An interest “merger” of the new power of SDXL and the ease-of-use of Midjourney, for local install. Fooocus. Claiming a three-click local desktop install, and “minimal GPU memory requirement is 4GB (NVIDIA)”. Though 8Gb of on-card memory, at least, would probably be better, and note that 32Gb+ of system RAM is said to be ideal (though it seems you might get away with 16Gb on a shiny new laptop). Free, and open source.
Ships with a wide variety of styles…
Explorer++ – A small and fast file manager for Windows, Still alive, still freeware and now in 1.4. Not perfect, but still the best Windows Explorer replacement/companion. The new version removes Windows XP support. MajorGeeks is still listing the old 1.3.5.
The new 1.4 doesn’t crash when switching rapidly between thumbnail-heavy folders. Previously, all the on-display thumbnails had to be allowed to load, and only then was it safe for the user to switch into a sub-folder.
UK arts funding for comics – does it exist? The newly formed grouplet Comics Cultural Impact Collective has a survey, linked above, to try to find out. Go fill it in.
I must say that, in 20+ years of observing local culture between Birmingham and Manchester I’d only ever heard of one Arts Council small individual grant to an actual maker of comics — a young North Staffordshire lad developing a graphic novel. That was probably 15 years ago, and I think it was about £500 of development money.
No doubt they’d be happy these days to fund the creation of political comics, of the correct leftist credentials, but even then I don’t see such funding being reported much. What I could find via search was the London academic Emily Haworth-Booth, “currently working on an Arts Council England-funded graphic novel about climate anxiety”. And £10,000 for portfolio development in 2022 to a documentary maker, a name only known to the Internet for having previously worked on a student knife-crime project in Sheffield. Good for her, as it seems to be a rare thing for an unknown name to land that much.
I guess there might be funding for genuinely comics-focused educational projects (crime, health, women’s history) etc. But I could only find an academic who had some emergency funding during lockdown, to give five talks on her new academic book on feminist cartoons.
Sometimes there is evidently a bit of spin-out. For instance I found that the Manchester Metropolitan University ‘Education and Social Research Institute’ had an Arts Council grant, and they passed a bit of it on to a local artist to run community arts workshops in 2018/19 on “health comics creation” for dementia. A few more such instances might be found, if one really dug for them.
Maybe also the odd exhibition, since “final audience” is everything to Arts Council funding committees heavily oriented toward the idea of ticket sales and the well-worn rut of community arts box-ticking. But I track the few such UK comics/illustration exhibitions quite closely, and I must say I haven’t been noticing the Council logo popping up on flyers and posters in the last 12 years or so. The only exhibition I can recall was a reasonable £14k of funding for the summer Shrewsbury Comics Trail (the cash “went towards commissioning and producing the artworks”), the Trail being a walking tour as part of the town’s now defunct comics festival. Though I’d imagine most of the cash went on fabricating and siting large weather-durable outdoor display boxes for the printed graphics.
I found one instance of the funding of international work. The South East had a huge £341,883 grant in 2017, to fund a exchange project that brought Baltic nation artists (Latvia etc) into contact with “the children’s illustration and comics publishing” scene in London. And of course London’s strongly left-leaning Cartoon Museum also had hefty Cultural Recovery Fund funding to keep it afloat during the lockdowns. It had more than one substantial tranche of funding there, I recall.
I looked at the sponsors and funding list of Yorkshire’s fledgling ‘Thought Bubble’ 2023 comics festival. No Arts Council logo to be found.
Individual comics artists are at more of an inherent disadvantage in terms of funding, compared to festivals and museums. Many are introverted and shy (see my published in-depth interview with the head of the UK’s first Comics Arts degree), and yet the Arts Council implicitly expects glad-handing and schmoozing of the local Arts Council manager(s) in person at events, even before the application form goes in. Many young comics-makers are politically unsophisticated, and being young any remaining trace in their portfolio of interest in superheroes / manga / kiddie-comics probably doesn’t help in that regard. Hackles will be raised. Then there’s the getting and holding of the required ‘match funding’, similarly difficult. Then the Grantium application site is said by all to be an infernal carbuncle, and highly off-putting to all but the most experienced and dogged organisation.
Once the funding is in then the comic creation process is highly individual and uncertain, and can’t easily be geared to ‘tick the boxes’ in terms of potential audiences. Deadlines are similarly uncertain in comics. The very ethos of working alone with one’s imagination in a room for a year is alien to the Arts Council’s implicitly political emphasis on community, ‘process’, co-creation and measurable engagement with certain predetermined types of audience. Once done with a large project such as a graphic novel, the maker is likely utterly exhausted — with little left over for the arduous and soul-destroying process of ‘audience development and engagement’ and also running community workshops and exhibitions. For which they often don’t have either the temperament or the marketing skills.
Anyway, to be fair to the Arts Council England I searched Google for their Awards data (“awards” = funding) spreadsheets.
site:https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/ “comic” “awards”
Then the same for “graphic novel”. And downloaded all the resulting regular quarterly Project Grant spreadsheets. The resulting set of files ran from 2013-2022. Discounting the ‘stand-up theatre comedy’ type of comic, here’s the resulting list…
Google may have missed some mentions of the word “comic” or “graphic novel”, and doubtless the Arts Council might scrape up a few more from the Lottery-funded community projects and emergency lockdown funds that involved comics in some way. But these are their Project “awards”, so far as I can find them. The total is pocket-change, compared to the lavish spending in the same decade on opera, theatre and large two or three-year community-arts projects. Sure, it’s something… but the chances of talent getting some funding are probably far higher on a big crowd-funder like IndieGoGo.
Oh, and I also looked at the UK’s leading Arts Professional trade magazine, for “comic-book”. One short news item, on 2015 Arts Council Northern Ireland funding… “for a comic book entitled Bobby Sands, Freedom Fighter”. Sands was a IRA terrorist.
A further search for “graphic novel” (Did you mean “demographic level”?… erm, no). Four hits there, none specifically about graphic novels.
DeviantArt introduced AI tags about a month ago. Now they also have the global option to “suppress AI” in search-result or watch pages…
It’s interesting to turn it off and reload your “Watch” page. But I think I like it on, if only to train my eyes to see “AI” and “not AI” at a glance. You start to pick up that skill after a while.
Some appear to get around it by tagging with “ia” and the name of the AI service (e.g. “midjourney”). Which is fair enough for those with discerning selectivity and quality images, like Andres. He’s one of the best. But is not something you might want when you encounter ‘Sonic98’ posting 24 nearly identical and un-fixed AI images of ‘Sonic the Hedgehog as a busty anime gal’.
In which case the best option is to block or un-follow, rather than to block all AI. Newcomers may be surprised how quickly DeviantArt starts to improve once you start freely using the “Block user” option. Most of the “blurgh” is caused, as elsewhere in everyday life, by a tiny minority.
An update on my recent musing on the optimal dimensions for a full-screen comic-book page on an Amazon Kindle Fire 10″. Because Amazon has now introduced the Fire Max 11″. It looks even more ideal for reading comics, though is not exactly a budget tablet — £260 at UK prices. But I thought I’d take a look at his new 11″…
* The 212ppi pixel density is less than the Fire 10″. Probably an imperceptible drop on the old 224ppi of the 10″ models from 2017 and 2021.
* Colour-range performance is as good as the older HD range.
* A new 2,000 x 1,200px resolution screen. My calculations, based on stated inch dimensions and images of the tablet, suggest one would aim for 2,000 x 1,180px in landscape, to accommodate the bottom bar.
Thus the old 10″ dimensions (for making a landscape comic or picture-book) still hold true…
MS Publisher: 2,480 x 1,600px for a Publisher page. Then output double-page spreads and join, for gutter-free spreads.
Photoshop: Or you could work straight to a 3,200 width x 1866px height in Photoshop. Then to 2000 x 1167px — if the file-size of the final product is a consideration.
Good news, you can now revert to good old 0.9 on Clipdrop. But only if you’re a “Pro” subscriber.
Regrettably the Pro sign-up still shows the message “something went wrong” for me, and fails…
It’s been like that for more than a month. Another site states… “A 403 Forbidden Error occurs when you do not have permission to access a web page or something else on a web server. It’s usually a problem with the website itself.”
The other problem is that you can’t just buy a month, to test if 0.9 really is the same as before. You have to buy a recurring monthly subscription, while not knowing how difficult it will be to cancel it.
I do also wish that AI image generators would simply use PayPal, instead of some obscure service you’ve never heard of. They must be missing out on millions by not doing so.
2D digital art and painting 
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