So I’m trying to make my own comic book shader, and I’m trying to replicate (or get as close as possible) to the shadows seen in my examples below. They’re from the Batgirl Year One comic.
The edges have a noise, but it’s essentially consistent all over. I’ve been trying to pull ideas and techniques from the more common NPR shaders, but I haven’t had much luck.
Does anyone have any suggestions or other references I could look at?
There are a couple of factors to getting the shading the way you want -
First, a good celshader. I use GooEngine - a fork of blender, which basically rocks. Not free (unless you wish to compile it yourself, then it’s free), but costs less than lunch.
https://www.dillongoostudios.com/gooengine
The other part of the equation is the modeling itself. I did a quick redo on a character (I don’t normally use such drastic shadowing), which shows how cleanly you can get the shadowed area. For areas over the eyes, I would need to adjust the model (or perhaps the normals, or both) to get that “overshadow” look. Similar situation with the nose; I’ve set it up so that I don’t get a nose shadow, but that’s just a matter of making it the way you want it to look.
Agreed that Joseph is great on NPR. He’s got a very nice sketchbook on here, be sure and check it out.
Sorry, I’m adding an edit - I didn’t understand that you WANTED noise on the edges, and my image in fact is the opposite of that. Your post was clear on it; it’s my mistake, and sorry for possibly confusing the issue.
You can draw it with grease pencil and then apply some old filters that make it looks like comic
I like to think my modeling isn’t too bad, and I get the cell shading but I don’t think ill need to use the GooEngine for this. It’s more I want the shadows to not look crisp like in anime, but when I try to add noise (or voronoi) it’s hard to fine tune it.
Edit: just saw your edit 
you’re all good, I appreciate it anyways
Indeed, I’ve done similar things before, it’s not too hard.
So, my Ultimate Cel-Shader has this capability:
Which you are free to use:
ucss.blend (2.1 MB)
You can change the strength and detail level with the parameters.
You can also try and replicate this yourself, it’s really not anything fancy, I’m just mixing a distorted Noise texture with a basic cel-shader using a Multiply node and a small factor. Feel free to Ctrl+Tab into the main CEL node group and poke around, it’s really not possible to simplify more than that.
P.S. @hungry_ouronoodle great choice of book, Batgirl Year One is top 3 all-time comic books 
this is much more than I was expecting, thanks! I’m definitely gonna poke around!
And Batgirl Year One definitely deserves to be top 3 lol I read it in middle school and almost immediately bought my own copy.
Here’s a pretty simple setup you could try…
And this way the shade is based on the actual light in the scene. I know a lot of cel shading shaders require an extra control for an “artificial” light source, which can get quite annoying if you have multiple characters facing different directions.
