Carlos Pacheco style (90s-00s Marvel & DC)

Trained on IllustriousXL2.0. Previews created on TewiNai. Basic workflow plus face detailer – all prompts are embedded in the preview images.

In the mid ‘90s, Carlos Pacheco and Adam Kubert were effectively competing to see who could make X-Men fans more uncomfortable with the rapid shift in art-styles. Letters pages called them “manga influenced”, presumably because the letter-writers had never read a manga in their lives – Pacheco, in particular, was more of a fusion of the Image style with some of Paul Dini’s cartoon curves (but subtly!). Pacheco was also fantastic at busy panels with dynamic composition, bolstered by Marvel’s earliest experimentations in digital colouring, so it’s a shame that it was the ‘90s so most of the art was buried under speech balloons.

His most critically-acclaimed piece was probably the Avengers Forever miniseries with Kurt Busiek in ’98-‘99, which managed to wring one of the best Avengers stories ever out of all the continuity issues that had piled up around Kang, Immortus, and whether or not the Vision was the original Human Torch. Go figure. Putting together the training data for this LORA I was surprised at how often Busiek’s name propped up as a collaborator – most notably in the Arrowsmith mini for Image in 2003.

He did some decent work in the ‘00s for both Marvel and DC, but rather than the lush digital colourists of the late '90s they paired him with the more desaturated, gritty, the-spandex-actually-looks-like-spandex colours that were fashionable at the time, and I’m not persuaded that it flattered him. His last really high-profile work was the regrettable Schism X-men event in 2011, and after that he was mostly a variant cover guy with the occasional fill-in.

This is a style LORA which – checks notes – contains as few superheroes in the training data as possible. I’ve drawn from his Operation:Zero Tolerance X-Men run (Hi, Maggott!), the Bishop limited series, Arrowsmith, a splash of JSA, and a few pics of Jean Grey in a waitress uniform from the ‘00s X-stuff, but as far as reasonably possible I’ve tried to prioritise normies over capes to give the LORA the widest possible applicability. As noted above, the colourists they gave Pacheco affected his style quite a lot, so you might want to make the colour and shading style you want nice and explicit in your prompts.

To wit:

·         carlospacheco is the general style trigger.

·         Always include dynamic composition – he never did a flat shot if he could possibly help it.

·         For the ‘90s vibe, I recommend western_comics_\(style\),  digital coloring, digital shading, hatching_\(technique\).

·         For his later-period work, drop the two ‘digital’s above and add desaturated, sketch.

STR should stay at 1.0 by default, and you can probably tone it down slightly if you find everyone’s jaws are too square for your tastes. I wouldn’t go over 1.2 at most.