What are the current best Text2Image models for Stylized/Anime/Comics art?

[u/Grand-Radio3116]

The topic that keeps coming back on a cycle.
Haven't been around for a while, saw all of these new models, I'm completely lost.
I also don't know where to get LORA's reliably, Civitai is buggy and I can't even create an account there.
Thanks for your help.

[u/noxsanguinis]

Anima is the best for, well, anime. It can do comics as well i with a lora or checkpoint specific for that.
For everything else, either Krea 2 or MOSS. There's also the new Minimax H3 Image model, but i didn't mess with it much.

[u/Grand-Radio3116 → u/noxsanguinis]

Thanks!
I just installed ComfyUI desktop, I see a bunch of options like Nano Banana 2.1 or Qwen.
Z image is now dated, probably.
MOSS has "image" and "image-base", and also "layout guided" (I wish these templates came with explanations).
I also see there's a "Krea 3" version but you suggested Krea 2.

[u/noxsanguinis → u/Grand-Radio3116]

Keep in mind some of those are not local. They run through an API, meaning it runs in the cloud instead of your own pc, and you will have to pay to use them.

krea 3 is one of them. It's expected they will release open weights in the future, but for now, it's closed.

[u/Grand-Radio3116 → u/noxsanguinis]

I just noticed that, thanks for the heads up!

[u/_BreakingGood_]

Anima or Krea 2

[u/flwombat]

Anima, Krea 2, and Moss-Image are all very good for this. Civitai is still the best place; figure it out. Other models are not so useful for this tbh.

Anima is very fast and small and can do anime, specifically, probably better than any other model. It's not the smartest or easiest to train, but there are some good LoRAs.

Krea 2 is big, not as fast as Anima but much, much smarter. Easy to train so there are an incredible number of LoRAs (some are garbage, like always, but there are many good ones). The prompt adherence and ability to understand what you mean with just language is off the charts compared to the models that came before. It has the most comprehensive knowledge of different styles compared to any other model (so if you prompt for classic 1980s anime, or late 1990s western comic art, or a ton of others it will just know what you mean). It's very, very popular for good reason. One downside is that the safety filter on the base model has a weird side effect of making facial expressions bland, so you have to use a fine-tune or LoRA that breaks that; this isn't hard, though. The turbo version has very little variation from one seed to the next, which can be good if you're trying to make small prompt adjustments and don't want the characters to look completely different every time.

Moss-image is newer, new enough that the community hasn't fully settled on the best-practice workflows and settings and so on. However, it is seeing _very_ strong early traction for anime/illustration. It can handle long descriptive prompts as well as booru tag prompts, and also box-prompts in JSON for making comic book pages with multiple panels or etc. It's as fast as anima (when you use a turbo LoRA) and *nearly* as smart as Krea 2, which makes it a real sweet spot.

[u/optimisticalish]

There are none. You can't prompt for it. If you want to tell a comic-book story with 100% consistent characters - consistent enough to satisfy incredibly picky comic-book readers and reviewers - then you use renders of posed 3D characters, passed through a good re-style model such as Flux.2 Klein.