boobacious

[Announcement] Lust & Lore - Part 2

Published: February 22nd 2025, 5:46:50 pm

Hi everyone!

The next comic will be the second part of Lust & Lore, where we'll watch Chloé as she keeps pushing the limits of what's possible in the game with the help of her Cheat Engine knockoff...

What exactly she’s up to, we’ll find out next weekend, by which I hopefully will have finished the comic ^^

Contagious Augmentation - Part 5

Alright, until then, let’s chat a bit about part 5 of Contagious Augmentation!

Over the last few comics, I’ve been experimenting with various new techniques — starting with objects/body parts extending beyond the panel borders, to consistent backgrounds and characters in growth sequences, and finally, working with higher resolutions. Now, I’ve finally reached a point where I feel like I’ve mastered most of these elements well enough to combine them all into a single comic. I think I’ve especially nailed the first one (characters breaking the panel borders) - if I may say so myself, haha. Initially, these pages always stood out too much from the rest of the comic and felt a bit unnatural to me. But in this comic, they blend in really well and no longer feel like they were awkwardly slapped on as a showcase — they’ve become an organic part of the comic (at least in my opinion — hopefully, you see it the same way ^^).

I genuinely believe I’ve been able to massively improve the quality of my comics over the past months - the resolution bump in particular has made a big difference in my opinion. The only downside to all of this is that my workload per comic keeps increasing and increasing... cry. Over the last few months, the time I need to complete a comic has easily more than doubled. I definitely want to focus on quality over quantity (there are already plenty of AI "artists" out there who just mass-upload their unedited output folders), but at the same time, I understand that you guys expect a certain level of regular releases (which is completely fair — you are paying for this, after all).

But sometimes, I do wonder if the effort I put into certain things is actually worth it, or if I should be allocating my resources differently. To give you an example: Right now, I spend a lot of time fixing errors in the images and ensuring background consistency. The fingers (probably the biggest weakness of AI-generated images, haha) still aren’t perfect in 100% of cases, but I’ve gotten much more meticulous about making sure they look decent and that there's the correct number of them. Especially in growth sequences, I make sure the backgrounds remain consistent throughout. And then there are all the little details spread throughout the comic. In this one, for example, the couch. Even though I explicitly had “red couch” in my prompts, the color of the couch sometimes changed from image to image (especially when multiple colors are involved — like a red couch, orange top, violet skirt, white tights... — Stable Diffusion really struggles to keep colors consistent due to how it works). So I ended up spending a considerable amount of time editing the images to ensure the couch stayed the correct color across the entire comic.

And the question I keep asking myself while doing all this is: Does anyone even notice?
Like, does this extra effort actually improve the reading experience in a meaningful way? I sometimes look at other creators’ comics, and most of them (not all, of course) don’t seem to care about this kind of thing at all — backgrounds and even character details change drastically from panel to panel. This allows them to create comics much faster and produce way more content than I do.
Of course, I immediately notice these inconsistencies because I’ve trained my eye to pick up on them. But to a “normal” person who just wants to read an expansion comic... Do they even see all these little details that don’t match?

But yeah, in the end, there’s not really a debate to be had about changing my approach. I’m a huge perfectionist, and once I notice a mistake, I have to fix it — there’s no way I could just say, “Eh, whatever, I’ll post the comic as is.” Plus, I want to stand out from the crowd after all ^^
I honestly think a lot of AI creators would benefit from reducing the mass of their posts a bit and instead invest a bit more time into refining their comics — actually making the AI output their own creation.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling from me. I just wanted to share my thoughts on this topic with you guys since I didn’t run into any major challenges while working on this comic — it was mostly smooth sailing, so I didn't have much to say about it ^^
Feel free to share your thoughts on this topic — I’d really love to hear how all of this looks from “the other side.”

For now, things will continue as usual. I’ll do my best to maintain the current level — both in terms of release frequency and comic quality. Especially when it comes to Photoshop work, I’m getting faster with more experience. And once the next generation of NVIDIA graphics cards stops costing as much as a small car, I might even be able to speed up the image generation process (right now, the higher resolution image generation is really eating up a lot of time).

We’ll check in again next weekend when part two of Lust & Lore drops.
Until then, take care!