5 I found the following, after a thorough search:

* Moebius Color Style – v1.0 is a LORA that tries to emulate the later ‘colour Moebius’ style. Said to work best as an add-on for the large Xenogasm checkpoint model for SD 1.5, which seems to have been specially trained for the sort of subject matter you might find in old 1980s copies of comics magazines such as Heavy Metal, 1984, Epic, etc and similar. Perhaps also Zona 84, Ere Comprimee etc, at a guess. The 1970s-style Xenogasm model is NSWF in the eyes of the 2020s, as you might expect. Apparently Xenogasm 2.1 is the last before it started being heavily re-worked for more realism, so you may want to try that first.

* WASMoebius V1, which is an Textual Inversion ‘Embedding’ add-on for SD 1.5 rather than a LORA add-on.

* For a more old-school ‘B&W Moebius’ one might try the Centerflex – v2.8 checkpoint model. Its main promo images are photoreal and it is a “photorealistic-first” model. But delve into the description and note that this is a dual model. Switch it to its illustration mode and it is said to specialise in the ‘clear ligne’ line-art of the French and Belgian BD comics and Moebius in particular.

Artist styles that this model was explicitly trained to on include Roy Krenkel, Jean-Pierre Gibrat, Milo Manara, Willy Vendersteen, Francois Schuiten, Edgar P Jacobs, Herge, Jacques Tardi, and Moebius. […] This model contains a general activation keyword phrase to evoke a certain hybrid comic book style and composition. This phrase is “ligne claire” meaning “clear line” after the Franco-Belgian comic book [line-art] tradition.

* Possibly also worth a look, in complete SD checkpoint models, is the Protogen Infinity checkpoint model. Trained on comics, isometric art, science-fiction. As well as Protogen, ReV Animated (aka ReVAnimated) is a model name that pops up for use with the more comics-oriented LORAs. There are also SD 1.5 models trained on modern western superhero art, such as iCoMix.

* Metal Hurlant Comics – Moebius, Bilal, Druillet is a LORA trained on a range of the classic 1970s/80s French comics artists. Though it appears to work best with the more grungy Druillet style. An ‘alpha release’, and not likely to be updated to a 1.0 release.

Another Damn Art Model (ADAM) was partly trained on Moebius, along with other Heavy Metal and 1970s artists.

* There’s also a relatively refined attempt at Enki Billal – v3.0, a Bilal style which might combine well with one or two of the above. Update: And another attempt, Enki Bilal Style – v1.0.

Some people combine checkpoint models and LORAs and ’embeddings’. So for instance one might combine the big Centerflex model with the smaller Moebius Color Style LORA as an add-on.

I don’t see anything that can do the distinctive ‘dash shading’ of Moebius. Although I’m not sure an AI could do this, unless it could be trained to follow the shading on a depth-map from a 3D figure / scene…

Ok, that’s what I found. Now all I need is the 12Gb graphics card for the PC, to be able to try them out. 🙂

John Coulthart takes a long dive into “The Great Drone Ones”. Being his survey of… “the series of Lovecraft-themed albums that Cryo Chamber have been releasing each year since 2014”. The “wholly instrumental” “dark ambient” music…

is a better match for weird fiction than most of the rock music derived from Lovecraft’s stories, in part because it resembles the kinds of atmospheric timbres that you find on the better horror soundtracks.

The AI Art Weekly newsletter ‘$50 challenge’, themed as “Twilight Zone”. Submission via Twitter only.

The latest Illustrators #42 magazine (October 2023) leads with a Richard Corben feature.

The Halloween comics are also flying freely through the mists here in the UK, from the new This Comic Is Haunted British horror comic, to a set of Halloween themed Commando releases.

A clever stylised Kitbashed Cthulhu, via Propnomicon…

This is a bag of sea creatures from Target [a big U.S. discount store], a dollar-store bag of Halloween skeleton warriors, and a Vampire bat from the “Todd McFarlane’s monsters” playset from the 90’s

The exhibition Tales of Terra: A Lee Brown Coye Retrospective. Running until 2nd March 2024 in Hamilton, New York, at the Picker Art Gallery / Dana Arts Center.

Lee Brown Coye (1907–1981), recognized mostly for his unsettling illustrations in horror anthologies and pulp magazines. His creations for popular pulps such as Weird Tales and stories by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Manly Wade Wellman earned him a place in American illustration history. Featuring examples from Picker Art Gallery’s vast collection of artwork by Coye, along with loans from other regional museums and private collections, Tales of Terra brings into focus the less gruesome side of Coye’s artistic output and puts these works in dialogue with his published illustrations. This retrospective exhibition includes artworks that span Coye’s lifetime, examining his regionalist roots, his fascination with architecture, and his relationship to the places he lived, all of which found a place in his unique takes on the grotesque.

I found two quotes from Those Who Were There…

“In the middle and late forties, Weird Tales had one superior artist, Lee Brown Coye. Coye’s best work featured degenerate and warped humans, who fitted well with the weird inhabitants of Dunwich and Arkham. His illustrations for “The Whippoorwills in the Hills” by Derleth and “The Will of Claude Ashur” by Thompson were masterpieces.” (Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos, 1973).

“Karl Edward Wagner’s masterful tale “Sticks” (Whispers, March 1974) was an homage to the artist Lee Brown Coye, who illustrated several Lovecraft editions from Arkham House in the 1960s. Making use of the stick-lattice figures that Coye made his signature, “Sticks” speaks of these figures as glyphs designed to summon the Great Old Ones.” (Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, Joshi).

Coye’s depiction of Lovecraft writing…

The venue for this (probably one-time) retrospective looks rather remote, and potentially wintery from now on. A glance at the map suggest you’d go from New York City up the Hudson Valley to Albany, then strike west for about 100 miles.