Retired, Still Creating: Anabran Abdhul Quarnain Builds a Comic Universe With AI

I was a big fan of The Avengers and the X-Men and actually one of my favorite characters was Simon Williams a.k.a. Wonder Man the character that sadly never got fully developed and would have been great if he had been properly portrayed in the movies. Honestly only in recent years and as I got bored with 3D and moved over into 2D animation did I become really interested in making my own graphic novels and comics but I used to draw huge collages of Marvel characters where I would pencil ink them and actually color them with colored markers on poster board

I started initially in the Pre-press department got my first job learning how to set up files for print which became really useful later on I eventually moved over to the design side and learned a lot about typography color and aesthetic page layout after the huge financial downturn of 2008 I was bounced out onto the street like a lot of people and just started freelancing and adding small animation clips and trailers and never went back to working for another employer until I retired in December 2025 actually my previous experience is greatly enhancing my ability to create comics for example issue one of the fracture protocol was actually printed for a small print run of 10 books so I have the 10 physical copies and setting up the books for proper print was no challenge to me because I used to do that professionally for a living

The fracture protocol trilogy is an introduction to my comic book universe where there is a huge network of artificial worlds run by a pan galactic government known as the Galactic Protectorate on each planet there is a superpowered individual known as a sentinel who has complete and utter authority he controls who gets the resources and of course acts as the lone law enforcement officer as he has able to impose the will of the Galactic Protectorate on the citizens what happens is one of the main protagonists a sentinel called AETHER receives a complaint from a petitioner that a brutal tyrant has landed out on on of a section of his planet called the Redlands when he goes and confronts this individual the individual immediately begins bombarded him with accusations against the Galactic Protectorate although he he seemingly defeats the character later on the character is rescued from his custody shockingly by a sentinel from another of the artificial worlds so as it turns out he was being recruited into a group of Sentinels who have discovered something really horrible about the Galactic Protectorate and what they actually plan to do with the citizens that they populate these artificial worlds with so eventually they all joined together and embark upon a mission to prevent a horror type of harvesting that happens every 1000 or so years because there are these huge dark matter constructs at the southern pole of each planet that's completely off limits to everyone and it turns out that those are gateways to another universe and there is a ravenous horde of crustacean like advanced creatures that populate these planets and then Harvey them by literally feasting on the population every 1000 years if you are familiar with video game lore such as Mass Effect and Halo you will see that a lot of my story was derived from those themes but I think I've made a really good derivation of those themes to build this trilogy the main thing I want opted to do was to subvert people's expectations for example the tyrant who originally called the Sentinel out and fights him out in the Redlands seems like a cookie cutter villain but by issue two you find out he was an extremely complex characters and there are layers upon layers of secrets that are kept even between the Sentinels as you get through the story you find out more and more as well as learn that there are traitors working for the Galactic Protectorate that are secretly assisting the Sentinels as well I think it's a good read if you really take the time to really dig into the story as it the mystery is unraveled layers at a time

It started with the character designs I designed the characters that eventually appeared in this trilogy over a year ago when I first started using paid AI services I didn't really have any actual stories in mind that I would use them for I focused on really nailing down the character designs and when I came up with the Jax Harlan character then I started getting ideas about building the story based on themes inspired by other media that I mentioned before such as the mass effect video game lore with the Reapers as well as the Halo video game lore with the forerunners and precursors if you're not familiar with those you won't really understand what I mean but if you even do a casual glance at those laws you will see how much it influenced my story so I really had no plans for a trilogy but as the first issue unfolded and turned out to be over 80 pages I realized they were going to be multiple books to finish the story I had planned on finishing up the entire story in the second book but it turns out that the book would have been nearly 200 pages and at the time I was already planning on getting the second book printed as well and and I had actually prepared the second book and sent it to an online printer but they screwed up so terribly and sent my printed books all up and down the entire East Coast everywhere except to my actual address that I ended up actually getting a refund so I may get the second and even the third issue printed eventually just to have physical copies for myself but in the meantime I'm going to try to build a more of a following with the digital versions and hopefully generate enough interest and possibly even do a crowdfund to get the second book and the third book printed because even doing small print runs of 10 books can get to be really expensive doing it out of pocket.

But as of now I do have a set of 10 copies of the first book in physical form that I show to people just to give them an idea of what type of comic books I do instead of asking them to go log in on a website which of course people will never take the time to do but when you show them a physical book right then and there their eyes light up there's still a lot of value in physical books but again doing it on out of pocket particularly now that I'm retired on a fixed income is not really viable so I'm hoping to build a following enough that I could possibly do a crowdfunding campaign

I was still quite active as a 3D animator in the blender community using that software and Rerigging DAZ characters to be animated in blender but I always wanted to do 2D animation and 2D illustration and as AI began to improve particularly on a 2D side, I started looking for a service that could produce really good 2D animations I've always been a fan of 2D animations since my kids were small and I used to sit and watch Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network with them
I stumbled upon Mage.space quite by accident and was immediately besotted with one of their toon presets which I use to make my first somewhat experimental graphic novel "Athena's paradox" back then mage.space did not even have the ability to create and store characters for reusable generations with the same character so if you look at the Athena paradox book that I have on comics authority I came up with a way to account for the fact that the characters overall look and clothing couldn't be consistent throughout the book by putting it into the story whereby my main character was experiencing quantum shifts into multiple iterations of the universe which sort of explained away why there was no consistency between the costume designs and all of that as I said it was very experimental but mage.space very quickly improved all of their tools I strongly recommend popping over there and taking a look because it's truly one stop for everything as it gives you access to all of the major frontier models right there on the site it has a built in video and image upscaling it has separate apps that can do face swaps that can replace characters clothing backgrounds in existing video footage there are so many tools over there that I have not even had time to experiment with because I'm mostly focused on comics and have been doing my cartoon animations using grok over@x.ai but lately I've Began using the video animation at MAGE a lot more

Actually I treat every image in my comic as an individual movie frame .
Because I opted for the $60 per month Pro Plus plan over there I get unlimited image generations and I can also generate unlimited videos at 860 by 480 I believe but I can use the on site upscaler to upscale my videos up to at least 720p and if I want to go 1080 I'll have to use a token or what they refer to as gems over there.
they give me 3500 gems every time my renews every month but right now I keep about 12 to 13,000 gems on hand whenever I want to use them to speed up a image generation.
Once I am happy with the particular image or shot I may take it over to the Upscaler to make it even larger or if I need to do a quick edit I have access to multiple frontier systems including Grok which is very good and I can literally edit an image they also have some really good relighting tools where you can actually change the direction and add really cool rim lighting to your comic images to make them much more dynamic
Once I am satisfied with the particular image or shot I simply download it and drag it onto the page with the Comic life software so the only truly manual part is creating interesting panel layouts and comic life and of course going back and adding the lettering which I do by using a software called VoiceTyper where I literally just drag a word balloon onto the panel and speak into my podcasters microphone which is converted into text right there in the comic life software so that it saves me from having to actually type anything in fact I'm using that same software to respond to your interview questions as I've gotten very lazy and really do not like typing on a keyboard anymore

I'm really glad you've asked this question.
a typical prompt over at MAGE starts out with "create a cinematic low angle camera view comic book illustration of xxxx" so I get much more dynamic images by using the language of cinematography such as low angle, wide shot, worm's eye, view bird's eye view ,3/4 over-the-shoulder view ,all of this terminology results in getting some really interesting camera angles instead of those flat boring perfectly centered square grid angles that you see coming out of ChatGPT and other image generators which are not the fault of the AI technology it's a matter of the person doing the prompting not knowing how to describe an interesting scene

Doing the final lettering on book three only emphasized the importance of why I do my panel layouts manually once you start lettering a book you realize that you're going to have to cover up some of your artwork which I take that into account when creating my panel dimensions and my panel layouts and I always leave room or dead areas of each image generation where I know there's going to be a text box that's not covering up anything contextually needed for storytelling purposes and if you notice all of my pages are what we call full color bleeds I do not have any blank white page backgrounds with color panels sitting arranged on them all of my pages have some interesting background art that aesthetically matches the type of artwork that are in each panel that appears on that page if you go back and look at some amazing artwork and series that were released by Marvel many years ago called "The Ultimates" that's what inspired me to adopt that style where you do not have blank white page backgrounds but you have full color full edge to edge illustrated backgrounds and then separate panels on top of those illustrated backgrounds which to me makes the book much more visually interesting to look at because every bit of the page is filled but in a in an aesthetically pleasing way instead of that busy overfilled way that you see happening with the default ChatGPT imagery people are using to create their comics with

First and foremost I worked in the print industry long enough to see entire job classifications disappear as we moved from shooting film images onto aluminum plates to creating printing plates directly from the desktop onto polyurethane plates and eventually going completely to digital presses where digital imagery is just imaged directly onto the final paper stock without any messy steps in between.
I often remind people that there were chemical engineers and silver recovery specialists who had lucrative careers working at Eastman Kodak most people have completely forgotten about those people as they take 8k video and photographs on their smartphones I do not even engage with the anti AI crowd except to mock and ridicule them on places like X.
You're not going to stop technological progress to protect a small minority of peoples jobs and livelihoods I know that seems harsh to say but that's the reality of technological innovation and not just in the creative fields but in any other industry these type of advancements displace people so if you're not in a position to adopt these new tools and move on or find another means to make your income I don't know what to tell you yes I'm in the somewhat advantageous position of being retired and not having to go out and compete in the marketplace anymore because there will be no future for people trying to make a career doing creative work that involves making any types of imagery and eventually any types of animations as well that's the reality of it so I don't really care about the criticism because I'm old enough to have seen it all happen before in the print industry and other industries as well

This is an area where I'm pretty much clueless and probably will struggle with which is why I'm glad I don't really have to make a living at making comics and graphic novels because building a following well it just requires a lot of maintenance sort of like having children again or having a wife again which is something I don't want to really have to deal with but I'm going to take my shot at trying to build a following based on the strength of my characters and stories but right now there's so much pushback against AI by people who themselves are not even artists most of this pushback is completely political by far leftist people who are just automatically opposing the technology because they hate the so-called tech bros and capitalism itself but that's another discussion entirely.

The way to keep creating enjoyable and stress free is first be retired and already have steady income and health insurance for the rest of your life after that any stress that you allow into your life is because you're just not being diligent and keeping it out, I'm about to turn 63 in December and I live a peaceful and carefree existence my life is a closely guarded fiefdom of tranquility.
At this point my primary inspiration is my grandchildren getting to enjoy them and trying to maintain a high level of health and fitness and enjoying whatever time I may have left and being able to get these ideas out of my head instantaneously through AI has just been a gift that I thought I would not live to see I don't know if you've ever seen the original Blade Runner movie I'm sure you have. but think of the scene where Deckard is sitting in his apartment analyzing those photos that he confiscated from one of the replicants apartment and just telling it what to do. look how primitive that looks compared to the world we're living in right now we're almost on the verge of that Star Trek technology future that I fantasized when I was a kid back in the 1970s so yeah I'm really looking forward to the way things are unfolding and just enjoying this new technology and just living this peaceful, carefree life.

My advice to the young people out there is this
don't die!! not yet
this world is about to become a really really interesting place and you're not going to want to miss it.