#mrs. nice

[therobotmonster]

The Secret Origin of Mrs. Nautilus / "If The Goo's Alight, It's Not Alright!"

Originally printed in TyrannoMax #25, October 1977.

Updated from this, details under the fold.

I already have mostly-unmodded versions of the images on the first version, but even those involved minor color fixes and cleanup of major flaws.

For a full comic page, though, I wanted passable consistency. The original colors had to be removed and converted into "inks", those inks then modified to keep clothing, hair length, and other features relatively consistent, areas outside the frame have to be drawn in, the image recolored, and then given aging and halftoning.

Each pic used a different prompt around the basic format of:

Secretary with a bob-haircut, redhead, green blouse and pearls,(action),(emotion descriptors), comic panel by Jack Kirby and Alex Toth, 1968, in the style of 60s Marvel

a secretary with lavender skin, tentacles for hair, (action),(emotion descriptors) comic panel by jack kirby and alex toth, 1968, in the style of 60s marvel

[deepdreamnights]

From this post, a conversation between Mrs. Nice and Dr. Underfang, about how there's more than one way to make a comic.

While the linked post goes into the process in much more detail, the short version is that making a comic with AI involves all the steps of making a photocomic or a Wondermark-esq collage comic.

Here, each panel is a combination of one or more gens through direct compositing and inpainting ('gumby Underfang' is a basic crop-job but the others are multi-image composites, inpainted edits, or both), with graphic design and non-AI composited elements. `

I like to use AI art to achieve forms of 'fauxstalgia', weaving concepts into the aesthetics of artifacts of the past. I consider myself a nostalgia artist (not a nostalgic artist, tho I can sometimes be that), but you can get as experimental with it as you want.

And people are already doing it, they just don't call them comics.

Those sequences of AI-generated photos that tell a horror story that pop up on Tumblr? Those are comics.

We are very much in the "plastic wrap and lens flare" phase of AI art, where the newest and (often literally) shiniest effects take center stage because like an early 2000s kid with a cracked copy of photoshop, it's the new toy.

(I have a feeling Colin Kaepernick is going to give us, at most, a few adventures of a D-rate Borgorroth of Coolswordoorroth before absconding with the bag.)

Feel free to reblog with folks that are doing innovative stuff.

I will start by recommending @reachartwork, where you're going to find all kinds of interesting new stuff, and a fun illustrated prose super-verse under the CHUM title.

[dunmesh]

one of my favorite things about laios is that he does get judgemental and annoyed by his party members but he keeps it to himself to avoid (further) confrontation. it's hilarious

[ditzybat]

just imagining a teeny tiny tim being absolutely devastated about jason’s death, that he manages to get on to dark forums to contact a mercenary for a hit on the joker’s life.

and who happens to be that mercenary? deathstroke.

tim wires money from his (admittedly very high) allowance to slade, who finishes the job within the week — news outlets are going crazy as nobody knows who pulled off such a stunt — bruce is confused, and dick is both grateful, that someone took the bastard who killed his baby brothers life, and angry, because bruce wasn’t the one to do it.

slade however? wants to investigate, someone finally had the gall to order a hit on the joker and he’s a little curious to see who it is.

only come to find a little boy all alone in a big house who spends his nights following around a vigilante in a furry suit.

and, well, slade hasn’t been the best parent, and probably doesn’t know how to deal with an average kid, but who can blame him when he begins to train tim into becoming a mercenary just like him — after all, how else is he gonna defend himself on the streets of gotham when he gallivants around with an expensive camera, a sign basically saying ‘kidnap me!’ strapped to his chest?

so what if the kid becomes robin and uses those skills in the cape? that’s batman’s problem to figure out.

[mcyt-cats]

I can only imagine the sheer chaos in this house right now

[aerequets]

(part 1)

(short comic) (you can otherwise search 'spy x pta' on my profile)

MY GOODNESS. it's been a hot minute since i posted the first part and i guess i just couldn't SHUT UP because this is FOURTEEN PAGES LONG. FOURTEEN. you can even see some pages where the linework is slightly different because i drew it like 6-ish weeks ago, that's how long this has been cooking. drawing in general has been hard lately because of time constraints, BUT i am so happy i finished this. this is like my fav project even tho it isnt as popular, but who cares!!!!! POPULAR IN MY HEART

[egophiliac]

I have SO many thoughts about everything and they are in no kind of order yet, so here's just some quick little bits in the meantime!

I am not normal about any of these characters!

[thankstothe]

polycule politics and management in my hatecrimes

[fishymom-art]

Putting my Bill in horrible situations

Lost on Earth by @mutatedleemon

Handyman Bill by @handymanbill (@/waty_mot and @/Losan-Postle)

Mr. Bill Pines AU by @honeqq

Copium AU by me and Leemon, Now What AU by me

[kagoutiss]

pelican town, ‘72

[wardingshout]

Travelling for Day 4 of SpeSilverWeek! going to Mt. Silver to visit "the extended family"...

[theriverbeyond]

took this incredible photo of my cat today mid-yawn and the internet needs to see

[deepdreamnights]

Mrs. Nautlius

Of TyrannoMax fame. Still on her break.

Prompt: a secretary with lavender skin, tentacles for hair, arms crossed, annoyed, "I'm on my break!" vintage animation cel, cartoon screen capture from 1985, by TOEI, Sunow Productions, AKOM., in the style of 60s marvel

My Nijijourney Style Code (Used in this piece): --p p6grcgq

[pfaerie]

Johnny and Daniel really seem to be getting along more since making up after the tournament :)

@ckreversebang

[always-a-king-or-queen]

The ache will go away, eventually. 

That was what the Professor told them, the day they got back. When they tumbled from the wardrobe in a heap of tangled limbs, and found that the world had been torn from under their feet with all the kindness of a serpent. 

They picked themselves off of the floorboards with smiles plastered on child faces, and sat with the Professor in his study drinking cup after cup of tea. 

But the smiles were fake. The tea was like ash on their tongues. And when they went to bed that night, none of them could sleep in beds that were too foreign, in bodies that had not been their own for years. Instead they grouped into one room and sat on the floor and whispered, late into the night. 

When morning came, Mrs. Macready discovered the four of them asleep in Peter and Edmund’s bedroom, tangled in a heap of pillows and blankets with their arms looped across one another. They woke a few moments after her entry and seemed confused, lost even, staring around the room with pale faces, eyes raking over each framed painting on the wall and across every bit of furniture as if it was foreign to them. “Come to breakfast,” Mrs. Macready said as she turned to go, but inside she wondered. 

For the children’s faces had held the same sadness that she saw sometimes in the Professor’s. A yearning, a shock, a numbness, as if their very hearts had been ripped from their chests.

At breakfast Lucy sat huddled between her brothers, wrapped in a shawl that was much too big for her as she warmed her hands around a mug of hot chocolate. Edmund fidgeted in his seat and kept reaching up to his hair as if to feel for something that was no longer there. Susan pushed her food idly around on her plate with her fork and hummed a strange melody under her breath. And Peter folded his hands beneath his chin and stared at the wall with eyes that seemed much too old for his face. 

It chilled Mrs. Macready to see their silence, their strangeness, when only yesterday they had been running all over the house, pounding through the halls, shouting and laughing in the bedrooms. It was as if something, something terrible and mysterious and lengthy, had occurred yesterday, but surely that could not be. 

She remarked upon it to the Professor, but he only smiled sadly at her and shook his head. “They’ll be all right,” he said, but she wasn’t so sure. 

They seemed so lost. 

Lucy disappeared into one of the rooms later that day, a room that Mrs. Macready knew was bare save for an old wardrobe of the professor’s. She couldn’t imagine what the child would want to go in there for, but children were strange and perhaps she was just playing some game. When Lucy came out again a few minutes later, sobbing and stumbling back down the hall with her hair askew, Mrs. Macready tried to console her, but Lucy found no comfort in her arms. “It wasn’t there,” she kept saying, inconsolable, and wouldn’t stop crying until her siblings came and gathered her in their arms and said in soothing voices, “Perhaps we’ll go back someday, Lu.” 

Go back where, Mrs. Macready wondered? She stepped into the room Lucy had been in later on in the evening and looked around, but there was nothing but dust and an empty space where coats used to hang in the wardrobe. The children must have taken them recently and forgotten to return them, not that it really mattered. They were so old and musty and the Professor had probably forgotten them long ago. But what could have made the child cry so? Try as she might, Mrs. Macready could find no answer, and she left the room dissatisfied and covered in dust. 

Lucy and Edmund and Peter and Susan took tea in the Professor’s room again that night, and the next, and the next, and the next. They slept in Peter and Edmund’s room, then Susan and Lucy’s, then Peter and Edmund’s again and so on, swapping every night till Mrs. Macready wondered how they could possibly get any sleep. The floor couldn’t be comfortable, but it was where she found them, morning after morning. 

Each morning they looked sadder than before, and breakfast was silent. Each afternoon Lucy went into the room with the wardrobe, carrying a little lion figurine Edmund had carved her, and came out crying a little while later. And then one day she didn’t, and went wandering in the woods and fields around the Professor’s house instead. She came back with grassy fingers and a scratch on one cheek and a crown of flowers on her head, but she seemed content. Happy, even. Mrs. Macready heard her singing to herself in a language she’d never heard before as Lucy skipped past her in the hall, leaving flower petals on the floor in her wake. Mrs. Macready couldn’t bring herself to tell the child to pick them up, and instead just left them where they were. 

More days and nights went by. One day it was Peter who went into the room with the wardrobe, bringing with him an old cloak of the Professor’s, and he was gone for quite a while. Thirty or forty minutes, Mrs. Macready would guess. When he came out, his shoulders were straighter and his chin lifted higher, but tears were dried upon his cheeks and his eyes were frightening. Noble and fierce, like the eyes of a king. The cloak still hung about his shoulders and made him seem almost like an adult. 

Peter never went into the wardrobe room again, but Susan did, a few weeks later. She took a dried flower crown inside with her and sat in there at least an hour, and when she came out her hair was so elaborately braided that Mrs. Macready wondered where on earth she had learned it. The flower crown was perched atop her head as she went back down the hall, and she walked so gracefully that she seemed to be floating on the air itself. In spite of her red eyes, she smiled, and seemed content to wander the mansion afterwards, reading or sketching or making delicate jewelry out of little pebbles and dried flowers Lucy brought her from the woods. 

More weeks went by. The children still took tea in the Professor’s study on occasion, but not as often as before. Lucy now went on her daily walks outdoors, and sometimes Peter or Susan, or both of them at once, accompanied her. Edmund stayed upstairs for the most part, reading or writing, keeping quiet and looking paler and sadder by the day. 

Finally he, too, went into the wardrobe room. 

He stayed for hours, hours upon hours. He took nothing in save for a wooden sword he had carved from a stick Lucy brought him from outside, and he didn’t come out again. The shadows lengthened across the hall and the sun sank lower in the sky and finally Mrs. Macready made herself speak quietly to Peter as the boy came out of the Professor’s study. “Your brother has been gone for hours,” she told him crisply, but she was privately alarmed, because Peter’s face shifted into panic and he disappeared upstairs without a word. 

Mrs. Macready followed him silently after around thirty minutes and pressed an ear to the door of the wardrobe room. Voices drifted from beyond. Edmund’s and Peter’s, yes, but she could also hear the soft tones of Lucy and Susan. 

“Why did he send us back?” Edmund was saying. It sounded as if he had been crying.  

Mrs. Macready couldn’t catch the answer, but when the siblings trickled out of the room an hour later, Edmund’s wooden sword was missing, and the flower crown Susan had been wearing lately was gone, and Peter no longer had his old cloak, and Lucy wasn’t carrying her lion figurine, and the four of them had clasped hands and sad, but smiling, faces. 

Mrs. Macready slipped into the room once they were gone and opened the wardrobe, and there at the bottom were the sword and the crown and the cloak and the lion. An offering of sorts, almost, or perhaps just items left there for future use, for whenever they next went into the wardrobe room.  

But they never did, and one day they were gone for good, off home, and the mansion was silent again. And it had been a long time since that morning that Mrs. Macready had found them all piled together in one bedroom, but ever since then they hadn’t quite been children, and she wanted to know why.

She climbed the steps again to the floor of the house where the old wardrobe was, and then went into the room and crossed the floor to the opposite wall. 

When she pulled the wardrobe door open, the four items the Pevensie children had left inside of it were missing. 

And just for a moment, it seemed to her that a cool gust of air brushed her face, coming from the darkness beyond where the missing coats used to hang.

[tomcriuse]

Wagner Moura as Joel Civil War (2024) dir. Alex Garland