Dashtoon's AI Comic Creating Kit For People Who Can't Create Comics

Based in San Francisco and London, and founded last year by Sanidhya Narain, Lalith Gudipati and Soumyadeep Mukherjee, Dashtoon  has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Matrix Partners India and Stellaris Venture Partners, and its platform Dashtoon Comic Reader has launched with 30 commission comics and states that they will add almost 1,000 new episodes every month, expecting to make $15,000 in revenue in its first month, and then grow to $100,000 per month.

They charge readers one free episode a day for each comic, and then charge for more. Forbes quotes Mukherjee saying ""Any storyteller, regardless of their artistic skills or technical knowledge, can create digital comics, breaking traditional barriers in illustrated content creation".

The service began after two of the founders, working for Pocket FM in India, on serialided audio content, promoted the company with comic book strips and found unexpected success. Their revelation of the power of comic books saw them research the Korean manwha market. And it seems they decided the biggest gap in the market was… people who couldn't draw.

And in the light of Midjourney, Dall-E and the like, began work on a platform that could generate production-quality comics with AI. They tell TechCrunch it works like so.

"Dashtoon is targeted at existing writer communities who want to turn their stories into comics, but don't have skills like sketching or lettering. To use Dashtoon Studio, a creator first uploads their storyboard. Then they pick characters for each panel from Dashtoon's character library or upload photos and drawings to generate images. The startup's founders say this reduces the time it takes to create an episode from 40 to 50 hours to just 5 to 6 hours. This means episodes can be published daily, increasing Dashtoon's chances of producing a hit. In the future, Dashtoon plans to add features enabling creators to generate storyboards and dialogues with AI, too, reducing the time it takes to create an episode to under an hour."

While Forbes adds a few caveats.

"The aim is to give creators an opportunity to both tell their stories and sell their finished work. Creators using Studio pay nothing for the service if they agree to distribute their work exclusively on Dashtoon Apps, but will be charged fees if they also want to sell their comics on other channels. As for readers, they will find that content goes behind a paywall once they have accessed 10 episodes – to read on they will need to subscribe, providing monetisation opportunities for creators and Dashtoon itself."

Here's how it looks in practice.

They quote Narain saying "Most of the AI products are basic wrappers, and the content they produce is very mechanical in nature which means the creator has very limited control over the final output," and that Dashtoon is a solution to that. As to charges that AI-generated content is based off stolen work from other artists, Narain tells TechCrunch that "Dashtoon prevents copyright infringement with several measures. One is seeding its character library internally with its own IP, including digital art, hand-drawn characters and photos. Stories also have to be the IP of its creator or Dashtoon, and the company may eventually train its own foundation models, partnering with data providers who don't break copyright law."

How this plays out in practice… is something we will have to see. By the way, I just asked Bing to draw a Dashtoon AI comic book, and this is what it came up with.