edit: get the script for yourself here https://codeberg.org/CritBase111/Comicify
Someone sent me the comic you see attached to the post, and I thought, hey, that seems like something you could automate. Put 4 images in a folder, run a script, and it automatically lays them out in a 2x2 grid.
With Crush and deepseek it basically writes itself. I'm actually kinda surprised at how well it's doing. There was just one bug that I sent to Claude to fix.
I'm putting the examples in an imgur link because they're still quite heavy on disk space and I don't want to overwhelm the server: https://imgur.com/a/bTiHV4b (yes the pictures make it kinda hard to understand but I'll try to make a real comic with it eventually)
It's difficult to get other people hyped about a work in progress lol but hopefully this makes sense.
It's a python script and this is how you'd run it:
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--folder FOLDER Path to folder containing comic panels
--panels {1,2,3,4} Number of panels to arrange (1-4). Not required when using --all
--gutter GUTTER Gutter size between panels in pixels (default: 15)
--border BORDER Border size around panels in pixels (default: 0)
--border-color BORDER_COLOR
Border color (CSS color name or hex code, default: black)
--gutter-color GUTTER_COLOR
Background/gutter color (CSS color name, hex code, or "transparent"|"none", default: white)
--margin MARGIN Margin multiplier relative to gutter size (default: 2.0, meaning 2x gutter)
--layout {horizontal,vertical,h,v}
Layout direction for 2 and 3-panel comics (default: horizontal). Use "h" or "v" as shorthand.
For 4-panel, use "h" or "v" for linear layouts, omit for 2x2 grid.
--all Generate all possible combinations (1, 2, 3, 4 panels with all layouts)
Examples:
python Comicify.py --folder "Comics/My first comic" --panels 4
python Comicify.py --folder "Comics/My first comic" --panels 4 --gutter 20
python Comicify.py --folder "Comics/My first comic" --panels 4 --layout h
python Comicify.py --folder "Comics/My first comic" --panels 2 --layout v
python Comicify.py --folder "Comics/My first comic" --all
python Comicify.py --folder "Comics/My first comic" --panels 3 --gutter-color none
If this doesn't speak to you basically you would download the .py file, and run one of the examples above. The --all flag makes all possible outputs (1, 2, 3 or 4 panel in all layouts). I also plan on adding "--reverse" to handle right-to-left order. you can see the examples in the imgur link, I included the sample code for some of them.
Deepseek wrote all of this, and it only costs like... a dollar or so. It's not the best at coding but it's so, so cheap that I fear I may spend all my savings on it lol. I didn't write a single line of code, just told it what I wanted (with more or less details) and it got it right on the first try. Now I'm just adding new functionalities to it.
I think one HUGE thing with LLM coding is it can go beyond what you know, so even if you can code it can do things you wouldn't necessarily do or know about.
I think this has uses for agitprop, if you want to make quick memes in a comic format for online or offline use. This is just one part of potentially a much bigger pipeline - I was thinking of having a simple gui afterwards you can send the output to, where you can add speech bubble stickers and write into them too, or like for one panel comics just write under it. Also with LLMs you can easily transpose this code to use javascript instead, or whatever else you want.
Oh if you send me a few pictures to comicify I can run them and show you the results. Script will not be available for download until it's fully ready.
