Creator: Antonio Rubbini
2024
Created by Antonio Rubbini, Kyra Chronicles is an action comic book series set in a fictional version of Brooklyn, New York. It revolves around a young woman named Kyra and her quest to avenge the murder of her father in the hands of crime boss Frank Donato.
On the periphery of this premise is Frank Donato’s group’s ongoing feud with rival gangs, the kidnapping of the city mayor, and other criminal bosses that serve as ancillary villains for Kyra. There is also the matter of a magical weapon – a gauntlet that is said to possess the power of “1000 warriors.”
The story is fairly generic and easy to follow. There is however an excess of moving parts. The plotting and world-building feels haphazard, as if the story was plotted by a committee. We suspect the engagement of an editor would have helped.
For instance, there doesn’t seem to be much thought put into the gauntlet weapon. It is a gauntlet that can shoot a nondescript energy blast and is reminiscent of Image Comics’ Witchblade. The connection between warriors and electric arcs is not obvious, and requires too much suspension of belief given the backdrop mirrors the real world.
There’s also Kyra, who possesses a variety of non-descript powers for no apparent reason (we read the comic several times to find a single panel that explains where she got her powers, or her training in martial arts, without success. Again, another failing arising from a lack of editorial intervention). The character serves merely as a barebones protagonist.
The art however is the selling point of Kyra Chronicles. It was created using the generative artificial intelligence service called Midjourney. The results are sleek and highly detailed.
But this comes with its perils. We pored through panels and found that while the art style is consistent, there are panels where the AI’s mistakes were overlooked – for example, the panel below where one character’s feet look like they are coming out of another character’s crotch, followed by the next panel where the stripes on the character’s pants have disappeared.
The art looks beautiful in isolation, but when used as a sequence of scenes designed to tell a story, it falls over. In almost every single panel, characters tend to have their lips closed or pursed while speaking. The main characters are frowning or grinning, without any other facial expression. The art is also cluttered with overly-generous amount of dialogue – again, no editor to pick this flaw up. The chunks of dialogue consistently breaks immersion.
In its own limited way, Kyra Chronicles is an excellent show of the potential of generative AI when it comes to producing a comic book. This title feels like a demo of the technology, with the end product disjointed but illustrative of what could be achieved. It is, sadly, too mechanical a creation to be enjoyable. You can read the issues for free at globalcomix.