Ashmycelia - Ashwini

Artist: @/fauxmantis on twitter

Don't Worry Side Order Drops Feb 22nd!!

MY GUY🐕🐕🐕

hi hello I checked out Laika's Comet a while back and man it's stunning! it's been a bit of a driving inspection for me to potentially make my own comics/stories but I don't know where to begin... what's your writing process like? do you write the story out as if it were a novel first then develop it into a visual medium or is it something entirely different? I've been interested in comics and the like since middle school and I've always wanted to hear someone's process for making them and I hope this ask finds you well

before drawing them, i script my comics the same way you would write out a screenplay! i've written screenplays for a film and a few short TV-episode-length shorts for school, as well as a play. the structure of it just so happens to work really well for comics too.

in screenplays (the way i was taught at least) you cannot write what a character silently thinks or feels - you can only write how they act. anyone who reads the screenplay should be able to interpret that character's unspoken thoughts/feelings/motives from the subtleties of their actions, because in the real world, there are rarely voice-over narratives or thought bubbles.

this also creates a little more tension within the narrative itself... if the character's silent intentions were all revealed to us as the audience, we'd have very little to be curious about. if there's something that you need to show that they wouldn't say outloud (either because its out of character or just not something a normal person would ever do) its your job as the writer to create instances in which that information can be revealed naturally.

i write comics the same way. i DO think narratives or thought bubbles are a useful tool unique to the medium of comics (so i would say dont wave them off by any means) BUT if you learn to write like you would for TV/movies then you can write comics in a way that builds intrigue/tension LIKE would be built in the moving picture... and you will cut any reliance on 'easy' answers behind the knees. basically, you'll train yourself to be a better writer.

also, the way screenplays are organized is soooo much easier to figure out how many pages your comics (page length) are going to be. if one page of written script is one minute of on-screen time, then one pages of script for a COMIC is usually (for me) equal to one page of actual DRAWN comic. i appreciate the efficiency and straight forwardness of the structure.

whatever

“why don’t you just fuck off already”

Rule

doodle of ryker when he was a child (3 or 4 years old) the deer's name is MR. DIRT

ahato mizuta / dedf1sh.

AI Scraping Isn't Just Art And Fanfic

Something I haven't really seen mentioned and I think people may want to bear in mind is that while artists are the most heavily impacted by AI visual medium scraping, it's not like the machine knows or cares to differentiate between original art and a photograph of your child.

AI visual media scrapers take everything, and that includes screengrabs, photographs, and memes. Selfies, pictures of your pets and children, pictures of your home, screengrabs of images posted to other sites -- all of the comic book imagery I've posted that I screengrabbed from digital comics, images of tweets (including the icons of peoples' faces in those tweets) and instas and screengrabs from tiktoks. I've posted x-ray images of my teeth. All of that will go into the machine.

That's why, at least I think, Midjourney wants Tumblr -- after Instagram we are potentially the most image-heavy social media site, and like Instagram we tag our content, which is metadata that the scraper can use.

So even if you aren't an artist, unless you want to Glaze every image of any kind that you post, you probably want to opt out of being scraped. I'm gonna go ahead and say we've probably already been scraped anyway, so I don't think there's a ton of point in taking down your tumblr or locking down specific images, but I mean...especially if it's stuff like pictures of children or say, a fundraising photo that involves your medical data, it maybe can't hurt.

If you do want to officially opt out, which may help if there's a class-action lawsuit later, you're going to want to go to the gear in the upper-right corner on the Tumblr desktop site, select each of your blogs from the list on the right-hand side, and scroll down to "Visibility". Select "Prevent third party sharing for [username]" to flip that bad boy on.

(If someone wants to post a link in notes to instructions for doing it on the app, I haven't updated mine so the option doesn't appear and I don't know where to find it.)