The Northern Lights & Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Northern Lights Multiverse Adventure [AI ENHANCED]

Earth 1701.  [For the original AI-free version of this comic, click here.  For an explanation to “why AI?”, scroll to the bottom]

 

 

 

 

MAD DOG MIKE WILL RETURN IN THE MULTIVERSE SAGA…

Harrison and Mike have always prided ourselves in our “NO AI!” stance when it comes to our art.  (Not just visual of course, but also the written word.)  Much like Queen with their “Nobody played synthesizer,” we have caved – partially – on AI usage in the Northern Lights series.

Harrison and Mike wanted to begin including multiversal variants of ourselves in the Northern Lights based on the concept of us being crew members on one of the Enterprises.  This reminded me that in 1993, I drew a comic of me as a shuttlecraft pilot.  It would fit seamlessly into the Northern Lights multiverse with little alteration – just some changes to the front cover to give it a Northern Lights comic header.  But damn, was it ugly when I scanned it.  Blue ink on lined paper, bleeding through to the other side.

“Could you clean it up and colour it, Harrison?”

“I could but it would take a lot of time.”

“Well, we’re trying to reduce your workload, not increase it.  I hate to say it, but I’m going to ask AI to clean it up and colour it.”

Which is what I did.  I went to…(I can’t believe I’m admitting all this, but I always to my best to be transparent with my work)…I went to Chat GPT and entered this instruction.

“I drew this comic based on Star Trek.  Please clean it up and colour it.”

That sent me down a rabbit hole.  I did not keep track of how many revisions I had to tell it to make in order to get something presentable.  I learned quickly that AI cannot make simple changes to your image without redrawing it completely, and this means something that looked OK on the last revision looks wrong now.  But let’s start with what I got when I told AI to clean it up and colour it in.

I got:  A female me in one panel, constantly changing uniform colours, Geordi’s skin tone being inconsistent from panel to panel, and a continuous lack of understanding of what Geordi’s visor actually was.  AI had multiple visors in most panels, and I had to settle for what I was getting.  In the end, I used Microsoft Paint to cut and past the best renditions into one panel, because AI kept changing my face and making me more conventional.  See image below:

Then we moved onto the cover image, which AI never got right and I had to give up and finish it manually.  I asked it to clean up the cover image, and colour it similarly to the last one.  I also asked it to remember that my character was the same person as the prior image, so it wouldn’t make me female again.  (I was hot.)  The AI got it more or less right, and then I wanted to make selective changes here and there.  Only I couldn’t.  The straw that broke the camel’s back was that AI could not change the title box on the left without changing everything else.  You can see the image below is what I was left with when I gave up.  All I wanted to do was change the title box on the top left!  It cannot do that.  It continually changed the shape of the Enterprise, the face of the alien, and my face as well, going further and further away from my original on every attempt.  A huge fail for AI.  The alien in particular got creepier and more vampire-like on some revisions.

It’s also worth noting that AI took many liberties in cleaning and colouring my image.  It knew to darken the background and make the stars white.  It added more stars, and two planets that I did not ask for.  It removed panel lines that I wanted on the alien’s UFO.  It changed my face quite a bit, and I had to continually tell it to make the face look more like my original sketch.  The text was formatted by the AI to look more like a comic, but I liked it and it wasn’t worth customizing.  I had reached the point where AI couldn’t get closer to what I wanted without ruining everything we had already got.   Diminishing returns.

Then, I went in for a second round of edits, to further hone in on what I wanted.  In the end I finally got close enough for rock and roll.

In a perfect world, I would have preferred to have Harrison clean up and colour the originals manually, but that wasn’t feasible.  In the end, I do feel a weird sense of satisfaction, seeing a close approximation of my 1993 cartoon, coloured and cleaned.  Thank you for your understanding or scorn, whichever it may be.

To see the original, non-AI version of this comic, please click here.

 

Mike 

 

THE ADVENTURES OF TEE BONE MAN:  PHASE ONE – THE SQUIRREL SAGA 

THE ADVENTURES OF TEE BONE MAN:  PHASE TWO – THE MULTIVERSE SAGA

THE ADVENTURES OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS:  PHASE THREE – THE UNICRON SAGA

 

 

SPINOFFS AND SIDE QUESTS

 

THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF EDIE VAN HEELIN’

THE WRITER’S ROOM

 

 

 

 

 

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