Could i use this to quickly create a comic book from one of my scripts?
Could also do like audio book visualizations type thing -- is it good at creating unique characters and keeping them recognizable across various scenes?
These are the right questions. Basically, the answer is yes, with a few significant qualifiers.
From my experience with it so far, it's better at making ideas than it is pictures, which is surprising to me, as I was expecting the opposite. I'm not too dissapointed though. This is a landmark achievement that raises a bunch of uncomfortable questions about the future. Without question they'll be constantly evolving it though, and I expect stronger performance in as soon as 6 months.
with some practice, and money (it's coin operated), you can get great art out of this, and even maintain a theme and look across hundreds of pictures if desired. It's far from perfect, but very powerful for your application.
Here's your actual solution, and if you do this, yes you can make a comic book or graphic novel, and it could look amazing and hold character and style to a large degree. It's a bit expensive, but will work amazingly well for an entry level artist. TLDR, you need to rotoscope and stitch every picture in your book, likely from several outputs, and only one in 10 outputs or so will be very useful.
1. Buy a bunch of Dall E 2 credits, for a graphic novel, you're probably looking at 600 bucks worth before it's over. Not too bad for 200 pages of incredible comic art.
2. Buy and Ipad Pro, 2021 or later.
3. Buy Procreate for Ipad Pro. I think it's 10 bucks. There is no better program for this job. New gen apple pencil required. 130 bucks.
4. Set up google drive, install the app on ipad. Create a google drive folder named whatever, and copy only viable output from Dall - E 2 to that folder.
5. Learn to use procreate, it's relatively simple and intuitive. There are many alternative programs that will do this task, including free desktop software like krita. So this can be swapped for the above ipad and procreate stuff, but procreate will make the entire 4000 hour process fun and intuitive, and that will effect the energy you can put into design.
6. Create each main character in Dall E until you're happy, bank that image, upload it back to dali. Now you can type commands and modify that image. So I'd provide image "guy standing" and ask dali to make it guy standing with coat, or guy jumping, and it can make decent variations from the base image input.
7. Often, basically always, there will be fantastic parts of an output you can use, and then parts that don't look good. This is where procreate comes in. It's also for your main characters and still post.
8. Take the frame where your character is perfect for scene x, and use procreate or your compositing program to rotoscope it into scenes.
9. Dall E puts out square images only right now. That will likely change at some point, but here you would also use your compositing application to stitch backgrounds.
10. Add word balloons, and you're done
At the end of the day, if one was willing to do a great amount of work, you could make an AMAZING comic book with this thing in a month, and an amazing graphic novel in 6 months or a year, I mean something that would get distro from a publisher somewhere. I'm actually super tempted to do at least a short one, just because this is a brand new possibility.
It would be kind of cool to try and automate a public domain audiobook with this, like I did with book of dragons.