This article is part of the "Making Of" series about "Urlan, Cosmic Cat" and features some of the weirdest, funniest and/or more interesting unused images generated in the rollercoaster process of creating this incredible AI-illustrated graphic novel.

You can check out a free preview of the actual work, grab it on Amazon or watch the Launch Trailer.

Heads up:
this article contains some spoilers!

Urlan was born out of simple curiosity.

We’ve been following the whole AI rush from the beginning and have been early adopters of several tools. We think AI is among the coolest, more impactful, certainly dangerous and ethically complex technologies ever developed. Its grey areas are so many, yes. This technology is so beautifully layered that it may well be the door into the next step in evolution as well as the downfall of humanity. But most of all, these robots are a lot of fun for artists and storytellers, presenting an incredible plethora of new cross-media possibilities.

So, we have been playing with Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Runway, Stable Audio and several other generators and editors, and of course ChatGPT. The latter – in its Pro version – is a tremendous help for professional tasks like copywriting, and image generators are invaluable for marketing jobs. Of course, we also tried them out for artistic purposes. Though having ChatGPT materially writing a story is possible, given the right prompts (which isn’t easy), that’s not something alluring to us, as we are primarily writers, so that would just take the fun part away – plus, ChatGPT still has several limitations as a creative writer… let’s just say we don’t think it’s that good at it.

Image creators are more interesting to us, though much more random and difficult to control – you must be a master prompt engineer and have incredible patience to get what you want from Midjourney. Yet, prompt engineering – though a new, cool, and certainly useful skill to learn – can become a little too close to coding for our more natural-language-loving tastes. So when we heard that ChatGPT had Dall-E 3 integrated into a conversation-like interface, we couldn’t wait to try it out and play a bit. Sounded like our perfect semiotic playground.

The first prompt we entered was the first thing which passed by our mind:

I want an image of a cat, armed with cyberpunk gear, fighting off a demon. Backdrop is the inside of a flaming spaceship. The demon has horns.

After a few tweaks to both characters, we asked ChatGPT to imagine this was a graphic novel and what may happen in the following panel:

We saw something in the first panel (yeah, beside the weird flaming mini-cat over the dead enemy). Also, the emergent alliance between hero and demon looked interesting. That black cat with leather jacket character was promising. It took about six more generations – with a lot of crazy stuff and laughs – to reach this:

Urlan was almost born.

We remember the third image was what had us thinking we had something there. Those yellow eyes in the b&w were striking. Were stylish. This cat with his angry face was cool, though a bit too childish. So we decided we could try and make a little comic experiment. We have edited and lettered comics, know our way around image editors, and we have lots of experience in making books – so really the only real missing skill was creating the actual art (which is, well, problematic for a graphic novel!). Though we both can draw, neither of us can do so at a professional level, so there was no risk of “taking the fun part away” – on the contrary, we saw the possibility of creating a comic all by our own.

We established the goals of the project: 1) have fun; 2) showcase what these robots can do; 3) see what could be done cheap and quick with AI technology.

Actually, that was something we’d already tried some months ago in Midjourney, and so we knew that the main challenge would be keeping consistency through the story. AI image generators are fantastic for a single illustration, but they really have a hard time keeping the characters consistent. Randomness is part of how they work. In our previous attempt, we got gorgeous panels but never really managed to get a comic done.

We began working on studies of Urlan and his enemy/ally T.D. (Tentacular Demon), and proceeded from there as we saw he was certainly recognizable, though not perfectly consistent.

We remember we almost quit when, after a lot of back and forth with ChatGPT to define everything, this one came out:

Urlan had become a four-fingered, yellow-eyed Dick Tracy, for some reason…

But quit we didn’t...

(to be continued!)

Urlan, Cosmic Cat

A groundbreaking AI-human collaboration in graphic storytelling. With yellow eyes.