Sample images are straight gens on TewiNai with no upscaling or detailers. Trained on Illustrious 2.0.

Note: This LORA explores Byrne’s post-X-Men 1980s style – as seen particularly in his Alpha Flight and Fantastic Four runs, with some Man of Steel, Action Comics (Superman) and a dash of Hulk.

I’ve always found the Grouchy One’s ‘80s work the most interesting. I remember being fascinated by a particular look he’d give his thinner characters at the time, such as Bruce Banner or Heather Hudson, when in side profile – a kind of stretched, John Denver-post-facelift appearance that was simultaneously distinctive, ugly and characterful. I’ve only partly succeeded in replicating it in this LORA, but feel free to experiment with the byrneface tag in close-up side-view portraits and see what pops out.

Usage:

·         STR1 for the basic faces-and-anatomy of the style, or STR1.1 to encourage it to stick to the '80s comics colour scheme and shading. I had to cook this one for longer than usual to get the style to stick, so I would suggest against anything higher than STR1.2 as it doesn’t improve the likenesses and starts to slop up the details.

·         johnbyrne is the basic activation tag. The only other tag I would strongly recommend on top of it is heroic_proportions, as Illustrious defaults to more large-headed anime characters and they can look bobble-headed when converted to a western comics art style.

·         On that note, feel free to experiment with the usual raft of western comics tags [western_comics_\(style\), 1980s_\(style\), traditional_media, hatching_\(texture\), ink_\(medium\)], but I’ve found overall that they just overwrite the Byrne-ness with generic western comics styling.

·         If you want to mimic the look of a printed 1980s comic, throw in the screentones tag. Though note that it doesn’t play nice with upscalers – the upscaling pass tends to make the splotches more even and geometric, so the image looks less like ink absorbed into newsprint and more like a 60s Ben Day dots pop-art piece.

·         Don't use quality tags (unless that's the look you're after): masterpiece, best quality and friends will nudge the image towards what's highly-rated on Booru, which means anime proportions and faces, and gradient digital shading. Even the highly-rated modern western comics stuff post-dates the late '90s anime influences and is digitally shaded (rather than the '80s and earlier styles where all the depth came from the inking). Avoid the various "bad quality" tags in your negative prompt as well for the same reason (though I did tag some training images as poor_quality and smudged, so those are marginally usable).