Collaborative Comic Generation: Integrating Visual Narrative Theories with AI Models for Enhanced Creativity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a collaborative AI system for comic creation that integrates visual narrative theories and human creativity, enhancing storytelling through a structured, theory-inspired generative process.

Contribution

It presents a novel system combining narrative principles with AI models to support human-AI collaborative comic generation, grounded in visual storytelling theories.

Findings

Improved narrative quality in generated comics.

Enhanced human-AI collaboration in storytelling.

Open-source tool for narrative-driven image sequence creation.

Abstract

This study presents a theory-inspired visual narrative generative system that integrates conceptual principles-comic authoring idioms-with generative and language models to enhance the comic creation process. Our system combines human creativity with AI models to support parts of the generative process, providing a collaborative platform for creating comic content. These comic-authoring idioms, derived from prior human-created image sequences, serve as guidelines for crafting and refining storytelling. The system translates these principles into system layers that facilitate comic creation through sequential decision-making, addressing narrative elements such as panel composition, story tension changes, and panel transitions. Key contributions include integrating machine learning models into the human-AI cooperative comic generation process, deploying abstract narrative theories into AI-driven comic creation, and a customizable tool for narrative-driven image sequences. This approach improves narrative elements in generated image sequences and engages human creativity in an AI-generative process of comics. We open-source the code at https://github.com/RimiChen/Collaborative_Comic_Generation.