Really strong character consistency is usu. done by fine-tuning a custom character LoRA. If that’s more work than you want to take on now, you could probably get by using ControlNets. The ones you’ll probably want to experiment with first are either `revision` or `reference_only`.
You’ll also want to start with a solid base model. Since I’m not familiar with the exact type of art you’re going for, it's hard to give advice here. As a first step look through some of the Illustrious and/or Anima models.