The new version of Midjourney dropped a few days ago, with new features being rolled out gradually. The biggest leap so far has been the introduction of omni reference, which was only made available recently. It allows you to use objects and characters as references and add them to specific scenes, which (on paper) sounds like a giant improvement for making AI comics. Thus, I was really excited to test it with the next issue of my “test” comic, The Last Superhero.

However, I completely failed at getting anything going.

The reason? V7 appears to have very aggressive prompt filters now. Despite many attempts and creative rewording, none of my prompts were accepted. Eventually, I became so frustrated that I gave up on the idea of using Midjourney altogether. All the improvements in features and image quality are meaningless if I can’t even generate a basic scene of a superhero being shot by a villain. I couldn’t even prompt “guy in pain being strapped to a chair…” without it being flagged. Nearly all action scenes were impossible to create due to the overly aggressive AI word filter now in place.

I hope the Midjourney team eventually realizes that filtering so many words renders the tool useless for a wide range of creative tasks. I understand their desire to avoid extreme gore or explicit content, but there must be a better solution. For instance, prompts involving violence should be allowed when clearly framed in a context like “comic book style.”

For now, I’ll be looking into other models and revisit Midjourney with version 8—which hopefully delivers more reasonable prompt restrictions.

Conclusion:
If you’re looking to create AI-generated comics, Midjourney currently isn’t the tool to use.