I briefly mentioned this at the beginning of last month, but as I was cataloging my new D&D group's journeys, I started to get the idea that I could produce a kind of comic book. The goal wasn't to mass distribute it and sell it on shelves, but rather I just wanted to hand them out to these new friends I had made.
It all started with a blog that I called Thotham's Journal. As most know, keeping notes and writing about your D&D character's adventures isn't anything new. I (and countless others) have done it a bunch before, and in fact my old DM encouraged it by handing out Heroic Inspiration for anyone willing to write about their journey. Because of that, it became almost second nature -- of course I'm going to write about my adventures!
I was also using AI to produce pictures to go along with the blog posts. (I've already discussed my struggles with AI art at length.) I didn't really need help with the writing department, but what I did use AI for was to stop me from being so long winded. It was not uncommon for me to throw down 750 to 1,000 words to describe a play session, and honestly, once I started looking at making a comic book, that just wasn't going to work. So I also asked AI to condense my posts down to about 350 to 400 words so they would still be readable and fit on one page.
When I first had the idea, I actually tried to make a standard comic book out of our adventures because one play session really could have been stretched out into one entire comic, but explaining word bubble orientation, keeping character details straight, and directing character positioning is actually pretty hard to do with AI. It's like I'd describe a small change I'd want done to an otherwise great looking comic page spread, and it would just bungle and change a handful of other things in the process.
So I went back to my original thought, which was . . . hey, current AI may not do great making comic page spreads, but it is actually pretty good at making simple storyboard panels! It reminded me of the old Prince Valiant comics in the newspaper from when I was a kid. They worked kind of similarly in that there weren't really word bubbles, instead it was a lot of text with storyboard pictures. THAT, AI could pull off.
Once I had all my storyboards made and words condensed down to 350-400 words per page, I could have a page of text on the left and a storyboard picture on the right as you thumbed through the comic book. The inside cover was a tribute to the players of the game, the game store for hosting, and the GM for making the adventure. The first page was my character as a level one Rogue. The back inside cover was my character now as a level 4 soul knife rogue.
When I was at a local bookstore I had seen a number of local comics for sale and on the back of several of them was a company called Ka-blam. When I was searching for a printer, Ka-blam was in fact one of the top results and looked to be a great company to work with. I love that they will cut some of your costs by letting you put their ad on the back page of your comic book.
To be honest, they were amazing to work with. I had used AI once again to try and produce my full pdf, and as per usual, AI had bungled a lot of the finer details like continuity between pages and keeping enough safe space between art and edges per the template that Ka-blam had provided. They contacted me before printing and raised some concerns about the art being too close to the edge.
At that point I took all the artwork to Microsoft PowerPoint and placed the pages by hand because I had had enough of messing around with AI to try and get the last bit done. After exporting the .pdf, I sent it back to Ka-blam, and a few days later they had printed out 12 high-gloss copies of my comic book and shipped it to me for around $55.
Honestly, I'm incredibly happy with how it turned out, and being able to hand these out to the other players and the DM as a gift to commemorate our adventures felt really satisfying. I guess more than anything, I'm happy I learned so much about the process of just printing and preparing a comic along the way. Perhaps if I had $1,000 to pay a really good artist on Fiverr to make a comic book for me, I'd do it, but this was good for what it was: a fun commemorative item and a learning experience.
Happy Dueling!
