Selection criteria
Pick the idiom, not just “comic”
The eight templates sit in three different printing traditions and they are not interchangeable. Pop-art and retro wall print foreground the dot screen itself — coarse visible Ben-Day dots, high-saturation primaries — and read as a 1960s print rather than a drawing. Comic style and reality-and-comics use a finer screen with a clear ink contour, closer to a modern comic page. The self-comic templates place you inside a panel with panel furniture around you, which is the one to pick if you want the result to read as a page rather than a portrait. Multi-faceted and 3D cinema are the outliers, treating the frame as a composited spread.
Still or animated panel
Four of these output short video, animating either the panel or the figure inside it while holding the printed look. An animated halftone is harder than it sounds — the dot screen has to stay locked to the frame rather than crawling with the motion, which is the artefact that makes cheap animated comic effects look like a shimmering mess. The video templates here keep the screen fixed. They cost more credits than stills, so settle the idiom on a still first.
Usage guidance
- Choose the tradition first: pop-art dot screen, modern comic page, or self-insert panel.
- Use a front-facing, evenly lit photo — profile angles lose the most likeness under simplification.
- Generate a still to settle the idiom before spending credits on an animated panel.
- Judge the result on the ink contour and whether colour sits flat inside it.
- If the face is unrecognisable, change the source photo angle rather than the template.
- Style only — do not attempt existing copyrighted characters.
Related models
How much likeness survives
Less than in a photographic style, by design — simplification is the point of the medium. Front-facing, evenly lit source photos hold likeness best because the ink contour has clear features to follow. Three-quarter and profile angles lose the most, and heavy shadow across one side of the face gives the contour nothing to trace, so it invents. If keeping the face recognisable matters more than the style, the pop-art templates preserve more than the manga-leaning ones, because they simplify colour rather than geometry.
What is off-limits here
Existing comic and cartoon characters. The content rules prohibit generating copyrighted characters, and it is also the fastest way to get a page or an account into trouble — so these templates style your photo rather than reproducing anyone else's IP. If what you want is yourself drawn in the idiom of a particular publisher, describe the printing style, never the character or the property.
