Comic: American politics Oct 2024

I have been trying for some time to create comics with Dall-E and it has been _frustrating_! The idea of this comic is to represent Kamala Harris as a bridge… she is a unifying force in many different ways. Trump is represented as a megaphone. I wanted the bridge to go from California to New York, the two primary bases of Democratic power in the U.S., and also the economic engines of the states. In the middle we have the ‘fly-over’ states – a term up there with ‘basket of deplorables’ when it comes to disrespecting people. The Trump megaphone is causing distortion in the red states and threatening the bridge.

Could I get Dall-E to do this? Lord, no. It took a lot of tries just to get the bridge to be placed even approximately correctly. No way could I get it to create a megaphone that even would point any direction other than left or right, much less where I wanted it relative to the bridge.

I did get some other interesting images… at one point I was thinking of trying to do some doonsbury/garry-trudeau-esque comics using symbolic representations of the protagonists in U.S. politics. Here’s what chatgpt and I came up with for trump:

That’s supposed to be a disembodied combover on top of a megaphone!

Playing with these ideas, I often ran into unexplained image generation errors, I suspect because I was tripping over some constraints on generating political material with Dall-E. ChatGPT offered no explanation.

I used Dall-E to create another depressing political comic in March of 2020: Comic: Israel, Palestine, Titanic