#DeinoSteve

[deepdreamnights]

TyrannoMax and the Warriors of the Core, 1986, Buzby-Spurlock Animation

[therobotmonster]

TyrannoMax and the Warriors of the Core (and Foes)

Left to Right: Maureen the Lizard Queen, Wally Manmoth, BrontoSarah, TriceraBruce, Cousin Wrexy, TyrannoMax, DeinoSteve, PteroDarla, the ApeTomic Pyle, Mrs. Nautlius/Mrs. Nice, Dr. Myron Underfoot, Dr. Underfang, the Cold Shoulder.

I compiled my control art for the series mains and filled in some gaps. Each mark = one foot, Wrexy is about 3", the Cold Shoulder (in heels) is 6", TyrannoMax is a brow-ridge over 9", and BrontoSarah is 12".

One thing putting your characters in a line does for you is you figure out when two characters have the exact same colorscheme. So, long story short, after the pilot Darla gets a redesign and is both blue and dressed to flashdance.

Each design was manually edited from multiple nijijourney gens, which were themselves based on previous composites and sketches.

[deepdreamnights]

A lot of this is spot on, but I think the choice of tools has skewed the data here, however, and may give an incorrect impression of how AI art tools on the whole work, because Dall-E 3 isn't representative of the options at large.

Dall-E 3 is pretty (if you make it be) and has good coherency and works with more naturally written prompts, but it is wholly uncooperative and has almost zero workflow accommodations for artistic applications, heck, It can't even do non-square aspect ratios (at least through Bing).

Playground AI beats it out on those fronts, and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion piledrive it into the concrete.

The only reason to ever use Dall-E 3's chat GPT interface is if you want to run up to three jobs simultaneously on a free bing account. It routinely misinterprets input, even direct "replace this word in the prompt with this other word" requests. It's essentially playing whisper-telephone with two hallucinating robots instead of one.

Here's how the process would go down in Midjourney:

Gonna be making a 90s fighting game version of my DeinoSteve character. Goal is to keep him largely on-model, minus changes that work for the style change from 70s comic/80s cartoon to 90s fighting game.

Prompt: fullbody character design, a velociraptor-anthro fighting game character, in the style of 1996 Capcom (Darkstalkers 3/Street Fighter Alpha 3) promotional art, fullbody on white background. Red scales, yellow shirt, black leather jacket, long tail, clawed feet, long tail, retrosaur asthetics, vector art inks with flat anime shading

Aspect ratio 3:4, Niji model v6, style 50:

Some pretty good stables at DeinoSteve (left image), but nobody's quite right. I've got several ways to get him kitted out right, but we'll use the same techniques CGPT was trying to use: inpainting and variations.

Upper right is closer to the character concept, but I like upper left's pose better, so we'll start by doing some variations on the subtle setting (right image)

You'll notice the variation problem from Dall-E 3 isn't there. Using Chat-GPT to change the prompt means you're at the mercy of two hallucinating robots instead of one, and it's probably been altering the prompt wildly with each revision, thus the slow degradation of mural-jesus.

Now, I'm just demonstrating in-system tools here, but on a piece that I was doing for finalization, I'd be upscaling all the ones that had features I liked, for later composition.

Steve looks... okay here, but he's off model in several major ways. Pants wrong color, no full-t-shirt, the spines on the tail, etc.

So here we'll do some inpainting. Unlike the GPT setup, I'm laying out what areas I specifically want changed at each go. Starting with the pants, I forgot to mention in the first prompt he wears blue jeans, so I add that to the prompt as well. If you're out to do your own post-editing, you can hit more parts at once and just composite from fewer gens.

I like #4 (left)'s swagger, so we'll repeat the process to get him full sleeves on his jacket, and to remove the spiked wrist cuffs. #4, again, is my winner. Now, I can keep varying individual bits, but I can also return to doing general variations, and the influence from the current version will carry over.

Now, it will me re-doing some bits, but #2 is pretty sweet, so he'll be where I tinker next. Note how a bit of his tail and claws are cropped out. I can fix that with outpainting.

If I were instead going for an edit in post, I'd probably have taken the best 5-6 chunks, merged, dropped to line art, then recolored by this point.

Now, I can keep tinkering on him bit by bit, put part of using the AI system is knowing when you're going to have to go manual. I know from experience that my chance of getting him to have his raptor-foot claws is going to require me to go in and do 'em manually.

If its not the horns and claws on dinosaurs, its hairstyles and clothing details on humans, the nature of using a randomized system is that you're going to get random hiccups.

But there are ways to mitigate that, depending on your toolset. Stable Diffusion has controlnet, different versions of which let you control things like poses, character details, and composition more directly, (as I understand it. I haven't messed with it myself, don't have that kind of beastly graphics card)

MJ's answer is presently in alpha: character reference. It's an extension of their image-prompting system (which isn't the same as image-to-image), wherein an image is examined by the AI's image-identification/checking processes and the results are used as part of the prompt. For Character reference, it tries to drop everything that isn't connected to character design.

A quickie iteration using a handful of previous DeinoSteve pics made the image on the left, while re-running the prompt with the semi-final DeinoSteve above as a character prompt produced the images on the right.

Of course, even with the additional workflow tools you get with non-DallE generators, doing anything with long-term consistency is going to require manual editing.

Anything with narrative? Well, this panel has over 20 individual gens in it, from across two generators (MJ and Dall-E 3)

The AI systems will get better over time, but there's an inherent paradox that I don't think they'll escape. To get to complex results you need complex control, and to gain complex control you need, well, complex controls

The more stuff an AI generator can do, the more literal and figurative buttons and/or menus you need to use those features. The more complex the features, the more knowledge and practice it takes to utilize them. Essentially: Any tool capable of (heavy air quotes) "replacing" an artist will wind up requiring an artist to operate it at that level.

As with other force-multipliers for art (photography, digital image manipulation, automated image touchup/filtering, etc) the skill gradient never goes away.

Among the many downsides of AI-generated art: it's bad at revising. You know, the biggest part of the process when working on commissioned art.

Original "deer in a grocery store" request from chatgpt (which calls on dalle3 for image generation):

revision 5 (trying to give the fawn spots, trying to fix the shadows that were making it appear to hover):

I had it restore its own Jesus fresco.

Original:

Erased the face, asked it to restore the image to as good as when it was first painted:

Wait tumblr makes the image really low-res, let me zoom in on Jesus's face.

Original:

Restored:

One revision later:

Here's the full "restored" face in context:

Every time AI is asked to revise an image, it either wipes it and starts over or makes it more and more of a disaster. People who work with AI-generated imagery have to adapt their creative vision to what comes out of the system - or go in with a mentality that anything that fits the brief is good enough.

I'm not surprised that there are some places looking for cheap filler images that don't mind the problems with AI-generated imagery. But for everyone else I think it's quickly becoming clear that you need a real artist, not a knockoff.

more

[deepdreamnights]

Combining character reference and the new nijijourney personalization style ( my code used here is --p p6grcgq) to make some DeinoSteves. Unmodified gens presented to demonstrate "First draft" results.

Verdict: Promising.

Prompt: a red deinocyhus-dinosaur-anthro wearing a orange leather jacket, yellow t-shirt and black jeans, silver utility belt and bracers, walking down the road, heroic, city street background, comic panel by jack kirby and alex toth 1968, in the style of 1960s marvel

Character Prompts:

[deepdreamnights]

TyrannoMax Theme Song (Season 1)

TyrannoMax and the Warriors of the Core (or TyrannoMax and the Heroes of the Core if you're from the UK) from Buzby-Spurlock Animation is a forgotten 80s gem, based on the comics from Cocytus Comics.

The cartoon emphasized Dr. Underfang as a primary antagonist, re-contextualizing most of the side-villains as his minions or creations directly. The 'Fossilized Time' origin was simplified into a hollow earth accessed via portals, and a lot was obviously softened for kids TV, particularly DeinoSteve.

It also where a lot of the iconic aspects of the film came from. The Dinoid society already had high-tech devices when the toon starts, where in the comics TriceraBruce invented their gadgets by reverse-engineering human and Ultramerican tech. Wally is in high school instead of being college age and Bobby is a regular member of the cast along with Max's show-original little cousin Wrexy.

The scads of toy-based characters go without saying.

Like most Buzby-Spurlock productions, TyrannoMax is largely lost media. This comes down mainly to the company's legal troubles in the 90s preventing official release. Here's hoping the new buyout means re-release.

"Warriors of the Core, lets hear that roar!"

Screencap is three individual multi-gen composites and overpaintings with extensive photomanipulation. The song was generated with SunoAI.

[deepdreamnights]

Tests and Experiments

Some animation samples from my Hailuo and Vidu experiments, some composites, some just gens.

[deepdreamnights]

Using Vidu to Make Character Turnarounds

Disclosure: I am in the Vidu Artist Program.

Having (at the very least) front and back reference greatly improves the quality of character image prompting. And very often, one finds that they were lazy and only got a couple of bits of character reference. Or they have tons of it in the wrong art style.

A character like Wally Manmoth requires some good reference to work right.

Now, it's not that hard to prompt up something that matches close enough and then modifying the stuff manually until it works, such as I did with TriceraBruce and DeinoSteve:

You can tell Steve's the bad boy because he's got a cool rip in the back of his jacket.

But for Wally, I decided to try out Vidu as a means of getting turnaround frames.

So I loaded Wally's front-view pic (above) into the image-to-video feature, and prompted with:

vintage traditional animation scene (1985) humanoid mammoth/furry elephant wearing a red hawaiian shirt and blue shorts, by filmation and sunbow productions, 90s colors, friendly on green background, streamlined black line art with cel shaded vintage cartoon color, official media, character design fullbody shot on green background. The mammoth-anthro starts facing the camera, turning around to face away from the viewer, providing a view of his back.

I gave it two shots at the 720x quality setting (12 points per, total of 24), and got:

Huh. Weird it happened twice, etc.

This demonstrates both that the tech is viable for this use, and the reason you'd want to have that multi-view reference. The robot clearly assumes that a luau shirt would have a large print on the back, whereas wally's is a more basic print. That's ultra easy to fix, though.

I started by exporting the last frame of each (or close to it, picking the one that looks cleanest)

While its image editing features and often touch-and-go, one thing the Midjourney edit feature has going for it is it's utility as an upscaler. You load the image in, make your tweaks (just a little bit of background if you're just upscaling) and then upscale and at the very least you have 2048x2048 worth of resolution.

I used the midjourney edit process, that got those two images to the following state, as a test.

The results are good, but getting the large trees to erase-and-replace out took several attempts, and just doing it in photoshop then using the editor to upscale would have been faster.

This is why we do tests.

I went with the slightly-at-an-angle one for the main reference sheet. I'll be keeping the straight-on-back-shot in case it winds up being useful for specific scenes down the line.

In photoshop, I touched up the shirt print, made sure the colors where consistent, and simplified the hair coloration to something more period-plausible.

No more giant trees on the back! On the other hand, I think the feet sprouting toes on the heel is going to be something I'll be fixing frame-by-frame until there's another revision.

Human characters will induce these issues less often. I just stick with my genre of choice.

Midjourney was not cooperating with TyrannoMax (it really doesn't like giving him the proportions I like, preferring to make him a weird big-head salamander), so I went the same direction, resulting in this stage 1 front/back:

Only Midjourney refused to work with it, at all. Declaring everything that came out of it too lewd for its internal censor. Apparently, this hunky relative of cheesasaurus rex is too sexy for general consumption. Nevermind that it's a cartoon lizard in a shade tangello orange.

The workaround is too dumb for words.

Slam the hue slider until it's off anything that could be perceived as a human skintone.

Then make the modifications. Here I had to rework the leg several times, and do a lot of tweaking to remove-overinking. Then I popped it back out, droped it back into lineart, re-colored it, and and composited it back together:

And voila, a front and back for Max. I shortened his tail, as the longer tails have been causing problems with confusing the image prompting systems. The armor skirt has scallops to accommodate the tail, which looked better more consistently than the flaps folding around the tail.

The results are, thus far, encouraging.

Of course, if the back of your character has any unexpected details, you're going to have to add those in after the fact or include them in the prompting, and you're going to be making a lot of edits regardless (as you should).

Oh, and Max has a sword now.

A blade of amber crystal with a fossilized femur grip and a faceted dino-eye that should be far enough away from the Eye of Thundera for safety. A roleplay-toy friendly trademark weapon, usually a sword, was a must-have for 80s action-adventure lines despite the fact that you'd never see it used on anything that wasn't a robot, living statue, or skeleton.

Thus the sword's gimmick is it cleaves through non-living matter with ease but anything BS&P doesn't want subjected to a stabbin's is encased in amber crystal: locked in place if partially encased, put into suspended animation if fully encased. A nice, nonlethal use for a magic sword.

It's proportioned like a gladius, but is generally interpreted as larger, approaching a broadsword, in keeping with the generally ridiculous blade sizes of kidvid fantasy. They're just more fun when they're stupidly huge.

Is "Sword of Eons" too on the nose?

[deepdreamnights]

TyrannoMax

Real name: Tyrannodus Maximus (translation) Known Aliases: Ty Maxon, the Dinoman of Wisconsin, Shellbreaker Occupation: Champion of Core City, adventurer Identity: Public Legal status: Citizen of Core City. Legal resident of the United States with a criminal record (pardoned), escaped felon in Ultramerica. Species: Dinoid Tyrannosaurus Rex Place of Hatching: Core City Martial Status: Single, betrothed. Known Relatives: TyrannoLucian (father), MegaloDiana (mother), TyrannoMaxine (grandmother, deceased), TyrannoCass (brother), TyrannoJulia (sister), Lady StegoJune (fiance), DeinoSteve (blood brother), Tyler Wrex (second cousin). Known affiliations: Warriors of the Core (member, current), Sevenfold Guardians (member, reserve), Wally Manmoth (ally), Johannes Factotum (ally), WoMinotaur (ally), Dr. Underfang (nemesis), Department of Inhuman Affairs (contractor). Base of operations: Soapstone, Wisconsin, Core City in the Fossilized World. First appearance: Tyrannomax #1 (1975)

From the Coctus Catalog, it's TyrannoMax!

His power/ability box is under the fold.

Physical Strength: TyrannoMax’s strength is exceptional, even for a dinoid. He can lift (press) 10 tons with his arms or tail. Known Powers & Abilities: Like all diniods, TryannoMax’s muscles and bone tissues are more dense and durable than human analogues, resulting in vast strength and resistance to physical damage. His scales can deflect an armor-piercing .50 caliber machine gun fire at 30 feet. TyrannoMax’s bite force is sufficient to bend a 5” diameter titanium rod. His teeth and claws are both sharp and strong enough to rend metal, and he’s able to leap up to sixty feet forward or twenty feet straight up from a standing position. Like all dinoids, TyrannoMax possesses a high degree of psychic affinity, which he can access through his psychic roar. This unique psychic talent allows TyrannoMax to imbue his roars with psionic power. He can attune the pitch of his roar to deliver physical psychokinetic force, stun the minds of those in its path, or induce fear and panic in enemies. Known Weaknesses: Dinoid physiology is only partially warmblooded and is vulnerable to cold. Temperatures below 56 degrees Fahrenheiht reduce TyrannoMax’s speed, strength and concentration in direct proportion to his body temperature. If lowered to the freezing point gradually, he will involuntarily enter a state of hibernation. Rapid freezing is deadly to dinoids.

-

TyrannoMax's art was made in the same fashion as the Wally Manmoth comic, with his body being composited out of several Midjourney attempts and his head coming from Dall-E 3, since MJ's rexes are always too modern for the 70s throwback of Tmax.

From there the colors were removed entirely, and the new lineart touched up and then re-colored using the classic comic colors from the DC 1981 style guide. And then "vintaged" in the process.

[deepdreamnights]

Against the HydraSaurus!

Or what goes into a monster...

I'm not gone, I've just been working on a big project and hadn't gone through the process of setting up my queue. So here's a sneak peek of a panel from a (planned for) eight page TyrannoMax story.

And here's (most of) what went into it:

Full(er) Process Under the fold.

I am missing a few gens that I used to get the rocky landscape and a few that were used for DeinoSteve's hands and foot-claws. And every gen here represents a stack of alternate takes and prompt dead ends.

Neither Midjourney nor Dall-E 3 is up to creating a complex scene with consistent characters and any degree of control. So any panel that isn't just a talking head requires multiple gens, and even the talking heads require editing.

For my process, I figure out what what I want from the scene, and start building a stack of gens to work with. Once I have some material to choose from, I start scaling and compositing the base images together into some semblance of the finished piece.

Generating uncolored B&W art doesn't produce the look of vintage comic art, so I remove the colors and extract the black outlines, at which point I start re-inking to get the right details, the right levels of detail, and to fix errors and blend the various pieces.

As shown here with DeinoSteve:

Here we start with the base gen. I liked most of the pose, but I wanted a balled up, spider-man-y leap, so I borrow the leg, head, and hands from other gens, correct the number of fingers and toes, add the big velociraptor claws by repurposing, fill in the missing tail, and then do basic inking.

Then, whoops, the image is too detailed for the size it will be in the final image, so I go in and erase details to make it more authentic to 1970s inking and printing, and thicken the lines throughout.

Once I have the image fully re-inked, I can go through the process of doing coloring, the newer old-fashioned way, using colors sampled from the 1982 DC comics pantone set. This panel, as a showpiece scene, gets a bit more love than others in the story, but even so DeinoSteve and PteraDarla are too small to get much color detail for a book from this apparent time (1977)

And once the image has its post-processing for the printing artifacts and the yellowing of the paper (this is a Q&D version, final will have several more tricks), you can see more what the scene would look like in print, lower saturation, slightly faded colors, slightly yellow newsprint, and some natural blurring from the benday dot patterns.

There were at least 11 prompts used, probably more.

[therobotmonster]

TryannoMax, Issue 25, October 1977

Cocytus Comics Group, Story by Barry McDermit, lines by Midge Joulet & Dale Ethree, Colors and Letters by H. Haddaway.

Issue #25. It's a quiet day so the Core team gets some R&R. TryannoMax hunts down Dr. Underfang for a long-overdue confrontation, DeinoSteve and PteroDarla finally have that date, and Wally Manmoth visits home. So when Ape-Tomic Pyle returns from the grave to exact his revenge, only TriceraBruce remains to stand in his way. One wounded dinoid against a living nuclear ape-pocalypse, with the populace of Wisconsin in the balance.

Running for an astounding 80 issues, TyrannoMax was the headline comic from Cocytus in the 1970s, and was the primary motivator behind Buzby-Spurlock buying out Cocytus in '83.

While the comic series is considered the root of the empire that would create the animated series and live action movie, the concept was first introduced in short story "Humanity, My Young Cousin" in the pulp-sci-fi magazine Stunning True-Life Tales of Science Fiction, a few years earlier.

May be posting interior pages soon.

Full details under the fold.

TyrannoMax is my AI dinosaur test kitchen, where I see how ideas work out before trying them on more serious projects.

Here, I've used Dall-E 3 through Bing and Midjourney to create comic assets, which I then de-color and rework into inks in a similar fashion to my AI-comic reworkings like Robots Ruined the Internet and Let's Gib About Ib, or any of my other fake comic covers. TriceraBruce and Ape-Tomic Pyle were generated with Dall-E 3, and the background was made in Midjourney.

This makes the basic inks, from there I correct anatomical problems, cleanup AI wonk, and generally re-ink where things are needed.

Once I have the "inks" its then a matter of doing the coloring and graphic design work the old fashioned way. I used my recreation of the 1981 DC comics palette for my colors, used post-processing to get the printed look, and there you go.

My prompt format for the characters is:

A -anthro wearing , long tail (if a dinosaur) , comic panel by 1968, in the style of 1960s Marvel comics

Because all weights are averaged a bit, to get a 1970s comic look, you have to prompt for late 60s, ortherwise it looks late 80s.

Background prompt was:

a distant city, a rocket launches from its center, flying toward the sky, comic illustration by jack kirby, inked lines, flat color, blue sky, green grass, orange rocket, from 1968

[deepdreamnights]

Wally Manmoth

Once Walbert W. Manheim, human friend of TyrannoMax, Wally sacrificed himself saving the lives of both TyrannoMax and Dr. Underfang. Unwilling to countenance owing a debt to the youth, Dr. Underfang used the geneincarnation process to tether the boy's spirit back to a cloned body, though one very unlike his original.

As a "Manmoth" Wally possesses superhuman strength, endurance and resistance to damage, as well almost complete immunity to cold temperatures and enhanced mammoth-senses.

Wally and DeinoSteve in the 1994 live action film.

Prompt and process under the fold.

Wally's lines were generated in Dall-E 3, with edits, digital inks, colors, and aging effects added in post.

A young man who resembles Seth Green, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, bell bottoms, and tennis shoes, with a feathered 70s haircut, standing in a sarcastic posture. The image is a full body shot on a white background, drawn in the style of a comic panel by Jack Kirby and John Buscema from 1968, as seen in the official handbook of the Marvel Universe.

A wooly mammoth-anthro, wearing a hawaiian shirt and bermuda shorts, standing on a city street, full body, straight to camera, comic panel by jack kirby and alex toth 1968, in the style of 1968 marvel comics

[therobotmonster]

Sure! and remember, you asked for it @readasaur

I have a lot under the #tyrannomax tag, but the sum up is that it's a unreality fauxstalgia concept that exists both as a story and a meta-story around its creation:

TyrannoMax and the Warriors of the Core was a comic by Cocytus Comics, originally released in the 1970s, appearing alongside such characters as Farrah Fyendlyne: Familiar of Faust, the Tomorrownauts, and Johannes Factotum: Professor of (Practically) Everything. (My Secret Origin of Wally ManMoth Comic is here)

TyrannoMax is a dinoid from "The Fossilized World of M'nar" which was created when the cosmic radiation burst that killed the dinosaurs (the KT impact wouldn't be commonly accepted until well after the series started) created a layer of "fossilized time" producing a pocket universe that resembles a hollow earth, accessible through portals hidden underground.

When Dr. Myron Underfoot discovers one of these portals, he brings art student Wally Manheim with him to take field illustrations, as traditional film is fogged by the portal transition, and to be a guinea pig.

The portal doesn't kill Wally, and he's found by TyrannoMax and his friends. Max is the champion of the Core City of Ib, their bravest and most heroic warrior, and just a generally helpful guy.

Underfoot winds up stealing one of the sun-crystals that keep the fossilized world stable, and when he tries to take it back through one of the portals to the surface it explodes, transforming him into the dinoid-like Dr. Underfang, and trapping Max and his friends on Earth, where they battle Dr. Underfang, his genicarnated creations, and a host of other foes.

(My favorite of which is Dr. Underfang's gal Friday, Mrs. Nice/Mrs. Nautlius, whose origin is summed up in this PSA that ran in Cocytus books through the late 70s.)

In the 80s, Cocytus hit hard times and was bought out by Buzby-Spurlock animation, producing the cartoon series that this figure was merch for. The series introduced Max's cousin l'l Wrexy and a host of new toy-based characters, and upped the tech level so you could get cool vehicle toys.

TyrannoMax Himself:

A Bio-Card of Comics Max is Here.

Max is the leader of his team, the 10,723rd reincarnation of his line, and a skilled fighter, strategist, and dancer. He's the physically strongest member of his team (narrowly edging out BrontoSarah) and never met a boulder he didn't want to throw.

His psychic dinoid ability is the ability to psionically augment his roar by focusing his courage to produce a force-shockwave, his righteous anger to stun or induce fear in enemies, and his hope to augment the strength of his friends. Like all dinoids he can use his psychic potential to rapidly learn other languages, but his overall psychic affinity is lower than most and highly specialized into his roar.

Like all dinoids, Max is vulnerable to cold (lore was established in the 70s)

His dinonite sword cuts through steel as if it were particle board, and can parry physical and energy attacks. His armor is made from dinonite and Hydrasaurus leather, augmenting his already formidable dinoid toughness.

Max is a relatively young champion and augments his lack of experience by relying on the expertise and knowledge of his comrades. He, BrontoSarah and TriceraBruce are best friends forming an Id (Sarah), Ego (Bruce), SuperEgo (Max) triumvirate. Bruce is intellectual and methodical, Sarah is passionate and wise, and Max is the balance between them.

The quick sum up of his personality is Adam West's Batman if he had Hercules' skill set and love of physicality and a more wry sense of humor.

He has a friendly rivalry with DeinoSteve, who respects Max's abilities but feels he's not decisive or 'solution oriented' enough for his role. Steve uses Max having saved his life during their first encounter as an excuse to hang around, but really he likes the companionship.

He is friends with PteroDarla, but not as close as with Sarah and Bruce, with a sort of chummy-work-colleagues kind of relationship.

Max considers Wally, Wally's little brother Bobby, and l'l Wrexy to be his younger brothers or adoptive children depending on how much managing they need.

Max considers stopping Dr. Underfang and his Genincarnates his responsibility, since Underfang got his powers from the Fossilized World and reverse engineered his own transformation to create the genicarnation process.

He has other rivals as well, in the form of TyrannoXam (an evil clone created, mostly, (its complicated) by the Unnatural Selector), CeratoGaius (Wrexy's dad, Max's brother-by-marriage, and a rich jerk who thinks he should be champion), and the DireLord of Lemurmalia (Max's counterpart from a realm of ice-age mammal people), all of whom seek to prove their superiority to a guy who would love to be their friend if they weren't being jerks.

And no discussion of Max's foes would be complete without Maureen the Lizard Queen.

Maureen has the ability to control reptiles and has general purpose hypnotic powers, making her the Lizard Queen. To her logic, the queen of lizards deserves only the best consort, the "Tyrant Lizard King," in the form of TyrannoMax.

She calls him "Darling" and "Sugarfangs" and other cutesy names. Max finds her attentions flummoxing.

Max and Steve are more resistant to her powers than most ("Ugh, you've got too much bird in you!") but she also doesn't use her power on Max outside of a combat/escape context cuz she's not quite that much of a creep. Her non-stalking related escapades usually involve attempts to establish her Queendom in some populated area or doing jobs for Dr. Underfang in exchange for the creation of reptilian genincarnate henchmen for her.

In the 90s there was a movie.

TyrannoMax 2" Action Figure In-Progress Sculpt

The hands cooperated for a chunk of sculpting today.

Toy Max is based largely on the cartoon design, but in keeping with the mid-to-late 80s, he's going to be a little more detailed. He's in my personal favorite, Battle-Beasts-inspired aesthetic.

[deepdreamnights]

Don't post many repeats on this blog, but people seemed to dig the DeinoSteve tutorial, so here's my comic process.

Against the HydraSaurus!

Or what goes into a monster...

I'm not gone, I've just been working on a big project and hadn't gone through the process of setting up my queue. So here's a sneak peek of a panel from a (planned for) eight page TyrannoMax story.

And here's (most of) what went into it:

Full(er) Process Under the fold.

I am missing a few gens that I used to get the rocky landscape and a few that were used for DeinoSteve's hands and foot-claws. And every gen here represents a stack of alternate takes and prompt dead ends.

Neither Midjourney nor Dall-E 3 is up to creating a complex scene with consistent characters and any degree of control. So any panel that isn't just a talking head requires multiple gens, and even the talking heads require editing.

For my process, I figure out what what I want from the scene, and start building a stack of gens to work with. Once I have some material to choose from, I start scaling and compositing the base images together into some semblance of the finished piece.

Generating uncolored B&W art doesn't produce the look of vintage comic art, so I remove the colors and extract the black outlines, at which point I start re-inking to get the right details, the right levels of detail, and to fix errors and blend the various pieces.

As shown here with DeinoSteve:

Here we start with the base gen. I liked most of the pose, but I wanted a balled up, spider-man-y leap, so I borrow the leg, head, and hands from other gens, correct the number of fingers and toes, add the big velociraptor claws by repurposing, fill in the missing tail, and then do basic inking.

Then, whoops, the image is too detailed for the size it will be in the final image, so I go in and erase details to make it more authentic to 1970s inking and printing, and thicken the lines throughout.

Once I have the image fully re-inked, I can go through the process of doing coloring, the newer old-fashioned way, using colors sampled from the 1982 DC comics pantone set. This panel, as a showpiece scene, gets a bit more love than others in the story, but even so DeinoSteve and PteraDarla are too small to get much color detail for a book from this apparent time (1977)

And once the image has its post-processing for the printing artifacts and the yellowing of the paper (this is a Q&D version, final will have several more tricks), you can see more what the scene would look like in print, lower saturation, slightly faded colors, slightly yellow newsprint, and some natural blurring from the benday dot patterns.

There were at least 11 prompts used, probably more.