> 1. What's the style name for dilbert-like comic strips? Comic? Line art?

I don't think there's a clear settled name for that specific style, but I'd describe it as an American newspaper strip with low levels of detail and inspiration from "ligne claire" (Ligne claire is the style of Tintin etc. - focuses on strong, clear lines with a lot of details omitted, rarely shading very rarely hatching; e.g. hair in Ligne Claire is usually described by its borders - even messy hair is mostly hinted at by tufts sticking out, with the rest flat shaded).

American newspaper strips by no means always use simple line work, so describing it as that in isolation is unlikely to work, but it has other characteristics (which are by no means universal - this is a regular complication in categorizing this), such as often omitting backgrounds, or just hinting at backgrounds (e.g. with a picture hanging on a wall being all you see of the wall), and often using panels that change little or sometimes not at all during a conversational exchange (basically strips have a lot of characteristics around streamlining works for artists on a deadline that's often a major stress factor, so lots of simplification, but what requires simplification to same the artist time will vary greatly).

But there is variation there too, and especially very significant variation between the classic single-strip-a-day format and the Sunday format with a bigger panel, where you often end up seeing non-traditional layout or characters "bursting out" of individual frames in various ways where the single strips are often far more regimented. Many comics do both, and will sometimes look very different between the two.

E.g. Calvin and Hobbes strips are fairly regimented, usually four panels of near uniform size, while the Sunday panels were renowned for breaking "rules" with uneven, sometimes overlapping panels, and drawings bursting out of them - the last ever Calvin and Hobbes consists of 3 or 5 or 7 frames depending on how you count - the first frame contains another frame, which contains a drawing, which contains another frame with a drawing. The two top outer frames don't even align with the bottom outer frame... [1]

You almost certainly would need to try multiple things and add additional descriptors to get the specific feel you want.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/12/31...

1. You probably won't hit 100% parity just by prompt engineering especially if you want to do your points 3-4. You would need to train a style LoRa.

2. You can use one of the many ip-adapter models but the best result would probably be a combination of ip-adapter + subject LoRa.

3. That would be a controlnet model probably sketch best results would be achieved (for poses) using open or dw pose models.

4. You would do that with inpainting or stable drag.

https://stable-diffusion-art.com is a good starting point.

2. How do I produce consistent characters throughout the "comic box" and episodes?: controlnet "reference"

3. How do I hint the generation of the comic? E.g. I draw a stick figure of someone sitting, and it generates my character with that pose: controlnet "open pose/sketching"

4. How do I "refine" some parts of the generated image. For example I like the generated character, but I want the face to look different direction: inpainting

It's still basically impossible to get perfectly consistent character features across multiple images/without a massive amount of effort. These models have been trained to generate single/standalone images.

Maybe some of the Sora related tech (where it generates frames in parallel/each frame has the context of every other frame) for coherency can be used to improve the plain image generation stuff as well, ie being able to specify a character with multiple views (3/4, back, front etc) so that you can refer to that character in your prompt.

>1. What's the style name for dilbert-like comic strips? Comic? Line art?

"style of Scott Adams."