Drawn to Extinction is written by Pete Trainor, a two-decade veteran of the Ai industry who also happens to be a lifelong comic book obsessive. This Substack is the companion to a book of the same name, published in 2026, with a foreword by Pat Mills.
The book exists because of a question a comics creator asked Pete in a pub in Northern Ireland, after a convention, somewhere between the first and second pint. If you work in Ai, are you part of the problem? Are you helping dismantle the very industry you claim to love?
That question didn’t have a clean answer. This is where Pete works through it.
Comics raised him before Ai ever employed him. They were the first escape route in his hands, the first proof that imagination had value. Ai gave him a career and a way to shape systems at scale. He owes both a debt of gratitude, which is exactly why writing about their collision matters, because not everything we can automate should be automated. Sometimes what gets framed as progress is closer to extraction.
Drawn to Extinction isn’t anti-technology. It’s about what happens when you care deeply about two things and realise they might be on a collision course. It carries voices from Grant Morrison, John Wagner, Ram V, Hannah Berry, Frazer Irving, Dan Cornwell, and others, people who gave their time and honesty to the question. It is, depending on your angle, a love letter to comics, a cultural autopsy of where we are, and a rallying cry for everyone who still believes a drawing is more than a style.
This Substack will carry extracts, conversations, fragments that didn’t make the final cut, and the ongoing argument, because the landscape this book describes is moving fast and the conversation doesn’t stop at publication.
Think of it as the pencil still in hand.
Subscribe if you’ve ever stayed up too late finishing a page. If you’re a creator watching the ground shift. If you work in tech and feel the same unease Pete does. Or if you just know the difference between style and soul, and you think that difference still matters.
No Ai was used to write the words, themes, or prose for this work.
