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Show HN: Shortbread App – AI-powered, romantic comics for women
Hi HN! Fengjiao and Evan here. We are building Shortbread App, Netflix for webcomics. We publish guilty-pleasure romance series (think 50 Shades of Gray) as comics. Like the mature version of Webtoon.
You can see two comics episodes at https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/3d25370c-a4eb-4df4-af8e-9980a72f2bd5 https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/3d25370c-a4eb-4df4-af8e-... https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/866c2873-9962-4ebe-8f0c-64a154c263bf https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/866c2873-9962-4ebe-8f0c-..., and read more in the app via https://www.shortbreadapp.com/ https://www.shortbreadapp.com/.
All comics in the app are made by artists using the Shortbread AI Comics Studio (https://shortbread.ai https://shortbread.ai). It is a powerful Photoshop-like editor that speeds up comic creation 10x with AI. The editor provides consistency and granular artistic control. More below.
We first posted on HN 6 months ago when we built a prompt-to-comics AI (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792444). We sunsetted this soon after - it was a fun experiment but it didn’t meet the real need of comic artists. Shortbread Studio now changes this by enhancing how creators naturally work instead of replacing them.
The tech:
One-shot Character LoRA: Artists upload a single photo of their character. Our backend uses prompt engineering and ControlNet pipelines to generate a synthetic dataset from this photo. This dataset shows the character in all kinds of angles, poses and facial expressions that the artist can pick the best from. It’s then sent to our LoRA training service to create a LoRA model. This takes about 7 minutes.
Control -> Redraw -> Refine Workflow: In real life drawing, you draw, erase, and draw again. The human creative process is iterative.
In Shortbread Studio, artists can start from a text prompt, a sketch, a web image or a pose reference as a basis, create an initial panel and quickly modify and regenerate until they get what they want. If you spend 5 seconds, you get a decent panel. If you spend 10 minutes, you can push the limits and get pro results.
Built-in Post-Processing: The editor’s features include liquify, upscale, remove background, and outpainting to extend an image. This allows artists to remove, add, or modify parts of an image on a pixel level without drawing by hand. We combine this with segmentation models like Segment Anything (https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything) to support intelligently selecting and editing a part of an image.
Google-docs like collaboration: The Studio runs in the browser and supports comments and collaboration.
LLM Powered Copy Editor: Comics need text. An AI agent proofreads speech bubbles, fixes lettering and identifies grammar mistakes.
Read our comics: https://shortbreadapp.com/ https://shortbreadapp.com/ (free to download + read, iOS + Android)
All of the above are built by a team of 3 engineers including myself. I will be around to answer any questions in this thread!
- com2kid 2y agoFYI your security certs are misconfigured and my ISP won't even let me visit your create.shortbread.ai subdomain. Might want to get that fixed!
- Fengjiao 2y agoThank youu - on it!
- jsheard 2y ago> LLM Powered Copy Editor: Comics need text. An AI agent proofreads speech bubbles, fixes lettering and identifies grammar mistakes. There's an obvious lettering error in one of your own example links: https://i.imgur.com/BzB9XzS.png https://i.imgur.com/BzB9XzS.png
- Fengjiao 2y agoIt's a preview link that adapts to your phone screen. Our artists use this link to render the content in realtime as they create. Published stuff goes through a microservice and is standardized.
- fwip 2y agoDoes "for women" here mean "for straight women?"
- filleduchaos 2y agoAlso, I have to wonder if anyone who actually reads webcomics was involved in the production of this, because "professional quality" (read: hyperrealistic) art is not the selling point at all even for the decidedly NSFW ones.
- fao_ 2y agoIndeed, the people I know who read them are often heavily invested in the art quality and the creator themselves.