By Todd Russell
Can’t draw, but always wished you could create your own comic book? Dashtoon (https://dashtoon.com/) is an AI generator that seeks to allow that sort of creation. Similar to Suno for music and a bunch of different graphic AI generators like Night Cafe and Leonardo, Rosebud.ai to help you generate games and AI characters and YesChat.ai for making card games and, well, the list goes on.
It’s all in the name. The dash part being it’s supposed to generate entire comic storylines with art panels from text prompts.
Create your own comic book using AI. You don’t have to draw the artwork or write the story, AI is there to help you with both. From a creative standpoint, this seems pretty neat, unless you’re a comic artist and feel this takes away from your potential work. The same could be said about other generators, although I think is a bit broad of a stretch simply based on text prompts.
“As a writer and creator for more than 20 years, I know how hard and difficult it can be as a lone creative trying to break into an industry, get noticed, and get published. What software like this offers creatives is massive. It’s like having a creative writing and designer partner who works 24/7 at lightning speed and is always ready to bounce some crazy ideas off you. And it can also instantly translate your ideas to the page and is willing to make unlimited revisions for you at the drop of a hat” – via Dashtoon Studio Review: Amazing AI Software for Comic Design and Webcomics – TCK Publishing
Signup is free, allowing and juicing creators with 500 credits, which is enough to generate several comics episodes. There is a pro plan that costs $9.99/month that awards 20,000 credits a month, providing ample credits to generate a whole lot more, for those interested.
Both free and pro plans allow creators to share their creations elsewhere, yes, even commercially. The creation process is all browser-based: start with a story that either you write or let the AI help you, then assign the characters included in the comic and generate the comic panels. After the panels are created, edit if necessary, then click a publish button and voila, you have an episode created.
After creating a second episode, now you’ll have a “story” that readers can subscribe to. They get the first 10 episodes for free and each day a daily episode, then after that, can pay to read more. Dashtoon splits revenue with creators.
Back when my AI band known as AI KILLS released their second album, I made a comic for the album with each of the first 10 songs being an episode — a single issue –of the story.
I used little more than the song title to generate the comic book issues. These song comic book stories turned out a little like mini episodes of the Twilight Zone. Think independent stories loosely tied together.
Here are the 10 episodes, name and link so you can check them out (Ed. all these comics are AI generated with minimal human creative involvement)
“Fading Into The Shadows”
Comic Issue #1 – https://dashtoon.onelink.me/ifIy/ctwobl6c
“In The Caverns of Mortality”
#2 – https://dashtoon.onelink.me/ifIy/w6rhhpoz
“Eternal Wrath of Time”
#3 – https://dashtoon.onelink.me/ifIy/tibh4lm7
“Alcohol’s Dark Embrace”
#4 – https://dashtoon.onelink.me/ifIy/2ky867n4
“Haunted Creation”
#5 – https://dashtoon.onelink.me/ifIy/7auqtxoj
“Hell Halloween Album”
#6 – https://dashtoon.onelink.me/ifIy/2nlimx09
“Screaming Into The Void”
#7 – https://dashtoon.onelink.me/ifIy/3c7qtv1z
“Age of Silence”
#8 – https://dashtoon.onelink.me/ifIy/3iujts5n
“Ghosts of the Golden Years”
#9 – https://dashtoon.onelink.me/ifIy/aza899an
“666: The Numbers Game”
#10 – https://dashtoon.onelink.me/ifIy/14068vyq
Intrepid readers might note that the 10th AI generated song from this AI KILLS album was also the last featured game AI generated with Rosebud.AI and is fully playable in the browser here: Play NumBlast Purgatory the 6th PGM Original Browser Game. Yes, the game was retitled from the song, but is an original game where the code was maybe 75% AI generated and 25% was me massaging, fixing and enhancing the code.
As I previously wrote about Rosebud.AI it’s not nearly as fast or complete as using text prompts and letting the generator create a fully playable game. Here’s that article for those that missed: Rosebud.AI Is Better Than Expected for Creating Game Code using AI, But Still Requires Human Programming. Note: since publishing that article, Rosebud now charges for a subscription plan to be able to use unlimited prompts and provides a very limited amount of prompts for free. I haven’t used it since this last game, so no idea how it has evolved since they went to this subscription model.
Dashtoon when it was created in the fall of 2024 was more complete of a solution than Rosebud, but quirky to use. There are only 10 comics you can create and then if readers want to read more, they need to buy tokens to read more, which was something they may or may not still be doing, I don’t know, but didn’t like that much. It just seemed like more human work would be required to massage these comics into something consistent and that was more effort and work than desired.
I’m all for providing creators some way to make money and am OK with paid AI generated content, especially if/when it is fully disclosed as AI. This is the model they still seem to be using and have no idea how well it’s working, how much these creators are making. Dashtoon splits the money from these “premium” subscribers with the AI comic book creator.
Dashtoon offered to be interviewed for PGM and I politely declined. I didn’t really see an angle at the time to interview them about their service at the time. Maybe I made a mistake and should have interviewed them for a follow-up to this article. Let me know in the comments if you think this might be worthwhile.
Am not sure if or when I’ll ever use this service again. It seemed like a neat idea at the time, but then once I got in and actually used it, the feeling I came away with wasn’t quite as exciting. Not saying you couldn’t make some amazing comics with Dashtoon — and maybe I could too, it’s just something I haven’t felt super compelled to return to.
Your turn. What do you think of AI Comic Book generators? Good idea? Bad? Underwhelmed? Not excited?