Stunning Comics with Keynote and Adobe Firefly

Generative AI image tools like Adobe Firefly, DALL-E3, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and even Canva can be used alongside Keynote to create beautiful and professional comic books.

I have been experimenting with a ton of generative AI tools lately, particularly those that generate images from text prompts. My favorites at the moment are DALL-E3, which you can currently access through the Bing Image Creator for free, and Adobe Firefly. These tools do an incredible, honestly mind-blowing, job and creating visuals from prompts. It’s an incredible engaging and thought-provoking experience to work with generative AI to try and get just the right image with just the right details and effects for what you’re looking for. Of course these graphics can be used for anything and can support a huge variety of learning experiences, but I set out with a specific task in mind. I wanted to see if I could create a teen comic book with dark and powerful imagery and minimal text. Now keep in mind, there’s not much of a story here - it was more of a proof of concept than anything!

Getting Started

I had an idea of what I was looking for with my visuals, so I dove right in to Adobe Firefly and started playing around. I tried six or eight different prompts until I landed on a teen male main character that I liked. The prompt was simply “angsty teenage boy screaming with despair.” I experimented greatly with the settings and included a reference image from the built-in gallery that had the ink/water color minimal look I was envisioning.

Here is the initial result…

Once I had this, it was pretty easy to proceed. I just uploaded this as my reference image and added a bunch of prompts using the same (or similar) style settings. The style reference image tool in Adobe Firefly is the key to creating both consistent visual feel and consistent characters.

Here are the ten images I ended up with for my [very short] comic book, and the prompts I used to generate them. Keep in mind, I did some tweaking of the settings and reference images used throughout the process.

angsty teenage boy comic book character screaming in an angry way 86620

angsty teenage boy seen from behind comic book character riding a bike away as fast as possible

angsty teenage boy seen from a distance comic book character talking to a group of similar looking students

angsty teenage boy close up comic book character hugging a girl with long hair with on a bright evening with a full moon in the distance

angsty teenage boy close up comic book character with a single tear running down his cheek, face on, looking slightly down

run down city with smoke from fires in the distance with some detail

angry teen boy throwing rocks into a river with a polluted city in the background seen from behind

angsty teen boy comic book character seen from a distance sitting by a campfire on a dark night, eating food from a tin can

broken down old car on the side of a dirty and polluted street with power lines overhead and

old run down seen house burning down with smoke and flames and damage from very far away

Now, Building the Final Product in Keynote

I took each of these images from Firefly and added them to ten blank slides in a Keynote deck. Strangely, they were all supposed to have a 16:9 aspect ratio, but they were all a bit narrower than that. Instead of stretching the images out in Keynote, I just adjusted the slide size to match perfectly.

There were some subtle style differences between the images. To add some consistency, I used the “enhance” image feature, and slide the saturation to 0 for each image. This minimized those differences.

Then I added my text to each slide. I wasn’t thrilled with any of my existing font options, so I grabbed a new one from FontSpace - “Great Answer.” If you download the Keynote deck after reading this, note that you will have to download that free font and install it first, or it won’t display properly.

I used black text on some slides, and white on others. When necessary, I added a rectangle behind the text to make it more legible. To have that appear somewhat seamless, I added an advance gradient from black to transparent so that it gave a bit of a faded edge effect. You can see this on slide 4.

The entire process took me less than an hour, including all the image generation. I’m quite happy with the aesthetic of the result (I just need more of an actual story!). I knew Keynote would not be an issue, I was just unsure how well I would be able to create multiple visuals with a consistent feel and consistent characters. It worked out well! A fun activity with so much potential for the classroom!

Download the Keynote deck here.