That distinction has done more to reshape how I think about all of this than almost anything else I gathered for the book, because it drags the argument off the ground everyone wants to fight on. Most of the noise about Ai and comics is about quality, whether the pictures look good, whether you can tell, whether the machine will ever draw a hand that doesn't make your teeth itch. Ram doesn't linger there. He thinks the great voices will be fine. "There is a pre-Mignola world and a post-Mignola world," he told me, and the writers who bend the form like that, the ones always moving too fast to be copied, will keep changing the weather whatever gets scraped into the training sets. His worry sits lower down, in the part of the industry that never gets a spotlight.

The route in has always run through the unglamorous work, the backup strips and anthology fillers, the low-paying gigs where you're allowed to sound like someone else until you slowly work out what you sound like on your own. Those are the rungs. Pull them away and you haven't democratised anything, you've built an art form that quietly asks for prodigious talent or family money as the price of staying in the room long enough to find a voice. The Otomos and the Moores will still command attention. The people trying to become them will reach for the ladder and find it gone.

That layer, the one Ram has least faith in, is where I want to slow down, because we keep talking about the apprenticeship as though it were only a career ladder, a matter of rungs and wages and who gets a start. It is that, but it's also something happening inside the person doing the climbing, and while the industry has been busy arguing about copyright, the research on what that something actually is has quietly stacked up.

Start with how mastery gets built in the first place. Anders Ericsson spent his career studying expert performers, and the finding his work keeps insisting on is that skill doesn't come from doing a thing over and over on autopilot. It comes from effortful, deliberate repetition, the kind where you push past what you can already manage, fail, notice the failure, and correct it, then do the whole uncomfortable thing again. The failing isn't the tax you pay on the way to getting good. It's the engine. And it takes a strange, unglamorous amount of time that refuses to be pinned to a slogan. One study of chess players found the hours needed to reach master level ranged from around three thousand to more than twenty-three thousand, nearly an eightfold spread, which tells you there was never a magic number, only the long accumulation. Even the ability to concentrate has to be grown. Beginners can hold full attention for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes before the mind bolts for the door, and it takes years of daily work to stretch that toward hours. The stamina to sit with a page is itself a muscle, and the only way to build it is to sit with the page.

Then there's what all that repetition does to the body, which is the point where this stopped feeling abstract to me. Every time you run the same line again, the same small decision, the brain wraps the neural pathway you're using in a fatty insulation called myelin, and that sheath makes the signal travel faster and cleaner until the thing that once took everything you had becomes something your hand simply knows. That is the physical trace of practice, laid down in white matter. What undid me was a four-week study of adults learning a new motor skill, in which the researchers measured the myelin change and found that the people who learned more slowly showed the greater change in the brain. Slowness wasn't the inefficient road to the same destination. It built more. There's even work in mice pointing the same way, where blocking the animals from producing new myelin left them unable to learn a new movement at all. And a good deal of what you gain doesn't even arrive while you're working. The brain keeps consolidating a skill after you've put the pencil down, in rest and in sleep, turning the fragile new thing into something that holds. The waiting is part of the learning, which means you cannot prompt your way through it. The work goes on inside you after the session ends, and there's no session at all if you never sit down to start one.

Here is the part that isn't in my book, the part that reframed the whole argument for me. Making things slowly, by hand, is measurably good for the person doing it. In a study led by Girija Kaimal, thirty-nine adults spent forty-five minutes making art, and three quarters of them walked out with lower levels of cortisol, the body's main stress hormone. The detail that matters most for us is what didn't predict the drop, and that was skill. The beginners, the ones who'd barely held a pen before, got the same calming as everyone else. Their clumsy, unfinished effort worked on their bodies just the same. Afterwards, people described a shape to the experience of initial struggle giving way to resolution, of losing themselves in the work, which is the felt texture of precisely the friction the prompt box exists to remove. Even standing near the handmade seems to help; a study out of King's College London found that people who spent time in front of original artwork showed their cortisol fall by around a fifth.

There's a name for the state those hours can open into. Flow, the condition where the difficulty of the task sits just level with your skill, so you vanish into it and time stops behaving normally. A large 2024 study in the journal Translational Psychiatry found that people more prone to flow were less likely, over time, to be diagnosed with depression, anxiety and stress-related disorders. I want to be careful here, because the honest thing to say is that this is largely correlation, and the researchers themselves warn against claiming flow simply causes the protection. But the pattern is consistent, and it rhymes with everything sitting around it. The repetitive handwork of a craft settles the nervous system, easing the body out of its fight-or-flight setting. A British study found more than eight in ten people living with depression felt happier after a session of knitting. Researchers at University College London, led by Daisy Fancourt, have shown that regular creative and cultural activity lowers stress hormones and prompts the release of dopamine, and that it tracks with a reduced risk of dementia. A finished thing, however small and wonky, tells a low and doubting brain that it is still capable of making something exist in the world. That is not a small message to be able to send yourself.

Which brings me back to the seventeen-year-old I keep returning to. Looking down at their own page, they asked in complete seriousness whether their art still counted if it took them a week to finish when the machine could do the same in ten seconds. They weren't being difficult. They wanted permission to be slow. And all of this research is that permission, if only they'd been handed it. The week they spent isn't the cost of the work, it's the place the work happens, the long stretch of hours where the myelin thickens, the cortisol drops, and a voice starts, almost too quietly to notice, to form. The ten-second version hands them the finished picture and keeps every bit of that for no one at all. It doesn't just take the job waiting at the top of the ladder. It removes the reason the climb was ever good for the person doing the climbing.

That's the argument at the heart of Drawn to Extinction, and the science only makes it heavier to hold. The machine doesn't need to beat us to win, it only needs to convince a generation that the slow part was never worth doing.

My book is available to buy now.

They even have a word for it, idrettsglede, the joy of sport, and the precision of that framing matters more than it might first appear, because it isn’t the triumph of sport, or the reward of sport, or the career of sport that they’re protecting, it’s the joy. They built an entire national policy around the idea that joy is the thing worth preserving above everything else — absolute genius.

What this looks like in practice is that youth sports in Norway operate without scoreboards, without league tables, without the infrastructure of ranking and comparison that most of us grew up inside, so a child plays football or skis or swims and nobody is officially keeping score until they are old enough to have already formed a genuine relationship with the activity itself, and by the time competition enters the picture it enters on top of something already built rather than underneath something still fragile.

The results are not what you might expect if you believe, as most of us have been conditioned to believe, that competition is the primary engine of excellence because Norway (a country of five million people) is now one of the most decorated Winter Olympic nations in history, and more than seventy percent of Norwegian adults remain physically active across their lifetime, not just in their youth, not just in their peak years, but across their whole lives. This is the part that rarely gets mentioned when people talk about elite sport but which is arguably the more important achievement of the two.

The reason is simple, even if we consistently refuse to internalise it; If you make a child feel like a loser at eight they probably won’t want to go for a run at thirty-eight, and the shame of early comparison doesn’t fade the way we tell ourselves it does, it calcifies, it becomes part of how a person understands themselves in relation to an activity, and for most people that understanding settles into something like “I’m not one of those people”, a verdict they carry quietly for the rest of their lives without ever really questioning where it came from or whether it was ever true.

What the Norwegian model understands is that intrinsic motivation is not robust in its early stages, that the love of a thing, the genuine unperformed private love of doing something because it feels good to do it, is extraordinarily vulnerable to the wrong kind of external pressure at the wrong moment, and that if you introduce a ranking or a scorecard or a public comparison before that love has had time to root, you don’t sharpen a child’s drive so much as replace it with something else entirely, something more like anxiety, or performance, or the exhausting management of other people’s perceptions, and some children find a way to thrive inside that pressure but most don’t, and the ones who don’t quietly disappear from the activity and nobody really asks where they went.

This is not an argument against excellence, because the Norwegians are not against excellence, they are against arriving at excellence through the systematic discouragement of the majority, and there is a phrase from the research around this model that has stayed with me, which is that if you take care of the fun the fast will take care of themselves, meaning excellence is downstream of joy, competition is a tool you reach for once someone has already decided they want to be in the room, not a mechanism for deciding who deserves to be there in the first place.

Now I want to push the frame further than sport, because I think the Norwegian insight is not really about sport at all, it’s about creativity, about what happens to a young person’s instinct to make and try and explore and produce something and see what it is, when that instinct encounters judgment before it has fully formed, and the answer is roughly the same as what happens to the child who loses their first match and never goes back, which is that they conclude the activity isn’t for them before they’ve had any real chance to find out whether it might be.

We do to young creative people exactly what the rest of the world does to young athletes, introducing the scorecard too early, putting grades on drawings and marks on stories and rankings on performances before the person doing the drawing or writing or performing has had any genuine chance to understand why they’re doing it or what it means to them, wrapping creative education in the language of assessment before the more important question has even been asked, which is whether they love this, and why, and what it does to them when they’re inside it.

The result is that most people decide early they are not creative people, not because the instinct isn’t there, and the instinct is close to universal in childhood, but because the infrastructure around their early attempts told them they weren’t performing well enough to belong in the category, and they internalised that verdict and stopped drawing, stopped writing, stopped making things, stopped following the strange sideways thoughts that might have gone somewhere interesting, and they did all of that not because creativity failed them but because the system around creativity failed them at exactly the moment when they were too young and too unformed to push back against it.

What would it look like to build the Norwegian model for creative development, to say explicitly and structurally that art, music, writing and design shouldn’t be graded the way maths and science are graded, that slapping a C minus on a thirteen year old’s first attempt at a short story or a painting is a categorically different act to marking a wrong answer in a chemistry test, because the chemistry answer is either correct or it isn’t but the story is an act of courage and interiority that deserves protection rather than ranking, and that for the first years of a young person’s engagement with making things the point is not quality or comparison or output but the experience of making itself, actively protected from the weight of formal judgment until the love of the thing is established enough to survive contact with criticism?

I don’t think that’s a utopian question, I think it’s a design question, the same way the Norwegian sports model is a design question, because they looked at what they actually wanted, which was a nation of people who love being active, and they built the conditions for that to happen rather than leaving it to survive whatever conditions already existed, and we could do exactly the same for creativity if we were willing to accept the same starting premise, which is that joy is the foundation, not the reward you get once you’ve proven you deserve it.

I get so hacked off with the current tidy, emotionally satisfying, and almost entirely wrong story about the Cinema Box Office. In the current version, Supergirl flopped because the DC reboot is stumbling, because James Gunn has hit his first real speed bump, because female-led superhero films have lost their commercial footing after Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, or because audiences simply don't care about Kara Zor-El the way they cared about her cousin. Each of those explanations contains a fragment of truth, neither of them is the actual story.

(You can read my other take on the Supergirl blowback here.)

The actual story is structural, and it has been developing for the better part of a decade. Supergirl is one data point in a deteriorating pattern that this summer also includes Masters of the Universe, Disclosure Day, The Bride!, Desert Warrior, Greenland 2, Animal Farm, and a half-dozen other films that have quietly haemorrhaged a lot of money in 2026 without generating the same volume of discourse. The question worth asking is not why Supergirl failed, but why an entire tier of big-budget filmmaking is failing simultaneously, and why the industry's response has been, broadly, to keep doing what it was doing and hope the numbers improve.

The Economics Have Inverted

Begin with the mathematics, because the mathematics make everything else legible.

A $170 million production budget, which is roughly where Supergirl sat, does not require $170 million at the box office to break even, it requires roughly twice that, once you account for the marketing spend, which on a film of this scale typically runs between $100-150 million in itself, and once you factor in the exhibitor split, which sees cinema chains retain approximately half of ticket revenues. The commonly cited breakeven figure for Supergirl sits between $300-375 million globally. The film opened to $38 million domestically and $30 million overseas. The gap between those two numbers is not a shortfall; it is a different category of outcome entirely.

Masters of the Universe presents an even starker picture with a budget reported at $200 million or above, and launched into a marketplace that analysts had flagged as hostile months before the film's release, for a property with negligible cultural currency among audiences under 40. Desert Warrior, the Saudi-backed historical epic from director Rupert Wyatt, represents perhaps the most extreme example: a $150 million production that grossed $742,066 worldwide, a figure so anomalous that it may represent the worst theatrical performance in the history of big-budget cinema on a proportional basis.

What these films share is not a creative failure mode, they share a structural problem: they were budgeted at a scale that made commercial success almost mathematically improbable before a frame was shot. The threshold for profit on a $150-200 million film is so high, and the audience required to reach it so large, that the margin for error has effectively disappeared. A film of this cost cannot succeed by being good, it has to be an event, and the industry is no longer reliably capable of manufacturing events on demand.

This is not a new observation. The economics of blockbuster filmmaking have been discussed in trade publications for years, but what has changed is the rate at which those economics are visibly failing, and the extent to which the failure is distributed across studios, genres, and properties that would previously have been considered reliable performers.

What Streaming Actually Did

The most common explanation offered for the decline of theatrical attendance is streaming, and while it is not wrong, it is imprecise in ways that matter.

Streaming did not kill cinema, what it did was permanently alter the cognitive calculus that audiences perform when deciding whether to see a film in a theatre. The question used to be binary: do I want to see this film, and is it in cinemas? The question now has a third variable: how long will I have to wait before I can see it at home, and is whatever I would lose by waiting worth the cost and friction of going out?

For genuine events, films that feel genuinely unmissable in the collective cultural moment, that third variable resolves easily in favour of the theatre. Toy Story 5 accumulated $585 million globally in its first two weeks, with a $70 million second weekend demonstrating that it was holding audiences rather than collapsing. Those numbers reflect a film that people actively wanted to see in a communal setting, that felt like it warranted the effort and expense of a night out.

For films that feel optional, the calculus reverses. Disclosure Day is instructive here. Steven Spielberg's science fiction thriller, made for a reported $115 million, opened strongly enough to cover its production budget. But its second-weekend decline was 60.2%, and its third-weekend decline was 53.4%. Those are not the numbers of a film that is finding its audience; they are the numbers of a film whose audience front-loaded their attendance because they wanted to see it on a large screen, while the majority of the potential audience decided to wait. The waiting audience is not lost, necessarily, they will watch the film on streaming in four to six weeks. But they will not contribute to the theatrical economics that determine whether the film is considered a success, and in the current climate, theatrical success is the metric that governs whether the next film gets green-lit at the same budget.

The specific mechanism through which streaming damaged theatrical economics is the window collapse. During the pandemic, studios experimented aggressively with simultaneous or near-simultaneous streaming releases, in some cases offering films on premium VOD on the same day as theatrical release. The experiment was commercially motivated and arguably necessary at the time. Its legacy, however, was to train a significant portion of the audience to regard the theatrical window as optional rather than mandatory. That conditioning did not reverse when cinemas reopened. What was once a cultural default, the idea that a new major film had to be seen in the cinema or waited for months, became a personal preference that roughly half the potential audience now exercises freely.

Studios responded by tightening windows back somewhat, but the damage to audience habit was already done. The window is now typically 45 days, which is enough to preserve some theatrical exclusivity but not enough to recreate the urgency that drove audience behaviour before 2020. The audience that wants to wait knows it only has to wait six weeks. In previous eras, it might have waited six months or longer. That compression is not neutral. It changes the number of people willing to make the cinema trip, and therefore changes the addressable theatrical market for every film that is not a genuine event.

The IP Exhaustion Problem

The intellectual property model that sustained Hollywood for approximately fifteen years was built on a specific audience relationship: the promise that franchise entries were connected chapters in an ongoing story, and that missing one meant missing context for the next. Marvel built this relationship with extraordinary discipline across more than twenty films. The audience reward was a coherent, escalating narrative that genuinely repaid continued engagement. The studio reward was a captive audience that felt obligated to attend each instalment regardless of whether they found the premise individually compelling.

That model has now broken down in ways that studios are still struggling to process.

The breakdown happened for several reasons simultaneously; First, Marvel's own extended universe became sufficiently sprawling that keeping up with it stopped being pleasurable and started being work. The obligation that had previously felt like a reward, you had to see the films to understand what was coming, inverted into a burden. Audiences who had invested heavily in the first three phases of the MCU found themselves facing an ever-expanding roster of television series, Disney+ exclusive content, and film entries that were mandatory reading for the next theatrical release. A significant portion of them quietly stopped doing the work.

Second, DC's various attempts to replicate the Marvel formula repeatedly failed to build the same audience trust. The Snyderverse generated passionate advocates but never achieved the mainstream consensus that Marvel had. The subsequent reset under Gunn and Safran produced Superman, which performed solidly at $618 million globally, but has now run into the fundamental problem that the Supergirl result illustrates: audiences who trusted the Marvel formula implicitly never extended that same trust to DC, and without that trust, each DC release has to justify itself on its own terms rather than riding the momentum of an established relationship.

Third, and most consequentially for the wider market, other studios attempted to create their own shared universe models across properties that never had the audience foundation to support them. The Universal Monsters universe never launched. The Hasbro cinematic universe stalled. Multiple attempts to franchise mid-tier IP at blockbuster budgets have produced consistent failures. Each failure erodes the general audience appetite for the model, because each failure is a reminder that the obligation being asked of them, spend $50 on a night out to see this film so you understand the next one, is not always honoured by a film worth seeing.

Masters of the Universe is, in this context, a case study in category error. The nostalgia that might theoretically have driven audiences to see a He-Man film belongs to people in their late thirties and forties. That demographic does not drive blockbuster theatrical attendance. Teenagers and young adults drive blockbuster theatrical attendance, and for them, He-Man is not nostalgia; it is an unfamiliar property they are being asked to invest in without a pre-existing emotional relationship. The sword-and-sorcery genre has historically struggled to launch at blockbuster scale outside of existing literary or gaming fandoms, and Masters of the Universe had neither. The film's commercial failure was predicted by analysts before production completed, which raises a question the industry has not satisfactorily answered: if the commercial failure was visible in advance, what was the business case for the $200 million budget?

The Bankability Collapse

One structural change that receives less attention than it deserves is the effective end of the movie star as a box office guarantee.

For most of Hollywood's history, certain performers could be relied upon to add meaningful commercial value to a film by their presence alone. Their attachment to a project increased the likelihood of theatrical attendance independent of the project's other qualities. That relationship between star power and ticket sales has not merely weakened; for most performers, it has effectively ceased to operate at blockbuster scale.

The exceptions are instructive. Tom Cruise remains capable of opening a film based on his personal brand rather than the franchise value of the property, as the Mission: Impossible series consistently demonstrates. But Cruise is operating from a specific audience relationship built over forty years, reinforced by a public persona that audiences genuinely believe in, and maintained through a consistent commitment to practical stuntwork that has become its own form of event filmmaking. The audience is not coming to see Ethan Hunt. They are coming to see Tom Cruise do something dangerous, and they trust that he will.

That kind of relationship is vanishingly rare. Nicholas Galitzine as He-Man, Gerard Butler in Greenland 2, Chris Pratt in Mercy: these are recognisable names attached to films that failed to translate that recognition into audience commitment. The audience knows who these people are. Knowing who they are is no longer sufficient reason to buy a ticket.

This matters economically because big-budget productions have historically been priced partly on the assumption that major cast attachments increase their commercial prospects. If that assumption is no longer valid, which the 2026 results suggest it largely is not, then the budgets built on it are not justified by the return. You are paying for a premium that the audience is not rewarding.

The Audience That Is Not Coming Back

There is a generational dimension to the theatrical decline that the industry has been slow to acknowledge directly, because acknowledging it has uncomfortable implications.

The audience that formed its cinema-going habits in the pre-streaming era continues to attend, selectively, for the kinds of films it has always gone to see. Older audiences are over-represented in the theatrical market relative to their proportion of the total potential audience, because for them cinema-going is an established habit rather than an active choice that competes with alternatives.

Younger audiences, specifically those in their late teens and twenties who grew up with Netflix as a default entertainment delivery mechanism, have not formed the same default relationship with theatrical attendance. For them, cinema is one option among several, and it is the most expensive and least convenient option. The films that draw them out are genuine cultural events, releases that feel socially mandatory because the conversation around them is happening in real time and cannot be joined later without being spoiled or left behind.

The MCU, at its peak, manufactured that social urgency reliably. Endgame was not merely a film; it was a collective experience that people attended because they could not afford to be outside the conversation. That level of cultural saturation is extraordinarily difficult to achieve, and it becomes harder to achieve the more frequently studios attempt it. You cannot manufacture urgency across forty films simultaneously. By definition, urgency is scarce.

The Pajiba analysis of the Supergirl weekend articulates this well: younger audiences spent years being told that superhero films were must-see events, essential for maintaining franchise literacy, and once they stopped caring about the franchise literacy, the obligation evaporated. What the studios built was not a love of superhero cinema. They built a sense of duty, and duty, once it stops feeling rewarding, is easy to abandon.

That audience is not going to return to blockbuster superhero films because studios produce more of them. They will return, if they return at all, because a specific film earns its way back into their attention. The question is whether the economics of a $170 million film allow a studio to make the kind of smaller, riskier, more character-driven bet that might achieve that. The answer, structurally, is no. The cost base demands audience scale that requires events, not films.

The Summer of 2026 as Diagnostic

What makes the current summer particularly useful as a diagnostic is that it includes both significant failures and significant successes, which allows for comparison rather than simply observing a market-wide decline.

Toy Story 5 is performing at elite level. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie crossed a billion dollars. Michael, the biopic, performed strongly. These are films with very different profiles: a legacy franchise with deep multigenerational emotional investment, a video game property that successfully crossed into mainstream cultural consciousness via the first film's performance, and a biographical subject with genuine mainstream recognition. What they share is clarity of purpose and a pre-existing audience relationship that the studios accurately valued and then delivered for.

The failures, by contrast, share a different characteristic: they were budget-scale bets on audience relationships that either no longer existed, never existed at the required scale, or had been eroded by previous disappointments. Masters of the Universe was a bet on nostalgia that did not survive contact with the actual demographic. Desert Warrior was a bet on the Saudi film industry's ability to manufacture international commercial appeal for a property with no existing audience base. Supergirl was a bet on DC franchise momentum that had not yet been established firmly enough to guarantee the result.

The overall summer market is running only 1.7% behind 2019 levels, which is important context. Cinema is not dying. But the distribution of that revenue has shifted dramatically toward a smaller number of films performing at higher levels, while a larger number of mid-to-high-budget films fail to reach profitability. The blockbuster market is bifurcating into genuine events and expensive disappointments, with very little territory in between.

The Structural Reform Nobody Is Making

The logical response to this pattern would be to fundamentally reconsider the economics of big-budget production, specifically the assumption that a $150-200 million budget is an appropriate scale for any film that is not near-certain to perform as a global event.

That reform is not happening at the required pace, for reasons that are structural within the studios themselves. Greenlighting decisions are made years in advance of release. By the time a film's commercial failure is visible, the decisions that produced it are two or three budget cycles in the past. The executives responsible for those decisions may no longer be at the studio. The lessons that should be extracted from each failure are diffuse, contested, and often superseded by the next cycle of optimism before they can be properly institutionalised.

There is also a collective action problem. If one studio radically reduces its big-budget output, it risks ceding ground in the theatrical marketplace to competitors who maintain their slate. The theatrical window rewards presence; a studio that is not releasing tentpoles during peak summer weekends loses those weekends to someone else. So the rational individual studio response, even in the face of market-wide evidence that big-budget films are overproduced and underperforming, is to continue producing big-budget films and hope that yours is the one that breaks through.

The result is a market that is structurally incentivised to keep making the bets that are failing. Each studio is behaving rationally in isolation while the system as a whole produces irrational outcomes.

Where This Goes

The 2026 box office is not the beginning of the end of cinema. It is a visible stress point in a system that has been under structural pressure for a decade and has not yet made the adaptations that the underlying economics require.

The films that are working share characteristics: strong pre-existing audience relationships, clarity about who the film is for and what it is offering, and budgets that are proportionate to their realistic commercial ceiling. The films that are not working are those that were designed at a scale that assumed an audience relationship they either had to manufacture from scratch or were borrowing against goodwill that had already been spent.

The conversations happening around individual failures, whether about Supergirl's treatment of its character, or Masters of the Universe's nostalgic miscalculation, or Disclosure Day's failure to sustain the momentum of its opening weekend, are not wrong. But they are all looking at specific trees in a forest that is reorganising itself around them. The structural shift is real, it is measurable, and it is not going to be resolved by making fewer mistakes on individual films. It requires a fundamental rethink of what a big-budget film is for, what audience relationship it is banking on, and whether the budget attached to it is proportionate to the realistic probability of the outcome that budget requires.

That is a harder conversation than the ones currently happening. It is also the only one that matters.

Max Allan Collins did not set out to write a landmark, I assume he set out to write a crime comic rooted in real history, drawn by an artist whose instincts were closer to European naturalism than American superhero gloss, published by a DC imprint that was quietly doing some of the most interesting work of the 1990s while the rest of the industry was arguing about foil covers. That Road to Perdition became something genuinely significant (as a graphic novel, as a piece of cultural furniture, and eventually as the basis for one of the finest comic book films ever made) says something about what happens when craft and intention align without the pressure of expectation.

The book arrived in 1998, and Collins had spent decades working in crime fiction, both prose and comics, and brought a novelist’s understanding of structure and moral weight to the material. His source was not invented, John Looney was a real figure, a genuinely dangerous and eccentric mob boss who ran Rock Island, Illinois with a combination of violence and a local newspaper he used as a blackmail instrument. Collins grounds his fictional O’Sullivan family inside that real geography and that real criminal ecosystem, which gives the story a texture that pure invention rarely achieves. You feel the period not as costume but as condition, the Depression not as backdrop but as pressure on every choice every character makes.

Richard Piers Rayner’s artwork is the other half of why the book works as well as it does, and it deserves more critical attention than it typically receives. Rayner is a British artist whose style sits somewhere between the scratchy expressionism of early Dave McKean and the grounded realism of European crime comics, and he is entirely uninterested in the kind of kinetic, muscle-heavy visual language that dominated American comics in the Image era. His panels are composed rather than pumped, atmospheric rather than explosive. The winter landscapes (and Road to Perdition is fundamentally a winter book, cold and grey and stripped of warmth) are rendered with a stillness that makes the violence, when it comes, feel genuinely shocking rather than choreographed. This is sequential art that understands silence. The gutters between panels do real work. What is left out is as considered as what is shown.

The story Collins builds inside that visual framework is deceptively classical. Michael O’Sullivan is an enforcer, a man who has built a wall between what he does professionally and who he is at home, and the narrative begins at the moment that wall collapses. His son Michael Jr. witnesses a killing. The Looney organisation decides the family cannot be trusted to stay quiet. O’Sullivan comes home to find his wife and younger son dead, and what follows is a road movie in panels, a father and his surviving boy moving across a hostile American landscape, the father pursuing vengeance and the son absorbing, quietly and irrevocably, the world his father inhabits.

Collins has acknowledged the debt to Lone Wolf and Cub, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s extraordinary manga about a samurai and his infant son, and the influence runs deep, not just in the structural parallel of the violent father and the watchful child on a road that ends in blood, but in the emotional register, that particular tenderness between a man defined by killing and the boy who loves him anyway. What Collins adds is the American specificity, the Catholic guilt, the Irish immigrant community’s complicated relationship with loyalty and violence, and a moral framework that is less about honour codes than about the impossibility of keeping the worst of yourself away from the people you love most.

Commercially, the book performed solidly rather than explosively. Paradox Press was never a mass-market imprint, and Road to Perdition found its audience gradually, through word of mouth and critical respect rather than through the kind of event-marketing that drove mainstream sales. Collins extended the story through several sequels (On the Road to Perdition, Return to Perdition and others) with mixed results. The first book’s power comes partly from its self-contained weight, from the sense of an ending that doubles as a beginning for the son, and the sequels inevitably pull against that completeness. They are not without merit, but they are the work of a writer returning to a world rather than discovering it, and the difference is audible.

What transformed the book’s cultural profile entirely was Sam Mendes’s 2002 film adaptation, and this is where Road to Perdition deserves a more serious critical position than it is usually granted in conversations about comic book cinema.

The film arrived in a particular moment. X-Men had come out in 2000, Spider-Man in 2002, and the superhero adaptation machine was beginning to find its commercial footing. Against that context, Road to Perdition was an anomaly. A studio film based on a graphic novel that had nothing to do with capes or mythology, that was interested in grief and moral inheritance and the Depression, directed by a man who had just made American Beauty and brought the same willingness to let a frame breathe, to trust mood over momentum.

Tom Hanks was a bold and largely vindicated choice for O’Sullivan. The risk was obvious because Hanks carried so much goodwill from the audience, such a deep association with decency, that putting him in the role of a professional killer required the film to work hard to establish moral complexity without losing the audience’s capacity to follow him. What the casting actually achieves is something subtler: it uses that goodwill as a dramatic instrument, because O’Sullivan is genuinely decent within the terms of his world, a man whose violence is transactional rather than sadistic, whose love for his son is the most real thing about him. Hanks brings a stillness to the role that suits both the character and Mendes’s pacing.

Paul Newman’s John Rooney is quietly one of the great late-career performances in American cinema. Rooney knows exactly what he is. He has no illusions about the life he has built or the methods that sustain it, and Newman plays him with a kind of weary authority that is more unsettling than any conventional villain register. The scene where Rooney and O’Sullivan face each other across a rain-soaked street, both knowing what has to happen, is as good as anything in the film’s genre — measured, inevitable, genuinely sad.

Conrad Hall’s cinematography won the Academy Award and the recognition was deserved, not merely as technical achievement but as a demonstration of what the visual language of comics adaptation can aspire to. Hall and Mendes understood that Rayner’s panels were already cinematic in their composition, already thinking about light and shadow as emotional instruments rather than merely descriptive ones, and the film honours that rather than overriding it. The amber-and-grey palette, the rain that falls in almost every exterior scene, the faces half-lost in darkness, these choices are in genuine conversation with the source material rather than simply illustrating it.

Thomas Newman’s score deserves its own mention in any serious accounting of what makes the film work. This is not music that accompanies emotion so much as music that locates it, a spare and melancholic piano motif that runs beneath the film like an undercurrent, carrying the weight of inevitability without tipping into melodrama. Newman understood instinctively that the material needed space rather than punctuation, that swelling strings would have broken the spell that Mendes and Hall were so carefully weaving. Where lesser scores announce feeling, Newman’s holds back, sustaining notes that fade rather than resolve, compositions built around the held moment rather than the dramatic release. It is music that knows something cannot be fixed, only carried forward, which is precisely the emotional truth the film is trying to tell.

What makes it particularly remarkable in the context of adaptation is how closely it mirrors what Rayner was doing on the page. Sequential art works in silence as much as in image — the gutter between panels, that white space where the reader’s imagination completes the action, is where much of the emotional weight of a great comic actually lives. Newman found the sonic equivalent of that gutter, the pause, the breath, the note left hanging in a cold room. The result is a score that feels less composed than discovered, as though it was always there inside the material waiting for someone with the patience and the restraint to draw it out.

Where the film departs most significantly from the book is in tone and texture. Collins writes in a genre tradition that is comfortable with pulp energy, with the pleasures of crime fiction as crime fiction, and Mendes smooths that into something more uniformly elegiac. The film is slower and sadder and more self-consciously literary than the book, which is not a failure but a different conversation with the same material. Some of the book’s moral complexity gets simplified in translation, the sequels Collins wrote suggest a richer ecosystem of consequence than the film has time to explore, but what the film prioritises, it handles with exceptional care.

The comparison to Watchmen, Sin City and 300 is worth making seriously rather than as a marketing gesture. All four films share a commitment to treating their source material as visual literature rather than as story content to be extracted and repackaged. Zack Snyder’s approach to both 300 and Watchmen is formally faithful to a degree that divides critics — Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons’ panel compositions translated almost directly to the screen, with mixed results depending on your view of whether that fidelity serves the work or fossilises it. Robert Rodriguez and Miller’s Sin City made a different formal bet, using digital tools to recreate the high-contrast black and white aesthetic of the comics as literally as technology allowed, achieving something genuinely unprecedented in how it looked and felt.

Road to Perdition takes neither of those approaches and is arguably more sophisticated for it. Mendes does not attempt to replicate Rayner’s pages on screen. Instead, he finds the emotional and thematic core of what Rayner was doing, the cold light, the stillness, the way violence sits inside ordinary domestic scale, and rebuilds it in cinematic terms. The result is a film that stands independently as a great piece of American cinema while remaining, for anyone who knows the source, in genuine and respectful dialogue with it.

That this film is not more consistently cited alongside The Dark Knight and Sin City in discussions of what comic book adaptation can achieve is a cultural oversight worth correcting. It lacks the franchise architecture those films belong to, which may be precisely why it has dated better. It was not building a universe. It was telling one story, completely, with the seriousness that story deserved. Forty years from now, when the cinematic universe films are historical curiosities, Road to Perdition will still be quietly asking its question about fathers and sons and the weight of what we cannot help but pass on.

Collins and Rayner made a book that deserved better than its moment gave it. Mendes and his collaborators made a film that deserved a larger audience than it found. Between them, they produced one of the most complete and serious engagements with the graphic novel form that either medium has yet attempted. That should count for more than it does.

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about a category of digital illustration that has colonised some social media feeds with such completeness that most people who follow comic book art accounts will encounter it daily without ever having sought it out. At one end of the spectrum sit the warrior women, fantasy fighters rendered with waists the width of a wrist, armour that protects nothing above the midriff, and camera angles positioned with the specific deliberateness of someone who learned to draw women from pornography rather than from life. The proportions are impossible, the poses are not combat stances, and the clothing exists to frame rather than cover. These images circulate under hashtags for fantasy art, comic art, character design, and digital illustration, which is precisely why they end up in the feeds of people who follow none of those communities specifically but whose engagement history has nudged an algorithm in a direction they never chose.

Further along the spectrum sits something more troubling still, a category known in these communities as moe, a Japanese term describing a cultivated aesthetic of innocent vulnerability in female characters. In practice this means characters rendered with deliberately childlike facial features, wide uncertain eyes behind oversized glasses, flustered expressions, the visual grammar of adolescent anxiety, combined with exaggerated adult bodies positioned in ways that make the combination unmistakeable in its intent. The infantilised face is not incidental to the appeal; it is the point. Legal scholars examining this content have noted that the artistic style often emphasises infantilised or youthful features in ways that raise significant legal and ethical challenges, with some jurisdictions now treating fictional or animated depictions on par with real child sexual abuse material. That comparison does not arrive in legal discourse lightly or carelessly; it arrives because the researchers making it believe the evidence demands it.

This content is not hidden in dark corners of the internet behind age verification walls and content warnings, though some of it exists there too, monetised through Patreon subscription tiers that have spent years refining policies to manage what their own platform acknowledges is a serious and growing problem. Patreon’s most recent policy updates explicitly prohibit AI-generated or digitally altered depictions of minors and clarify that in animated or illustrated adult works, subjects must be unmistakably represented as adults, with expanded guidance on how the platform assesses that. The fact that they needed to write that guidance at all, to specify it explicitly and expand it in response to what they were already seeing on their own platform, is its own confession about the scale of what was already there.

The audience for this content is not a fringe curiosity either. The BBFC, which now classifies more anime than ever before for physical media release in the UK, commissioned research in 2025 finding that nearly nine in ten people believe anime poses a child protection risk if not age-rated appropriately, with anime now accounting for nearly a quarter of all content classified for DVD and Blu-ray release. A quarter of all classified content, and that is only what gets formally submitted. The volume circulating online, unclassified, unmoderated, and algorithmically amplified into the feeds of people who never sought it, is immeasurably larger.

The communities producing and sharing this content operate with considerable sophistication, cross-promoting across platforms, building followings through safer adjacent material before migrating audiences toward more explicit work, and using engagement signals to ensure the algorithm treats them as legitimate creative communities rather than what they frequently are, which is networks organised around the sexualisation of female characters rendered with varying degrees of deliberate ambiguity about age. When anyone criticises any of this, the response arrives with a speed and coordination that should itself be instructive. The “it’s just a drawing” defence deploys within minutes, and the harassment of anyone who persists follows shortly after, calibrated to ensure the cost of speaking is high enough to deter whoever comes next.

Anita Sarkeesian, the media critic who produced the first widely seen video analysis of hypersexualised female characters in gaming and adjacent visual cultures, faced years of rape and death threats for doing so, a response that tells you everything about a community that understood exactly what was being said about it and wanted the price of saying it to be prohibitive. That chilling effect has largely worked. For years the mainstream conversation tiptoed around this territory, framing it as a matter of taste, a cultural difference, a question of artistic freedom that reasonable people might disagree about, when what it actually is, is a community producing content that depicts women and girls as objects of sexual consumption, distributing it at industrial volume through platforms that profit from the engagement it generates, and ensuring it lands unrequested in the feeds of people who followed a hashtag about Dredd or Saga or Sandman.

The Ghost in the Training Sets

What elevates this beyond a question of individual discomfort, and connects it directly to the argument running through Drawn to Extinction, is what happens to all of this content next. To understand that, it helps to strip away the language of magic and get back to mechanism, because the way generative image systems actually work is both less mysterious and more alarming than the marketing suggests.

These tools do not work like inspiration, and they do not browse a few comics, absorb a mood, then head off to do their own thing. As I describe in the book, they ingest. They disassemble. They reduce millions, sometimes billions, of images into patterns, relationships, correlations between pixels and language. Captions, tags, filenames, descriptions, prompts, all of it gets folded into a vast statistical architecture. The process is less like learning to draw and more like industrial digestion.

The datasets that made this possible were not built with care or discernment, they were scraped, bulk-collected by automated crawlers roaming the open web, hoovering up whatever they could reach with very little regard for origin, consent, context or copyright. The most notorious example, LAION-5B, assembled more than five billion image-text pairs pulled from the internet at scale. Five billion, a number so large it almost sounds abstract until you think carefully about what it contains: portfolio pieces, sketches, fan art, commission previews, character sheets, splash pages, drafts, half-finished experiments. A vast percentage of the visual culture that people uploaded because they wanted to be seen, not consumed by a machine. As I write in Drawn to Extinction, the digital equivalent of looting a museum, grinding the collection to powder, and then selling new objects made from the dust while insisting nothing was actually taken because the original paintings are no longer visible in the final mix.

And here is the part the communities sharing hypersexualised anime characters across social media never get asked about. That content is in the mix too. Every moe character sheet, every cheesecake fantasy warrior, every image produced by artists who have built profitable Patreon followings around the sexualisation of female characters, all of it is being scraped and ingested alongside the work of creators who spent careers trying to push the medium in a different direction. The machine does not sort them. It does not grade them by intention or ethics or artistic seriousness. It processes them with identical indifference, and what it learns from that processing becomes the statistical foundation for every future output.

When you ask one of these systems to generate a female superhero, it does not consult an artistic tradition or make a creative judgment. It reaches into that statistical foundation and finds what is most frequent, most reinforced, most heavily represented in the data. And what is most heavily represented, given the volume of content these communities produce and the algorithmic amplification that ensures it spreads, is the template: impossible proportions, minimal clothing, the camera angle that treats a woman’s body as a landscape to be surveyed rather than a person to be depicted. The model is not making a sexist choice. It is faithfully reproducing a sexist consensus, encoded into it by the sheer weight of what it was fed.

Lesley Gannon, Deputy General Secretary of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, named the mechanism precisely when I spoke with her for the book. “We know that algorithmic behaviours intensify the bias of the material they are fed,” she said. “Not just perpetuate it, intensify it. That means disparities worsen. Stereotypes worsen. Harmful attitudes are amplified.” The critical word there is intensify. The model does not simply mirror what it ingests; it amplifies whatever patterns are most statistically dominant, which means the communities producing this content at industrial volume are not merely adding to the dataset but actively warping its centre of gravity. Every new image produced, shared, reposted, and scraped makes the default output more extreme, not less.

There is a feedback loop operating here that is worth sitting with, because it is genuinely without precedent in the history of visual culture. In the past, a harmful visual convention, say the hypersexualised depictions of women that ran through mainstream superhero comics for decades, could be challenged, critiqued, and gradually displaced by the work of artists and editors willing to push back against it. That process was slow and incomplete and is still ongoing, but it was possible because human beings made editorial decisions and human beings could be argued with. The machine does not argue. It does not respond to critique or evolve through cultural pressure. It responds to data volume, and the communities producing moe art and cheesecake fantasy characters are winning the data volume argument by an enormous margin, publishing new content daily across dozens of platforms, all of it feeding back into the systems that will generate the next wave of outputs, which will in turn be scraped, ingested, and used to train the generation after that.

As I also point out in the book: “When image models scrape ‘comic art’ they do not understand which images were products of their time and which were attempts to challenge that time. They absorb it all alike. The hyper-sexualised heroine pose. The monumental male body. The racial caricature. To the model, none of this is ideology. It is pattern. Frequency. Dominance in the data.” The machine does not invent new prejudices so much as perfect old ones, making them cleaner, faster, and infinitely reproducible, fossilising bias by mistaking repetition for legitimacy and turning outdated fantasy into default syntax.

Torunn Grønbekk, the Norwegian comics writer whose work I discuss at length in Drawn to Extinction, tried using image generators as creative reference tools and found the reality considerably uglier than she had anticipated. No matter how she phrased the prompt, she told me, every “woman” came back as the same kind of creature, “could be sixteen, could be twenty-seven, lips slightly parted, permanently on the edge of a pornographic close up.” When she asked for an older woman, the system returned cartoons of decay, no beauty, no complexity, just a drained husk with all specificity removed. She was not describing a malfunction; she was describing a system working exactly as trained, faithfully reproducing the visual assumptions encoded into it by the communities that produced the data. “It has nothing to do with women in any possible way,” she said, and the directness of it cuts to something important: she was not speaking about aesthetics or artistic tradition but about a fundamental failure of recognition, a machine that has learned to conjure the shape of a woman without any understanding of what a woman actually is, because the data it learned from was never really about women either. It was about the male appetite for a particular version of them.

Dr Julia Round, one of the foremost academics in British comics studies, described the underlying structural problem to me as an impossible ethical dilemma, and when I analysed my own comic book collection I found the numbers that make it concrete: only nine percent of credited contributors across decades of material were women. Nine percent, before a single piece of fan art was ever scraped, before the moe artists and the gacha game character designers and the cheesecake commissioners added their volume to the pile. “If the machine only learns from what is already recorded,” Julia told me, “then the invisible will stay invisible.” The creators who spent careers expanding what bodies, identities, and emotional presence could look like on a page, Nicola Scott, Jen Bartel, Sana Takeda, Fiona Staples, all of them working in the same digital spaces as the communities producing hypersexualised fantasy women in their thousands, all of their work swept into the same datasets together, and as I write in the book, “the noise of the past can drown out the nuance of the present.” That is the quiet catastrophe that nobody producing these images is ever asked to account for.

The piece of this that the mainstream technology and comics press has been collectively reluctant to state plainly is that the audience for this content bears direct responsibility for what those training datasets contain, not the platforms alone, though the platforms are culpable, and not the algorithms alone, though the algorithms operate with an indifference to harm that urgently requires regulatory attention, but the people who built communities around the sexualisation of female characters, who refined over decades a visual vocabulary in which women exist primarily as arrangements of flesh designed for consumption, and who ensured that vocabulary is now so prevalent online that it is essentially inescapable for anyone who follows the art form those same communities claim to love. As I write in Drawn to Extinction, the scraping is not neutral, the ingestion is not neutral, and the uncritical resurrection of prejudice through training data is not a technical accident. These are decisions, and somewhere behind every decision there are people who made them and communities who kept producing the content that made them possible.

The machine does not invent new prejudices, as Lesley Gannon made clear; it intensifies the ones it is fed. The people feeding it know exactly what they are doing, even when they insist, loudly and with considerable coordination, that it is just a drawing and you simply don’t understand the culture. The algorithm served you that image because a community worked hard to make sure it would, and the machine is learning from every single one.

Drawn to Extinction: Comics, Craft, and the Battle for Originality in the Age of Ai is available now in hardback from Amazon, Bookshop.org, and comic shops via Ingram.

I should start with a confession because this piece is trying to be honest and honesty has to cut both ways; I have spent most of my comic-reading life inside a very particular corner of the medium, one that skews heavily male, heavily towards the characters I grew up with, and I’m so acutely aware of that now my 13-year-old daughter is digging around in my substantial graphic-novel collection looking for heroes and only finding jocks. For a long time, that reading bias has also quietly followed me into the cinema, and female-led superhero films were things I’d catch eventually on a streaming service, half-paying attention, rather than things I’d clear a Friday evening for. I’m working on that. Actively. Because the more I’ve paid attention, the more I’ve realised how much that kind of lazy default costs both personally, in terms of the stories you miss, and culturally in terms of what it tells the industry about what’s worth making.

I mention this because it matters for what follows. I’m not writing this from a position of pure detachment. I went to see Supergirl which is loosely based on Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s comic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and I came out with a strong view, not just about the film, but about what’s been done to it before most people had the chance to see it for themselves.

The Film, First

Supergirl is a flawed piece of work. The script is uneven, and the second act loses its nerve somewhere between a cosmic road trip and a meditation on grief… it can’t quite commit to either, which is the films biggest flaw. The villain is underwritten to the point of near-absence. These are real creative problems, and critics who’ve flagged them aren’t wrong.

But Milly Alcock’s performance is genuinely extraordinary. She plays Kara Zor-El as someone still carrying the weight of watching her planet die before she ever set foot on Earth, someone who finds moments of fierce, scrappy joy without ever quite shaking the sadness underneath. It’s not the Supergirl of Saturday morning cartoons, it’s darker and stranger and more interesting than that, and it’s exactly the version the source material called for. Jason Momoa, meanwhile, appears to be having the time of his life as Lobo, and the film has a cosmic, interstellar scale that GotG got right, but most superhero films don’t attempt.

I found it absorbing. I also found it imperfect. Both things are true, and I think holding both at the same time is the only honest response to what’s been happening around this film.

The Numbers

Before we talk about the noise, the data deserves to be seen clearly.

Sort that chart by revenue and the first thing you notice is that the top of it is not a graveyard. Captain Marvel earned $1.13 billion worldwide — the first female-led superhero film to cross a billion dollars — and Wonder Woman earned $822 million, becoming at the time of its release the highest-grossing live-action film ever directed by a woman. These are not asterisked successes, these are dominant performances by any metric.

Look at the films that fell short and a different pattern emerges: Catwoman bombed in 2004, Elektra limped out with $56 million in 2005, Wonder Woman 1984 was hobbled by a pandemic-era release, The Marvels ended its run at $206 million against a reported $275 million production budget. Each of these failures is real. But here is the thing the discourse always skips over: not one of them failed because a woman was at the centre. Catwoman failed because it was a genuinely terrible film with an 8% Rotten Tomatoes score. Elektra failed because it was a low-ambition spin-off nobody believed in, including the lead actress. The Marvels failed because the MCU had been haemorrhaging audience goodwill for two years through an over-saturated streaming slate, and because the creative conditions weren’t in place. The gender of the protagonist was not the variable.

Now look at Supergirl’s opening: an estimated $40–50 million domestic, landing at number two behind Toy Story 5’s second weekend, with a reported production budget of $170 million. By the logic of the online discourse, this is a disaster. By any other reading, it is a modest opening for a mid-franchise DCU film opening against stiff family competition, with a 57% critics score that had been generating negative headlines for weeks before the film arrived.

Critics vs. Audiences: The Gap That Tells the Story

That second chart is the one I keep coming back to. Supergirl sits at 57% with critics and 77% with audiences — a 20-point gap. That is not a random divergence. Look at what else shows a pattern: Captain Marvel’s audience score was actively manipulated downward through coordinated review-bombing before most people had seen the film. The Marvels’ audience score is higher than its critics’ score. Madame Web (which is a genuinely poor film by any standard) has an audience score of 67% against an 11% critical rating, which suggests even there, the people who actually paid to sit in the seats found something the critics, primed by months of negative anticipation, had stopped looking for.

Critics are not a monolith and most of them are doing their jobs as honestly as they can. But critics also exist within a cultural conversation, and that conversation around Supergirl had been poisoned months before the first review was written.

What They Actually Said About Milly Alcock

Before the film reached a single paying audience, Milly Alcock had been subjected to months of sustained personal attack online, none of it related to her ability as an actress. People criticised her teeth at the world premiere. They circulated memes comparing her face to a character from a 1970s Saturday morning television show — a comparison that former Superman actor Dean Cain engaged with and was then criticised for, in a cycle that tells you everything about the energy driving these conversations. Promotional posters were edited to make Supergirl’s costume shorter. Her decision not to perform a specific kind of polished feminine presentation on red carpets was treated as a casting failure.

Alcock was clear-eyed about it. “I knew that by simply existing as a woman in franchise IP, I was going to get backlash,” she told Variety. She observed that most of the hostility came from anonymous accounts, the burner profiles and the “Dad of four, Christian” bios, and arrived at the only sensible conclusion available: “If you’re pissing the right kind of people off, you’re doing OK.”

It is worth being specific about what this backlash was not; It was not disappointed comic book fans with a genuine creative argument about the adaptation, it was a cohort that has spent years developing a playbook for generating pre-release negativity around properties featuring women, people of colour, or any character who doesn’t conform to a very specific vision of who a hero should be and who they should desire. Captain Marvel received exactly this treatment in 2019 and still earned a billion dollars. The machine is loud. It is not necessarily representative of anyone who actually watches films.

The Comparison Nobody Is Making

Here is a fact that has been almost entirely absent from the Supergirl discourse though, the biggest breakout film of this summer, the one that has earned $220 million globally against a production budget of $750,000, that has a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score, that audiences have been returning to in their second and third weekends while word of mouth turned it into a genuine cultural event, is Obsession.

Obsession, directed by YouTuber Curry Barker and starring Inde Navarrette as Nikki, is a horror romance whose entire engine is the perspective and interiority of its female lead. Navarrette has been in virtually every frame of the film’s promotional material. The story is driven by her experience, her psychology, her survival. It is, in every meaningful sense, a female-led film, and it has become the highest-grossing movie picked up at a film festival since The Blair Witch Project, besting the global cumulative totals of Get Out and Smile. Nobody is writing hot takes about how Obsession’s success disproves the female-led film thesis. Nobody is generating memes about Inde Navarrette’s appearance. The online hostility machine has not trained its sights on her, and the film has been allowed to find its audience on its own terms.

The difference, of course, is that Obsession is not a superhero film. The cape and the mythology and the decades of male precedent attached to them are apparently what triggers the territorial response. A woman in a horror film is allowable, a woman flying in the suit is not.

The Pattern Studios Keep Ignoring

When female-led superhero properties are given first-rate creative conditions, they succeed. Wonder Woman had Patty Jenkins, a strong screenplay, and genuine studio belief. Captain Marvel was positioned as the bridge between Infinity War and Endgame and given the full weight of MCU machine-hype. Both broke records. The films that struggle tend to be the ones where those conditions weren’t in place, where the script was underbaked, where the studio hedged its bets, where the marketing felt like obligation rather than enthusiasm.

And yet in almost every case, when a female-led superhero film underperforms, the failure gets attributed to the gender of the lead rather than to the creative decisions that determined the film’s quality. That attribution is not just factually wrong, it is useful to specific people, because it lets the industry off the hook for its own creative failures while simultaneously discouraging further investment in female-led stories. It is a self-reinforcing mechanism, and it has been running for long enough that people have stopped noticing how it works.

The uncomfortable truth is that the dudes will show up in higher numbers for a male-led film, that is a documented reality of the current superhero market, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. But the gap is not as wide as the industry fears, and it is being actively widened by the online campaigns that poison the pre-release conversation, tank the critical discourse, and ensure that organic fan enthusiasm (the kind that can carry a so-so script into a genuine cultural moment) never gets the chance to build. Male-led superhero films coast on decades of accumulated goodwill and the simple social permission that comes from never having had to fight for your right to exist. Female-led films don’t get that same runway, and when they stumble, the stumble is treated as evidence of structural failure rather than the product of the specific circumstances that caused it.

What the Film Is Actually About

I want to end where I started, with Milly Alcock flying across an alien sky, looking like someone who has earned the right to be there through grief and stubbornness and a refusal to tidy herself up for anyone.

The stories we tell about superheroes have always, at their best, been about people who carry more than they should have to carry and carry it anyway, who protect those who cannot protect themselves, who refuse to accept the world as it is. Kara Zor-El arrived watching her planet die, and she carries that into every fight, she does not smile on cue, and she does not perform her powers for an audience’s comfort, and she is all the more interesting for it.

The people who spent months trying to ensure this film failed before it opened were not, at bottom, making a creative argument, they were making a territorial one: the cape belongs to a particular kind of person, and Alcock’s Supergirl is not that person, and that is exactly why she is worth watching.

The film is in cinemas now. I’d recommend seeing it before you let anyone else tell you what you think of it.

Box office data: Box Office Mojo, Guinness World Records, Deadline Hollywood. Rotten Tomatoes scores as of 27 June 2026. Obsession box office data: Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline. Supergirl 2026 opening weekend estimate: Deadline / industry tracking.

It is, in other words, the story that the people who now want to own superheroes prefer to tell, because it ends with the medium as a commercially viable intellectual property machine with a decades-long runway of source material.

It is not, however, the actual story.

The actual story is considerably messier, more uncomfortable, and in the context of what is currently happening to the industry, considerably more important.

Comics were not created by people with platforms or institutional backing or cultural permission, they were assembled (often in genuine poverty and frequently under active discrimination) by people the respectable world had decided were not worth listening to. Understanding that origin is not a sentimental exercise, it is the only way to understand what is being lost, and who is taking it.

You need to begin in New York in the 1930s, in the tenement neighbourhoods where Jewish immigrant families had settled after fleeing persecution in Europe.

The publishing industry, the advertising industry, the respectable media of that era were largely closed to them, and what was available was the gutter end of the print trade: cheap paper, lurid covers, penny-a-page rates, and absolutely zero cultural prestige. Into that space walked men like Jack Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg on the Lower East Side to Austrian immigrants who had left because staying was dangerous, and Joe Simon, and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two boys in Cleveland who created Superman in a rented room and sold the rights for $130 because the alternative was not eating. These were not people making a calculated creative investment, they were outsiders using the cheapest available medium because it was the only one that would have them, and they poured into it everything they knew about being feared, excluded, and underestimated. Captain America punching Hitler on the cover of his debut issue in 1941 was not a piece of cynical marketing, it was drawn by a Jewish man who understood exactly what Hitler was doing, a year before America officially entered the war, at a time when that view was not yet the consensus.

Captain America #1, March 01, 1941

Will Eisner built urban theatre from the texture of Jewish New York, treating the city’s street corners and fire escapes and immigrant interiors as the emotional architecture of a medium that everyone else was still using for fistfights and space opera. When he later insisted on the term graphic novel, he was not making a branding decision, he was arguing, with considerable urgency, that this form deserved to be taken seriously, that the people who made it and the people who read it deserved to be taken seriously, and that the gatekeepers of literary culture who had spent decades dismissing comics as children’s entertainment were wrong in ways that mattered.

(Eisner did not invent the phrase "graphic novel," but his 1978 book A Contract with God popularised it. To avoid the juvenile stigma of "comic books," he also championed the term "sequential art" to describe his narrative medium. The term is widely attributed to American comic book fan and historian Richard Kyle in 1964.)

Across the Atlantic the coordinates were different but the principle was identical. British comics, particularly the weeklies that shaped the reading lives of multiple generations of working-class children, were produced on rough newsprint for readers who were not the target audience of anything else the culture was producing. Pat Mills, writing Charley’s War for Eagle in the early 1980s, was not delivering a literary statement about the First World War for a broadsheet readership. He was writing working-class history and smuggling it into a boys’ weekly, describing the slaughter at the Somme through the experience of an underage soldier who had lied about his age to enlist, because that was the story Mills’s own family had lived and that the official version of British history had spent decades refusing to tell. The strip is now cited by historians as one of the most accurate portrayals of trench warfare in British media. It ran in a comic that cost a few pence and was read on the back seats of school buses by children who had no idea they were absorbing an act of radical historical recovery.

2000AD carried a similar energy, just pointed at a different set of targets. The strip that produced Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper, Sláine and a dozen other strips that warped the imaginations of everyone who grew up with them was built on a foundational distrust of authority, a relentless willingness to make institutions look corrupt and stupid, and a tonal range that moved from deadpan satire to existential horror within a single issue. It was, in retrospect, the perfect reading material for children growing up in Thatcher’s Britain who could feel, even if they couldn’t yet articulate it, that the official optimism of the era was a fiction being maintained by people who would not be paying the price for it. The creators who built 2000AD, the writers and artists who collectively invented its visual and narrative DNA, were not doing this from positions of comfort or security. They were grinding out pages against savage deadlines for modest page rates, working across multiple strips simultaneously, building something they were making up as they went, and the result was one of the most formally adventurous and thematically rich comics traditions in the world.

The readers who built fandom around all of this were similarly drawn from the parts of the culture that the mainstream had decided were not worth serving. Queer teenagers who found in certain characters a coded language for experiences they could not yet name in the rooms they actually inhabited. The X-Men’s entire premise, a group of people feared and persecuted for something they were born with, who nevertheless commit their lives to protecting a world that would rather see them destroyed, was not subtle, and it was not accidental, and for LGBTQ+ readers it arrived with a force that polite literary fiction, even the well-intentioned kind, rarely managed to match. The metaphor worked because it was specific and because it was drawn with conviction and because it asked the reader to sit with the full weight of what exclusion feels like rather than just gesturing at it from a comfortable distance.

Black readers came to comics and found, scattered among decades of embarrassing representations and outright caricature, characters who carried something real about the experience of living in a world structured against you. When Black Panther arrived in 1966, created by Kirby and Lee, it was a genuine rupture: a Black king, a genius, the ruler of the most technologically advanced nation on Earth, written at a moment when American society was being forced at the cost of considerable blood to acknowledge that Black citizens deserved basic civil rights. The character’s cultural resonance was never separate from that context and never could be. Women, who were for decades rendered invisible or decorative in mainstream comics, built their own spaces outside the gravitational pull of the Big Two: feminist zines, queer anthologies, small-press tables at conventions where the work being sold was formally adventurous and emotionally honest in ways the corporate product rarely allowed itself to be. Those were not side quests or peripheral concerns. They were, often, the actual cutting edge of what the medium was capable of.

The underground comix movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s made all of this explicit in terms that nobody could mistake for anything other than what it was. Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Trina Robbins and the others who built that scene were producing work that was deliberately, provocatively adult, sexually explicit, politically incendiary, formally adventurous, and structurally committed to the idea that the cheap disposability of the medium was a feature rather than a flaw, that it allowed them to say things in a stapled pamphlet sold from a record shop that no respectable publisher would touch. They were right, and the work they made remains, decades later, an extraordinarily honest record of what it felt like to be alive and politically conscious and alienated from official culture in that particular moment.

The point of all this history is not nostalgia, though the work repays attention on its own terms. The point is that comics arrived at whatever moral authority they now possess through a specific and traceable process. They were made by people who needed them, for people who needed them, and that necessity was not decorative. It produced a form with an unusual capacity for emotional honesty, for speaking to outsider experience with specificity and force, for holding up a mirror to power without first asking power’s permission. The medium’s ability to do all of that was not the result of a deliberate artistic programme. It was the natural consequence of who was making it and why.

Which brings us to the present, and to the precise nature of what is currently being done to this tradition.

Over the past several years, a cluster of technology companies, backed by the kind of venture capital funding that compresses decade-long industry transformations into eighteen-month product cycles, have built and released a set of tools capable of generating comic art, comic scripts, and complete comic narratives from text prompts, at industrial scale, in seconds. The companies involved, Stability AI, Midjourney, various iterations of image generation built into larger platforms, along with the growing constellation of comics-specific startups including Dashtoon, Shortbread, LlamaGen and others, present themselves in the language of democratisation. They are, they claim, making comics creation accessible to people who lack the technical skills to draw or the financial resources to hire artists. They are opening up the form. They are expanding who gets to tell stories.

It is worth spending some time with that claim, because it is the claim that has the most rhetorical purchase and deserves the most careful scrutiny.

The tools these companies have built were not trained on publicly available, freely licensed creative work. They were trained on the accumulated creative output of generations of working artists, scraped from portfolio sites, from DeviantArt, from archived comics, from the digitised collections of decades of human labour, without consent, without compensation, and without disclosure. The legal arguments around this practice are unresolved and genuinely complex, but the ethical architecture is not complicated at all. Jack Kirby’s visual vocabulary, the crackling energy of his machinery and the cosmic scale of his compositions, lives inside these models. Dave Gibbons’ panel construction from Watchmen is in there. The work of Amy Reeder, who has described losing a direct commission because the client used a model trained on her work to generate what they needed instead of hiring her, is in there. Every artist whose style has been indexed, ingested and made available as a prompt option, without being asked, without being credited, without being paid, is in there.

This is not, to be clear, the same as artistic influence. The history of comics, like the history of any visual art form, is a history of influence: artists learning from those who came before, absorbing visual languages and reinventing them, building on traditions they inherited. That process is how culture develops and how individual voices emerge from shared history. It is fundamentally different from training a statistical model on millions of images and then selling access to the resulting output as a content generation service. Influence involves a human being, with their own experience and perspective and set of choices, encountering other work and making something new from the encounter. What these models do is extract pattern from data and reproduce it without understanding, without history, without the specific human context that made the original work meaningful. The output looks like comics. It does not know what comics are.

The people most enthusiastically using these tools to flood platforms with generated content are not, in the main, the people for whom comics were built. They are not the queer teenager who needed Northstar to exist before they could find language for their own experience. They are not the working-class British kid who found something true and unpatronising in a 2000AD strip. They are not the Black reader who recognised themselves in a character the mainstream had spent decades ignoring, or the woman building her own space in a medium that treated her as an afterthought. They are, disproportionately, people with disposable income and programming skills, people who grew up in the digital content economy and understand creative work primarily as a production problem to be optimised, people for whom the idea that making something requires skill and time and stakes and genuine human investment is an inefficiency rather than the actual point. The technology press has a word for this demographic, though it rarely applies it critically: tech bros. People who want the product without the grind, the aesthetic without the history, the content without the cost.

The startup pitch decks for companies like Dashtoon, which promises to transform any story into a global comic sensation in minutes, or Shortbread, which describes itself as the Netflix of comics and boasts the ability to generate episodes ten times faster than traditional workflows, are a revealing document. They are addressed to investors, not readers. They measure success in throughput and market capture, not in the quality of what is being produced or the wellbeing of the people whose work funded the training data. They describe the comics industry as a market to be disrupted rather than a culture to be participated in, which is an important distinction, because it tells you exactly what relationship these companies have to the tradition they are cannibalising. The comics industry, in their framing, is a problem: slow, expensive, dependent on skilled human labour, resistant to the kind of venture-capital-backed scale that turns modest cultural products into billion-dollar intellectual property pipelines. The solution, in their framing, is to remove the humans from the process wherever possible, retrain the market to accept machine-generated output as equivalent to hand-made work, and capture the margin that currently goes to artists, writers, colourists and letterers.

This is not, to be clear, an ideological project. It does not emerge from any political position or cultural agenda. It is, far more simply and far more depressingly, an economic one. The comics industry has always been structurally exploitative of its creators, as anyone familiar with the work-for-hire contracts that stripped Jack Kirby and Joe Shuster and Bill Finger of ownership over the characters they created will know, and the arrival of generative Ai represents not a rupture with that history but its logical extension. The people at the bottom of the creative pipeline, the colourists and letterers whose labour is structural but invisible, the mid-list pencillers who held the industry together across decades without ever becoming famous, the writers working on assignment for modest page rates with no royalties, were always the most economically vulnerable. They are the ones who have already begun to lose work, not in some hypothetical future but now, as publishers discover that generated backgrounds are cheaper than commissioned ones, that generated covers attract enough clicks to justify the saving, that the audience, presented with polished synthetic output without context, often cannot tell the difference.

When Marvel used an Ai-generated title sequence in the Disney+ series Secret Invasion, the detonation of criticism that followed was not primarily about quality. It was about signal. The message that sequence sent to every working creative in the industry was unambiguous: we can do this without you, and we will do it without you, and when we do it, we will not tell you, and we will not apologise. The fact that the sequence was widely regarded as aesthetically inferior to what a commissioned artist would have produced was almost beside the point. The point was the intent, and the intent was legible.

What is being taken from comics in this moment is not just jobs, though it is certainly that. It is the specific transmission mechanism through which the form reproduces itself: the apprenticeship, the mentorship, the long years of grinding work through which a person develops not just technical skill but a way of seeing, a point of view, a voice. The mid-list artist whose consistent work across decades of unremarkable issues was, quietly, how the next generation of artists learned what the job actually involved, is already becoming economically unviable. The colourist who understood precisely how light behaves across a page and what emotional register a particular palette produces is finding their expertise undermined by tools that approximate those effects without understanding them. The conditions under which comics culture reproduced itself are being systematically dismantled, not because anyone has decided that comics matter less, but because the companies doing the dismantling are not thinking about comics at all. They are thinking about content markets, about data, about scale, about the gap between what skilled human labour currently costs and what automated generation costs.

The form was built by people who had been excluded from the rooms where respectable culture was made. LGBTQ+ readers, Black readers, working-class readers, immigrants and outsiders of every description found in it something the mainstream refused to offer: stories that saw them, characters who felt like them, a medium cheap enough and strange enough to let marginalised voices speak without first being approved by a committee. None of that happened because comics were progressive in the contemporary political sense of the word. It happened because the people who built the form had skin in the game. They were drawing from experience that was real and specific and sometimes frightening, and readers recognised that, and trusted it, and built their emotional lives around it in ways that still show up in conversations at conventions and secondhand stalls decades later.

What is being generated by models trained on that tradition, operated by people who have no relationship to the conditions that produced it, is something categorically different. It looks like comics. The panel rhythms are there, the speech balloons, the visual grammar assembled from decades of scraped and ingested human work. What is absent is everything that made the grammar worth having in the first place: the stakes, the specific human consciousness trying to tell a specific truth about a specific experience, the grind and the failure and the revision and the thing that finally works on the fourth attempt because the person doing it cared enough to keep trying. The machine does not care. It cannot care. It produces outputs that satisfy the pattern requirements of the training data without having any relationship to what those patterns were originally expressing.

To hand those tools to people who never needed an escape route, who never sat in a school bus or a doctor’s waiting room or a difficult childhood bedroom and felt a comic open a door that everything else kept closed, and to call that democratisation, is one of the more audacious acts of rhetorical sleight of hand that the technology industry has managed in a decade not short of competitors. The people the form was built for, the ones whose need shaped it into something worth having, are not the beneficiaries of this development. They are its casualties. And the people benefiting from it are, in the main, precisely the demographic that comics spent most of its history speaking against: those with institutional power, economic comfort, and no particular interest in what the medium cost to build or who paid that cost.

That is the hijacking. Not a conspiracy, not a coordinated attack, not even a deliberate cultural project. Just capital moving, as it always moves, toward the cheapest available means of production, indifferent to what gets destroyed in the process, and cheerfully describing the destruction as progress.

Comics have always survived by being underestimated, and so question my new book asks, with some urgency, is whether survival is still enough, or whether what is actually at stake this time is the conditions that made the form worth surviving for in the first place. What I tried to do attempt to find out, told through the people who built it, the people who are fighting for it, and the machines that have decided it belongs to them.

Born to Extinction is out now, published independently and all proceeds are donated to grassroots creative groups battling to keep their craft alive.

At the same time, over in America in the parallel universe of Providence, Rhode Island, a radio station called WBRU which specialised in indie and alternative music had picked up a song called ‘Morning Afterglow’ from a little known U.K band called Electrasy and it started to take off. WBRU had a good pedigree of listeners and the song ended up being their most requested song of all time at the radio station. A promotions guy called Mark Zimmerman from Arista was tasked with checking out the most requested lists from the student stations and he spotted it. Once he’d seen the music video he decided the band was marketable and set things in motion that nobody was expecting.

The band was about to get a second shot in the arm.

Nigel: It’s early 1999, and I’m looking around for new management. Talking to some big London based players, like Sanctuary, and was pretty much about to do a deal when I got a random call from our publisher, Windswept Pacific.

The secretary from Windswept tells me that there is this guy in town from the American record label, Arista, and he’d like to meet me because they’re interested in the band. I was told to go to the Dorchester on Friday at 7pm and ask for Mr Davis.

We’d been doing meetings like this a fair bit so I agreed and just went with it. I had the impression we were going to meet some junior A&R guy over in London on a scouting trip or something, which would have been quite common.

Jim and Paul weren’t really into the whole meet and greet thing, so me and Steve headed over to the hotel with our demo CD of Renegades.

Steve: There’s a town called Dorchester near Weymouth, so I found the whole thing hilarious. We’d done a pub gig in Dorchester at some point in 1996 to about 10 people. That Dorchester definitely wasn’t as shiny as this Dorchester.

Nigel: The first inkling I had that things were not as I had originally imagined was when I was told that “Mr. Davis would see us in his suite on the 7th floor”. Steve and I are looking about as unremarkable as it is possible to look, and we head on up.

My brain is already ringing alarm bells as we’re greeted by two guys in suits who basically interview us for 15-20 minutes to see what we’re all about.

I have now fully clocked what’s going on, I have no idea who Mr Davis is, but I now know exactly what he is; He’s this big time record company guy and his guys are checking to see if they think it’s even worth his time to meet with us.

Steve: I was starting to realise that this was one of those life altering moments and we were in it up to our necks. Again. It was pretty surreal.

Nigel: Steve and I have never exactly been fashion icons, but despite our pretty dire appearance, we were ushered in to see ‘the man’. It’s almost like meeting a mafia boss or something.

He seemed nice enough and we made small talk about the band and learned that he’d heard and liked ‘Morning Afterglow’, and that the A&R guys had heard some talk about it maybe being used for a movie with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant that was being released that year called “Notting Hill.” Which was all news to me.

Steve: This guy, Clive, seemed pretty down to earth, I liked him. I was also amused that his initials were CD and he worked in the music industry, it was the little things that tickled me. I think I was more daunted by the suite we were in than him to be honest, it was a long way away from Dorset.

Nigel: He liked our track ‘Angel’ and he wanted to know about the lyrics. I told him about teaching at Bruton School for girls and how powerful it had been getting the students to form their own band and perform at a parents night show.

I was really proud they’d done that; “All my angels, made in England, oh so well”. It was fairly uncool and not very rock and roll, but as a family man he loved the story.

We played the ‘Renegades’ demo to the room, which got everyone pretty excited, and one of the other suits in the room suggested the track would probably be huge on KROQ, which we found out later was this influential Alt Rock radio station in LA.

Steve: It was a cool meeting. It felt like a second chance might be coming for us.

Nigel: Everything’s going well, we learned that ‘Morning Afterglow’ was the most requested song of the year on WBRU, a college radio station at Brown University in Providence Rhode Island. Which we obviously didn’t know because this is all pre-internet, how could we possibly know stuff like that?

And then Clive says; “Where’s the guy?”

“You two, you’re OK. The songwriter and the guitar player. But neither of you are THE guy, where is he?”

Ahhh shit. He meant Ali.

Clive wanted to meet him, and he needed him to be there by 10am the following morning because his flight back to New York left the following afternoon.

After the sudden departure of the band from the music press and scene we all figured they’d be taking some time out to plot their next steps, or go back to gigging locally again. What we didn’t realise was that being dropped by MCA really had a big impact on the individual members of the band in very different ways. Nigel being Nigel had got busy, Steve was just kind of hanging around. Paul and Jim were lugging furniture for an Indian family-run-business in Fulham, and Ali had gone to Glasgow to hide and drown his sorrows.

When you climb that high so quickly, the fall back down is pretty far, and Ali had been very sprained when he hit the ground.

Ali: After the meltdown with MCA I went up to live in Glasgow with my girlfriend at the time. I won’t lie, I wasn’t in a great place. I did not have a pot to piss in and I was sitting around moping, smoking lots of weed, and drinking a lot. I was over-thinking about the fact that it had all come to an abrupt end just as we were on the ascendency. A couple of months before I’d been performing to 9 million punters watching TFI Friday, and now I was broke, depressed and probably not heading in a great direction.

Then one random evening I get this phone call from Nige and he asks if I can sort myself out and get to London to meet this record company guy the following day. I borrowed the money for the flight off my girlfriend, Kay, booked a flight over the phone and flew down.

The funny thing about that short flight was it was at a time when the airlines were still imbuing you with free alcohol regardless of what time of the day it was, so I’m on this early morning flight, and typically for me I get straight on the fucking sauce. I’m still acting like a rockstar even though the airline staff haven’t got a clue who I am. Living the lifestyle y’know? I was knocking back a few whiskeys and kicking back. The flight from Glasgow to London is only about an hour, but I had a good liquid breakfast.

I get down to London. I’m already buzzing a bit. I go on the tube to Hyde Park Corner and I go to the Dorchester, which is this silly posh hotel on the edge of Mayfair overlooking Hyde Park. At the front desk the scene is hilarious because obviously I must just look like a fucking right state.

I told them I was there for a meeting with Clive Davis, and two security guards came over all dressed in black like bouncers, and they escorted me to the lift that only goes to the penthouse. I’m half-cut and I have no fucking clue who this guy is, or what the fuck is going on.

In my head I know I have to go into ‘Electrasy Ali’ mode and style this one out. I come out of the lift, walk into a living room (who has a living room in their hotel room?) where Steve and Nige are sitting on a sofa.

There’s probably four or five suited A&R men there. I can sniff an A&R person out by now. All corporate and stiff. So at that point I panic a bit and think, what the fuck is going on here, I need another drink.

Nigel: Me and Steve are already there, chatting to the Arista guys when Ali finally arrives. Ali being Ali he’s late and he’s already a bit hammered. He enters this big suite and first thing he does is sort of break off from being introduced, walk over to the mini bar, pours a large brandy, probably downs it, pours another, and goes outside onto the balcony for a cigarette.

Ali: I get my drink and go straight out onto the balcony for a fag because the view is nice, and I want some air. I’m feeling really claustrophobic in there, and I need to make sure I’m on my a-game.

When I walk back in, this bloke enters. Like, it’s a big moment. Apparently this Clive fella is the big cheese at an American record label, but it literally means fuck all to me. I don’t know who he is. Literally no idea, or how powerful he is. You have to remember that just a couple of years before this moment we’re doing gigs at The Royal Oak in Dorchester to a dozen pissed up old men at the bar or whatever, and now I’m in the suite at The Dorchester meeting some fella from America.

In all honesty it all probably played to my advantage, because I was in no way intimidated by the bloke.

Nigel: Ali then turns to Clive Davis and says, “Hi Mike, so great to meet you!”

I feel like now is an appropriate moment to jump into the middle of this particular story to fill in the blanks about ‘Mike’ just in case some of you are as clueless about him as Ali is in this moment.

Clive Davis is one of the most powerful figures in the recording industry, and had presided over Arista Records for more than two decades at the moment Ali is addressing him as ‘Mike’. Davis had helped to shape the trends in the pop and rock music industries since the mid-1960s, and he has piloted Arista Records through the changing musical scene of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The man is quite literally an industry pillar. Under Davis’s management Arista averaged more than $300 million in annual sales during the 1990s with a catalogue of artists that at that time included Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, the Grateful Dead, the Kinks, and the Crash Test Dummies.

Clive was also instrumental in the careers of Dionne Warwick, Sarah McLachlan, Annie Lennox, Kenny G, Notorious B.I.G., Toni Braxton, Lou Reed and Patti Smith, among many others.

In an interview another of his proteges, Barry Manilow, told a reporter that Davis “Had the mind of an executive and the ears of a teenager.” Davis also had an intense interest in vibrant rock music and in his previous role at Colombia had assembled one of the most impressive rosters of talent ever under the same record label. Which included artists as Janis Joplin; Santana; Blood, Sweat and Tears; Pink Floyd; Billy Joel; and Bruce Springsteen. He also discovered Aerosmith. The man knows what he’s doing, and he’s standing in his penthouse suite at the Dorchester being addressed as ‘Mike’ by a half-cut Alisdair Hamish McKinnell from Weymouth, in front of his top-brass.

Ali: I could tell this bloke was there to give us the big spiel, but I just jumped in front of him and I started calling him Mike because in my head he looked like the comedian and actor Mike Reid. “Frank fucking Butcher from Eastenders was in the house.”

Nigel: Ali’s entrance has been pretty loud, almost rude, and now he just called Clive Davis, Mike. Me and Steve have no idea what is going on. Everyone turns to Clive knowing that this moment is everything and the deal is about to be knocked stone-cold dead in the water, but Clive is beaming. Clive loves a star. Sure, he picks hit songs, but even more so he picks stars, and he saw Ali and he saw attitude. Probably everything he didn’t see in me and Steve he immediately saw in Ali. In these situations, charisma is everything.

And after that we knew we were safe and the deal was done.

Ali: I told him I was there to talk to him about Electrasy and what we were and what we would like to do, I just blew off some steam for about ten or fifteen minutes because he seemed like a nice bloke.

He asked me to sit down while explained what he’d achieved in his career and who he was, and when he did that, I was like, oh my fucking days, what have I just done? If a hole had opened up in the ground, I would have jumped in it back down the hotel lobby.

But then he just literally said this was the reason he wanted to see me in the flesh. He was the starmaker. He knew we had the songs, and he knew there was a band there, but he wanted to meet me. I think he just fucking liked what he saw. And that was it.

Steve: I didn’t really know what was going on if I was honest, but Clive told us we needed to get to New York, and by Sunday we were in New York rehearsing for a showcase. Mental. Totally mental.

Ali: I’m just a lad from Weymouth playing at being a rockstar. It was pretty surreal.

Nigel: When we first showed up at Arista records on 52nd street or wherever the heck it was, it had a massive gold plated front entrance. Huge 46 story building purely I think devoted to the record label. It was so bizarre. Even just thinking about how much that must have cost to maintain blew my mind.

We went off to this rehearsal space called SIR Studios in midtown New York on 475 10th Avenue and got ready to do the classic high pressure record company showcase. 25 guys in suits and cigars filed in and silently watched our short set of 5 or 6 songs. I think we did Angel, Renegades, Morning Afterglow, Todays the Day and one other that I can’t remember, probably Lost in Space.

Ali: Honestly, I was so stoked to be back in the game so soon that I just went over to New York and enjoyed the whole experience. We got totally wasted the first few days. Went large. Then into the rehearsal space we go to play our showcase. I’ll be frank (Butcher), I wasn’t feeling great about it because this wasn’t like a gig where you’ve got a crowd to feed off. This is a room with a bunch of stiffs in suits watching you. There’s no energy.

Truth be told it was a bit of a nightmare. I didn’t enjoy it. No atmosphere at all. After we finished playing our set Clive grabbed me and took me outside, put his arm around me and told me he didn’t like it, and that he wanted me to do it again, but pretend I was playing to 6000 people.

Steve: They loved the set so much they asked us to play it twice. An incredible result really. Twice!

Nigel: We did the set once and were asked to do it a second time because Clive liked it so much.

Ali: Honestly, I just thought “What a fucking dick.” Asking me to pretend like I was an actor or something. No crowd. No energy. I went back in and I had the right fucking hump about being asked to do that. My voice was going from being up all night partying and rehearsing and I really just didn’t have it in me, but I thought, right, “fuck off, Mike, I’m doing this for the lads.”

So we did it again for the execs, and this time I just fucking stared the bloke out for every bit of every song. I never took my eyes off him. And that was it. I just drilled into him that those songs were his if he wanted them. And that was it, he was like, yeah, I’ll sign you.

Nigel: The lawyers spent 3 months haggling and by June we were a signed band again - all done with no management.

Ali: Listen, I can be a dick about stuff sometimes, but this was life-changing shit. Like the impossible had been achieved. We’d been given another opportunity when some people don’t even sign once. To sign for a second time, to an American label, and go to the states was unbelievable.

The boys were back in the game.

26 May 99

After months of tense negotiations, we can exclusively announce that Electrasy have signed a huge new record deal with American giants Arista Records of New York.

A band spokesperson had this to say earlier today:

“We first began talking to Arista a few months ago, and then out of the blue Clive Davis (President and founder of Arista) came over to the UK with some of his A&R people. We met them, and from the start it was obvious that these were people we could work with. They had a real spirit of enthusiasm and genuine excitement for our music.

We flew over to New York to do a showcase performance for people from the record company and it was a real success - we actually got to play our set twice. The songs that really knocked them out were ‘Morning Afterglow’, and a new song we’ve got called ‘Renegades’.

It’s taken a little while to sort out the deal but now it’s all on, and we can’t wait to be off and running again”

Electrasy: Calling All The Dreamers: The extraordinary true story of a Britpop band from the West Country who went to space and back.

The UK comics market hit £78.7 million in sales last year. Record numbers, the highest ever tracked, children’s comics up almost thirty percent, adult graphic novels sitting just shy of their all-time peak. By any measure you care to apply, the industry is thriving.

So why are the people who made it happen mostly earning less than £20,000 a year?

Those two facts have been allowed to coexist for long enough that the industry has started to treat the contradiction as a weather condition, something unfortunate, persistent, and largely beyond anyone’s control. It isn’t. It’s a choice, one that gets made quietly, contract by contract, commission by commission, in the gap between what the market generates and what ever reaches the person who actually drew the thing.

This isn’t a new problem. Page rates in British comics have barely moved in real terms for four decades. The freelance model has always transferred financial risk downward, onto the creator, while the upside travels in the opposite direction. Work-for-hire contracts strip creators of rights to work that gets reprinted, adapted, and monetised long after the original cheque has been spent. None of that is new, and none of it has ever been acceptable. Publishers paid poorly because they could, and everyone understood, dimly, that this was the arrangement.

What’s changed is that exploitation now comes with a rationale.

Generative Ai has handed commissioners and publishers something they’ve never had before: a respectable economic justification for paying less. The conversation has shifted, unmistakably, from “we can’t afford to pay you more” to “the market has decided your work is replaceable.” Those are not the same claim and the first is a negotiating position, the second is a verdict, and once a verdict lands, it changes what feels reasonable for creators to ask for.

Hannah Berry has been watching this more carefully than almost anyone. An award-winning creator, former UK Comics Laureate, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she first began structured research into the relationship between comics creators and emerging technologies in 2020, when generative Ai was still largely speculative. She returned to the same research in 2025, not to prove a point but to understand whether anything had actually shifted. What she found was quietly devastating: almost none of the creators she spoke to were using generative Ai themselves, and yet around a third had already lost work or income because of it.

“That’s the part people don’t quite grasp,” she told me. “It’s not a tool that creators are adopting, it’s a tool that’s being used around them, often instead of them.”

The economic damage isn’t coming from creators changing how they work, it’s coming from the people who used to buy the work deciding they no longer need to. And it’s not the high-profile commissions going first, it’s the smaller ones, the cover for a small press book, the character design, the poster, the kinds of jobs that sit between larger projects and quietly keep a creative career financially viable. The hidden scaffolding, as Hannah describes it. The first thing to be replaced.

“It’s not dramatic when it happens,” she said. “That’s the problem, it just stops. The emails stop, the small jobs stop, the bits of work you rely on without really thinking about them just disappear.”

What Ai introduces is a language of inevitability that makes it harder to push back. When a publisher says the budget won’t stretch, you can argue the budget. When they gesture toward a generative tool and imply the market has already decided, the conversation changes shape entirely. The devaluation of creative work isn’t new, but the new justification for it is. There’s a meaningful difference between an industry that underpays people because it has always gotten away with it, and one that underpays people because it has convinced itself, and them, that the work was never worth more to begin with.

Hannah put a question to me, simply, without drama, and I’ve been sitting with it since we spoke earlier this year;

“If comics are doing well,” she said, “why aren’t the people making them doing well too?”

Follow the money rather than the announcements and the answer is bleak: the industry was never designed to share its success downward. Ai hasn’t created that problem, it has given the people who benefit from it a new argument for why fixing it can wait. And the longer it waits, the more creators do the maths, find it doesn’t work, and leave. The shelves stay full. The sales figures hold. And somewhere in the middle of all that, the industry quietly becomes less itself.

What’s happening isn’t disruption. It’s removal, and it’s happening in plain sight, while the market reports look better than ever.

‘Drawn to Extinction: Comics, Craft, and the Battle for Originality in the Age of Ai’ is available now.

Dan Cornwell was driving a bus when John Wagner messaged him with the offer. That message, a single line asking if he liked football and could he draw it, was the result of years of rejected submissions, doodling between bus routes, and one particular afternoon on Brighton Pier with a pint in his hand asking himself what he was doing with his life.

Dan was meant to draw, and the bus he drove for years was just where he’d ended up while waiting to find the courage to try drawing again.

That story, from bus routes to Judge Dredd, only exists because the struggle existed first. The rejections. The gap between what Dan could imagine and what his hands could produce. The slow, private accumulation of craft that nobody sees until the day everything changes. “You can’t fake loose,” he told me, borrowing a line from Carlos Ezquerra. “That’s true for drawing and it’s true for life.”

Here’s what worries me about Ai; it’s not the technology, it’s the conditions.

Generative Ai doesn’t threaten the Dan Cornwells who already exist, it threatens the ones who haven’t started yet. The teenager right now with the same stubbornness and the same fire, who opens an app, types a prompt, and gets back something that looks more polished than anything three years of real effort would produce. What does that do to the three years? What does it do to the will to begin?

Research from Matt Beane at UC Santa Barbara shows this isn’t hypothetical in a study of surgical suites where robotic systems now handle the procedure, junior surgeons have become optional observers. The expert-novice bond, the mechanism through which skill actually transfers, has been severed. Entry-level tech job postings dropped 67% between 2023 and 2024, and the Society of Authors survey last year found a third of working writers had already lost income to Ai. Different industries, same severance.

The comics industry was built by outliers. People from buses and bakeries who drew through rejection because the alternative was unthinkable. Dan’s first year of professional income came to fourteen grand, and amount to pitiful that he had to tell his wife the taxman was giving them money back. That’s what sits behind the art.

“If you take the work away from people,” he told me, “you take away their reason to get better. And that’s when everything starts looking the same.”

Twenty-five years of watching people make things tells me the same. When someone is deep in a drawing, or a paragraph, or a page of sequential art that’s finally starting to work, something happens that has nothing to do with the output. We’ve all been there at some point when noise falls away, and the hours disappear. That state isn’t a side effect of making, it’s one of the reasons making matters. You can’t prompt your way into it. You can only get there through the long, repetitive, occasionally humiliating process of learning to do something with your own hands.

We’re removing the conditions that make that possible. Quietly. In the language of democratisation and creative empowerment, and a generation that never has to learn the differences between those two things is a generation that loses something it didn’t know it needed.

Here’s the thing about lists like this: the individual rankings are almost beside the point. Yes, Watchmen is number one. Yes, Born Again pipped Dark Knight Returns to second. You can argue those calls until you run out of coffee. What’s actually interesting is what the shape of the list tells you about where and when comics became the thing we now recognise them as.

So I ran the numbers. And the picture they paint is pretty striking.

Marvel and DC own this list. Almost entirely.

Between them, Marvel (38 entries) and DC (32 entries) account for 70 of the 100 spots. Add in DC’s imprints, Vertigo, Wildstorm, and America’s Best Comics, and the number climbs to around 79. The remaining 21 are spread across 10 publishers, none with more than four entries. Image gets four. Fantagraphics gets three. Everyone else is picking up singles.

Now, you could read that as depressing. Two corporations. Seventy percent of the canon. But I think that’s the wrong frame. What it actually tells you is that the conditions for great comics storytelling in the 20th century were almost entirely inside those two publishing houses. The talent, the characters with decades of history behind them, the editorial freedom (when it existed), and crucially the audience that created a market for work that pushed past what anyone thought the medium could do. The great independent work is here, but the centre of gravity is unmistakably the Big Two.

The 1980s did something that every other decade is still living off.

34 entries on this list originate in the 1980s. That’s more than a third of the entire canon, from a single ten-year window. The 2000s come in second with 24. The 1990s follow with 22. The 2010s manage 13. The 1960s and 2020s each contribute 3. The 1970s, genuinely, produced one entry.

Think about what that means. If you were reading comics between roughly 1980 and 1989, you were present at the moment the medium decided what it was going to be. Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Year One, Born Again, Maus, V for Vendetta, The Dark Phoenix Saga, Kravens Last Hunt, Days of Future Past. That’s nine of the top twenty, all from a single decade.

The 1980s were when comics stopped apologising for being comics and started treating the form as a legitimate vehicle for literary ambition, political complexity, and genuine visual storytelling. Moore and Miller and Gaiman and Claremont and Simonson didn’t just write great stories. They redrew what the ceiling looked like. Every list since has been a negotiation with the shadow they cast.

What does the 2020s number tell us?

Three entries. Absolute Batman’s The Zoo, Woman of Tomorrow, and Daniel Warren Johnson’s Transformers: Robots in Disguise. The decade is only half done, so that number will climb. But it’s worth sitting with the gap.

Part of it is recency. Votes for the ages take time to accumulate. Part of it is that the format itself has fragmented so dramatically that no single title commands the cultural attention it once did. And part of it, maybe, is that we’re still waiting for the work that does for this decade what 1986 did for its own.

That work is probably already being made. It just hasn’t been canonised yet.

The list is a record of where the form found its confidence. Two publishers supplied the infrastructure. One decade supplied the proof of concept. Everything else is the long tail of that moment still playing out.

For the record… not having “Justice” on the list seems like a huge oversight!

The Full List

Here’s the full list with publisher and year:

1. Watchmen — DC Comics, 1986–87

2. Born Again — Marvel Comics, 1986

3. Dark Knight Returns — DC Comics, 1986

4. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale — Pantheon Books, 1986–91

5. The Dark Phoenix Saga — Marvel Comics, 1980

6. All Star Superman — DC Comics, 2005–08

7. Year One — DC Comics, 1987

8. Kingdom Come — DC Comics, 1996

9. Crisis on Infinite Earths — DC Comics, 1985–86

10. The Long Halloween — DC Comics, 1996–97

11. The Great Darkness Saga — DC Comics, 1982

12. If This Be My Destiny — Marvel Comics, 1966

13. Kraven’s Last Hunt — Marvel Comics, 1987

14. Season of Mists — DC/Vertigo, 1990–91

15. Perfect Strangers — Image Comics, 2003

16. Marvels — Marvel Comics, 1994

17. V for Vendetta — DC Comics, 1988–89

18. The Judas Contract — DC Comics, 1984

19. Days of Future Past — Marvel Comics, 1981

20. The Coming of Galactus — Marvel Comics, 1966

21. Blackest Night — DC Comics, 2009–10

22. Civil War — Marvel Comics, 2006–07

23. Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? — DC Comics, 1986

24. Avengers Forever — Marvel Comics, 1998–99

25. The Sinestro Corps War — DC Comics, 2007

26. Infinity Gauntlet — Marvel Comics, 1991

27. The New Frontier — DC Comics, 2004

28. Winter Soldier — Marvel Comics, 2005

29. The Man of Steel — DC Comics, 1986

30. Life as a Weapon — Marvel Comics, 2012–13

31. The Elektra Saga — Marvel Comics, 1981–83

32. Batman R.I.P. — DC Comics, 2008

33. Return of Barry Allen — DC Comics, 1993

34. The Death of Gwen Stacy — Marvel Comics, 1973

35. The Surtur Saga — Marvel Comics, 1985

36. Under Siege — Marvel Comics, 1986–87

37. Dangerous Habits — DC/Vertigo, 1991–92

38. Rock of Ages — DC Comics, 1997

39. Who is the Fourth Man? — DC/Wildstorm, 1999

40. The Golden Age — DC Comics, 1993–94

41. House of X — Marvel Comics, 2019

42. Wolverine — Marvel Comics, 1982

43. Saga, Volume 1 — Image Comics, 2012

44. American Gothic — DC Comics, 1985–87

45. Mister Miracle — DC Comics, 2017–18

46. Secret Wars (2015) — Marvel Comics, 2015–16

47. Annihilation — Marvel Comics, 2006

48. The Eternity Saga — Marvel Comics, 1963–65

49. Squadron Supreme — Marvel Comics, 1985–86

50. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 1 — DC Comics, 1999–2000

51. The Death of Superman — DC Comics, 1992–93

52. Kree/Skrull War — Marvel Comics, 1971–72

53. The Court of Owls — DC Comics, 2011–12

54. Welcome Back, Frank — Marvel Comics, 2000

55. Planet Hulk — Marvel Comics, 2006–07

56. Confession — Homage/DC, 1996–97

57. Grand Guignol — DC Comics, 2000–01

58. Runaways Volume 1 — Marvel Comics, 2003–04

59. Secret Wars (1984) — Marvel Comics, 1984–85

60. The Death of Jean DeWolff — Marvel Comics, 1985

61. Tower of Babel — DC Comics, 2000

62. E is for Extinction — Marvel Comics, 2001

63. Woman of Tomorrow — DC Comics, 2021

64. From Hell — Kitchen Sink Press, 1991–96

65. Red Son — DC Comics, 2003

66. Deus ex Machina — DC Comics, 1989–90

67. The Age of Apocalypse — Marvel Comics, 1995

68. We3 — DC/Vertigo, 2004–05

69. Ultron Unlimited — Marvel Comics, 1999–2000

70. Hush — DC Comics, 2002–03

71. The Korvac Saga — Marvel Comics, 1977–78

72. House of M — Marvel Comics, 2005

73. The Man Without Fear — Marvel Comics, 1993–94

74. Anatomy Lesson — DC Comics, 1984

75. Mutant Massacre — Marvel Comics, 1986

76. Olympus — Eclipse Comics, 1985–86

77. New World Order — DC Comics, 1997

78. Church and State — Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1984–88

79. The Magus Saga — Marvel Comics, 1975

80. The Governor Saga — Image Comics, 2004–06

81. Old Man Logan — Marvel Comics, 2008–09

82. Knightfall — DC Comics, 1993

83. The Death of Speedy — Fantagraphics, 1987

84. First Tale of the Demon — DC Comics, 1971–73

85. Identity Crisis — DC Comics, 2004

86. Little Worse than a Man, Little Better than a Beast — Marvel Comics, 2015–16

87. Weapon X — Marvel Comics, 1991

88. Robots in Disguise — Image Comics, 2024

89. Final Crisis — DC Comics, 2008–09

90. The Kindly Ones — DC/Vertigo, 1994–95

91. The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck — Gladstone Publishing, 1992–94

92. High Society — Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1982–84

93. The Zoo — DC Comics, 2024–25

94. The Great Cow Race — Cartoon Books, 1993

95. Superman for All Seasons — DC Comics, 1998

96. Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Boy on Earth — Fantagraphics, 1993–2000

97. Demon Bear Saga — Marvel Comics, 1984

98. Blood of Palomar — Fantagraphics, 1987–88

99. Future Imperfect — Marvel Comics, 1992–93

100. The Last Iron Fist Story — Marvel Comics, 2007–08

After two years of conversations about comics and generative Ai there is something in the book that absolutely everyone consistently circled around. Artists, academics, union reps, futures designers, working writers, people who couldn’t be more different in background or temperament, and they all end up saying a version of the same thing, and usually with a particular kind of quiet anger that has nowhere obvious to go. What worries them most isn’t the technology, it’s what we’re teaching a generation of young people to believe about the act of making something.

Speak to the tech companies and they already have a tidy answer for that worry. Mira Murati, then Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, gave it with practised calm in a public interview a couple of years ago; Ai would be “a collaborative tool,” she said, and then added that some creative jobs “maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” Not cruel exactly, just breezy. The kind of casual moral inversion that reframes harm as inevitability and inevitability as improvement, the same rhetorical move that once dressed up factory closures as modernisation and gig economy exploitation as flexibility. Sam Altman, around the same time, told a room of marketers that ninety-five percent of what creative professionals do would soon be handled by Ai, nearly instantly, at almost no cost. Not augmented. Not assisted. Handled. Both of them said it with the same casual certainty, no acknowledgement of the lives inside those percentages, just a future described as though it were already settled.

The money follows the rhetoric with generative Ai companies raising $56 billion from venture capital by 2024 alone, and the companies spending it are not experimenting. They’re building infrastructure. The people designing these systems, as I put it in the book, are not artists or writers in any meaningful sense, they are product managers and growth hackers who looked at the act of creation and saw an underperforming system. The very slowness that makes art worth anything, the days spent thumbnailing, the panel that takes forty attempts before it breathes, the drawing hand that takes years to learn to listen, was reframed as a bottleneck, an inefficiency, and a problem to be solved.

Viraj Joshi has spent his career on the fault line between those two worlds. He is a futures designer, a Design Lead, a visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College, and the cartoonist behind Eliza, The Ghost in Every Machine. He understands the language of innovation well enough to see where it starts lying to itself, which is what makes his view on the young so uncomfortable. When I asked him what it means for people growing up in a world where creative output appears increasingly frictionless, his answer was immediate: it scares him. Not because creativity disappears, he said, but because the process that builds it is being quietly bypassed, flooding the world with work that carries no lived experience, no repetition, no persistence, and in doing so teaches the wrong lesson entirely; that the destination matters more than the journey, when the journey is precisely the thing that teaches you how to mean what you make. He went further too, pointing to what he calls the real risk: not that machines copy us particularly well, but that they flood the culture with convincing emptiness until the signal of human intention becomes harder and harder to hear beneath the synthetic noise.

Torunn Grønbekk, who has written Thor, The Punisher and Red Sonja, CatWoman and many more, came to the same conclusion from a direction that makes it harder to dismiss. Before any of that comic book career mode she was a teenage coder and hacker, someone who grew up in the Demoscene, those computer parties where teenagers hauled CRT monitors into rooms and competed to squeeze impossible animations from underpowered machines, who then went on to build and sell a tech company in Norway. She is not a nostalgist and she knows it, which is why when she says generative Ai for art is a problem she isn’t reaching for a simpler past she half-remembers. Her daughter, she told me, had heard someone mention the ten thousand hours idea and promptly sat down and started grinding; four hours a day, drawing by hand, because she’d decided that was simply how long it takes to get good. What struck Torunn wasn’t the discipline, impressive as it was, it was that her daughter had understood something instinctively that the tech industry is quietly working to make feel optional: the doing is the learning, and any tool that removes the doing also removes what the doing was supposed to build.

The science is starting to catch up with what we’ve been feeling in our bones, and a study out of MIT’s Media Lab, published earlier this year, used EEG brain monitoring to track what happens neurologically when people write with the help of Ai tools over a sustained period. The findings were bracing. Participants who relied on Ai assistance consistently showed weaker brain connectivity and worse learning outcomes across neural, linguistic, and behavioural measures over four months. The researchers coined a term for it: cognitive debt. The idea being that we borrow mental effort from our future selves at a cost, with neural connectivity dropping, memory declining, and users struggling to recall or reflect on their own work. Crucially, self-reported ownership of essays was lowest in the Ai group and highest in those who wrote without assistance, with Ai users also struggling to accurately quote their own work. Meanwhile, a separate study by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University, surveying 319 knowledge workers, found a parallel pattern: the more humans leaned on Ai tools to complete tasks, the less critical thinking they did, making it more difficult to call upon those skills when they were needed. The researchers noted particular concern about younger users, finding a strong negative correlation between Ai tool usage and critical thinking skills, with younger users exhibiting higher dependence and consequently lower cognitive performance scores. And a December 2024 study in the British Journal of Educational Technology warned of what it called “metacognitive laziness,” where ChatGPT use risks shifting thinking and problem-solving away from students; the group using it produced the highest-quality essays but showed no gains in learning, motivation, or interest.

None of that surprises Dr Julia Round, who has spent more than twenty-five years studying comics as a legitimate cultural form, building degree programmes at Bournemouth University and co-founding the first academic journal dedicated to the medium. She sees the same pattern every semester, when she asks literature students to make short comics as a way of breaking stories into visual beats, forcing them to think spatially and emotionally at once. Students who write paragraphs with ease freeze the moment they have to draw. Not because they lack ability, but because they’ve already absorbed the cultural message that struggling with something is evidence you’re not cut out for it, rather than evidence that the education is actually happening. Students lean on Ai for any part of the process that feels overwhelming, she told me, and far more of it is fear than convenience. Fear of not being good enough, of failing in front of peers, of expectations they have no time to meet. And because formal education has mostly treated Ai as contraband rather than a subject requiring critical examination, all of that is being figured out in the dark, with no framework for understanding what’s being traded away.

Where does it all lead us? Lesley Gannon, Deputy General Secretary of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, named what’s being traded away with a precision I couldn’t have put better myself. “We are seeing bits of every process being hollowed out,” she tole me. “The development journey is being cut off. If the low-level work is being done by a machine, where are people getting to develop their skills to move on up?” Follow that question to its conclusion and the answer is uncomfortable: no entry level means no mid level, no mid level means no future masters, and what you lose isn’t just individual careers but the entire generational chain through which knowledge travels. In comics that chain was never formal. It was tracing Kevin Maguire’s faces until your hand finally understood why the expressions worked. It was copying your top five influences until your own instincts started showing through the seams. It was a fat envelope from Pat Mills landing on a young artist’s doormat, a dog-eared newspaper clipping inside, a note saying this might help. None of that is a prompt. None of it is learnable by inference. It was transmission, human and specific and irreplaceable, and once the entry level disappears, so does the chain that runs upward from it.

The school system softened young people up for this long before the platforms arrived, and I’m still furious about it. Five years ago, the current GCSE generation was told, by governments cheerfully following a Silicon Valley script, to stop drawing and start coding; art got dropped, drama rooms fell quiet, sketchbooks were put away in favour of Python, the supposedly safe skill the machines couldn’t touch. Then the machines got very good at code too, and those teenagers found themselves holding qualifications for a path already closing, having surrendered not just the arts but the belief that developing any skill deeply was a bet worth placing. The bait and switch left an entire cohort persuaded, before they’d even started, that the effort of becoming genuinely good at something carries no guarantee, and that whatever edge you develop, a tool will soon smooth it away.

Into that specific wound steps generative Ai, polished and cheerful, trailing the language of access and inclusion, and the Lumi launch is the clearest example I found. Colin Kaepernick’s Ai comics platform was sold to Portland Public Schools as an “Ai literacy programme,” with local news running warm pieces about teachers “meeting students where they are, on screens,” and the website promising “instant comics” and the chance to “free creators from technical constraints.” What it didn’t advertise was the lesson actually being taught: that creativity is a process of iteration, error, and persistence, or that it’s something you automate if you just feed the machine enough examples of other people’s imagination, scraped without asking them. The so-called democratisation was powered by datasets built from the labour of the people being displaced. The gate wasn’t being opened. It was being replaced with a wall painted to look like a door.

Drawn to Extinction includes a passage I wrote after visiting art college lecturers who described something that freaked me out, a lot: an eighteen-year-old asking, quite seriously, whether their art was still valid if it took them a week to finish a page when Ai could produce something similar in ten seconds. They were looking for permission. For reassurance that their slowness wasn’t failure. That student isn’t an outlier. Patrick Goddard, who has drawn Judge Dredd and long runs for 2000AD, describes learning to draw as a process of copying his top five artists until his own instincts started bleeding through, of filling sketchbooks badly and obsessively until the bad pages started teaching him more than any tutorial could. He calls it being the honest kind of thief, stealing with gratitude. Midjourney doesn’t steal with gratitude. It doesn’t steal with anything. It has no voice to find and no gratitude to feel, and when we hand it to seventeen-year-olds and call it empowerment, we are not democratising creativity, we are selling them the ghost of it.

What we have built, without quite meaning to, is an environment where slowness feels like failure, where the thousand bad pages are an embarrassment rather than the curriculum, and where an entire generation is opting out of the grind before they’ve had the chance to discover what the grind was actually for. Torunn puts the stakes plainly: “the erosion of awe, of difficulty, of the sense that some things are worth struggling for.” Julia Round puts the same thought differently: the young creator who might never discover their voice because an algorithm handed them a borrowed one. Not a dramatic collapse. A slow substitution, happening in classrooms and Discord servers and on Clip Studio, without ceremony, one frictionless prompt at a time.

The book I spent two years writing is about comics specifically, because comics felt the pressure first; small enough and human enough to name what’s happening while it’s still happening. But the mine runs under everything, under music, fiction, design, film, and education itself, because the machine doesn’t dream, it replicates and forges, and a generation raised on replication, never having ground through the bad pages, never having sat in the room when no one was watching and kept going anyway, will inherit a world full of content and empty of makers; performing like genius, thinking like autocomplete, and finding out too late that no one taught them how to fix anything when the prompt misfires and the update doesn’t come and the only tool they were ever given turns out not to have been theirs at all.

Drawn to Extinction: Comics, Craft, and the Battle for Originality in the Age of Ai is available now directly from my website, or via Amazon.

Sources:

1. Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X-H., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I., & Maes, P. (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.08872. Please note as of June 2025 when it was uploaded, the paper had not yet been peer-reviewed, and the MIT Media Lab page notes that explicitly. The researchers themselves flag it as preliminary.

2. Lee, H-P., Sarkar, A., Tankelevitch, L., Drosos, I., Rintel, S., Banks, R., & Wilson, N. (2025). The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25), Yokohama, Japan.

3. Fan, Y., Tang, L., Le, H., Shen, K., Tan, S., Zhao, Y., Shen, Y., Li, X., & Gašević, D. (2025). Beware of metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative artificial intelligence on learning motivation, processes, and performance. British Journal of Educational Technology, 56, 489–530. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13544

In 1923, a cartoonist named H.T. Webster sat down at a drawing table somewhere in New York and drew a picture of a machine that would put him out of a job. He called it the Cartoon Dynamo (Pat. 2023), gave it an Idea Dynamo for a brain, a tank of ink for blood, and a drawing arm that could produce daily strips and Sunday pages without complaint, without coffee, without the particular human inconvenience of having somewhere more interesting to be. The man in the cartoon stands to one side, telephone to his ear, already making plans for a salmon fishing trip with Frank, while the machine does what he used to do.

At the bottom of the frame, Webster wrote the caption: In the year 2023, when all our work is done by electricity.

He drew it as a joke for the New York World, one of the great American newspapers of the era, where readers would have found it funny in the way that absurdist futures always feel funny from the safe distance of a hundred years. Of course nobody was going to build a machine that drew cartoons. The very idea was ridiculous. A machine couldn’t have ideas. It couldn’t have instincts. It couldn’t find the thing that was quietly funny about a suburban marriage, or a put-upon office worker, or the particular humiliation of a man outwitted by his own dog. Webster knew that better than anyone. He had built a career on exactly those instincts, winning a Pulitzer Prize and syndicating his work across the country, most famously through a recurring character called the Timid Soul, a mild, bespectacled everyman crushed gently but repeatedly by the indignities of modern life.

The Timid Soul would have understood what happened next.

Because in 2023, the actual year in Webster’s joke, tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion arrived in full public force. Anyone with a keyboard could now type a description and receive an image in seconds, rendered in any style you cared to name, including the styles of living artists who had spent decades developing them. The Cartoon Dynamo was no longer a punchline. It was a product. It had a freemium tier.

Webster saw it coming, not as prophecy, because he didn’t see it coming at all, that’s rather the point. He was satirising the anxieties of industrial modernity, the creeping fear in the 1920s that machines were coming for every category of human labour, including the creative ones. The cartoon is funny because the anxiety is real, and the relief is that surely, surely, the artists were safe. A machine could replace a riveter. A machine could replace a telephone operator. But a cartoonist? The one whose job is to notice what’s quietly absurd about being alive and translate it into six panels? No. That required something the machine couldn’t be given.

And then it was given it.

Or at least, something that looks enough like it to have disrupted an industry. Whether generative Ai actually creates, whether it has anything resembling imagination rather than an extraordinarily sophisticated pattern-matching engine, is a conversation worth having at length. What isn’t in dispute is the effect. Illustrators, comic artists, animators and cartoonists are watching their commissions dry up, their styles scraped and replicated without consent, their years of accumulated craft treated as training data for systems that will undercut them on price to clients who can no longer tell the difference, or have decided they no longer need to.

Webster drew the joke, and the joke took a hundred years to land, and now the cartoonist in the frame isn’t standing to one side making fishing plans. He’s standing in an unemployment queue, holding a portfolio that nobody is asking to see.

There’s something else in the cartoon that snagged me the moment I first saw it. Look at the man on the telephone. He’s cheerful. Relaxed. Completely unbothered by the machine drawing away beside him. In his version of 2023, the Cartoon Dynamo is a convenience, something that frees him up for the good parts of life, the salmon fishing, the lunch with Frank, the leisure that automation was always supposed to deliver. He’s not worried, because in 1923, the story of automation was still a story about liberation. Machines would do the drudgery. Humans would flourish.

We got a rather different version.

What we got was automation that came for the interesting work first, because interesting work turned out to be the most legible to a machine trained on culture. The drudgery, the form-filling, the spreadsheet maintenance, still requires human oversight. The art, the writing, the illustration, the music: that’s the stuff the systems got good at generating something resembling, quickly enough to flood the market.

Webster’s cartoon, for all its warmth and wit, is a document of misplaced confidence. The confidence that creative labour was the last safe harbour. The confidence that a machine couldn’t have the thing that made the work worth making. That confidence was entirely reasonable in 1923. It’s a little harder to maintain now.

I’ve spent the last two years talking to comic book writers, artists and industry figures about exactly this, about what it means when the thing you’ve dedicated your working life to mastering becomes something a machine can approximate in thirty seconds, and what, if anything, can be done about it. The conversations were sometimes angry, sometimes grieving, occasionally darkly funny in ways Webster would probably have appreciated. What they were never was simple.

Because the story isn’t simply that the machines have won, or that human creativity is finished, or that we should all update our CVs for roles in Ai prompt engineering. The story is more interesting and more difficult than that. It’s about what we decide to value. About who benefits when creative labour is automated and who pays the price. About whether the speed and scale of generative tools actually enriches culture or whether it floods it with something that looks like culture, replicates its surface and patterns, but carries none of the weight that made it matter in the first place.

The machine doesn’t dream. It replicates. And in that difference is the whole reason this conversation is worth having.

Webster knew the joke. He drew it in ink, with his own hand, at a table in New York, in 1923, and the punchline arrived a century later in a form he couldn’t have predicted and almost certainly wouldn’t have found funny. The Timid Soul, I think, would have recognised the feeling. That particular modern sensation of watching something you were absolutely certain couldn’t happen, happen, with the smooth inevitability of a thing that was always going to happen, and nobody being quite sure what to do next.

These questions are at the heart of Drawn to Extinction: Comics, Craft, and the Battle for Originality in the Age of Ai, my new book built on two years of conversations with some of the most important voices in comics, from Dan Cornwell and John Wagner to Ram V, Hannah Berry and copyright specialist Jonathan Bailey. If this landed for you, the book is where the argument goes deeper.

Frazer Irving will tell you, with the quiet amusement of someone who has long since stopped needing to impress anyone, that your style is everything you do wrong. He attributes it to Jerry Garcia, loosely, the way you’d cite something that turned out to be true before you’d even properly verified it. He says it almost as an aside, leaning into a thought rather than landing a speech, which is exactly how Frazer tends to make his most useful points, and it unlocks something that the entire current argument about generative Ai and creative work seems determined to avoid.

He is talking about deadline pressure, and about the last hours on a page when perfection is off the table and all you can do is make decisions. What you choose to simplify. What you exaggerate. What you decide not to draw at all. Those choices, he says, are not flaws to be corrected, they are signatures forming in real time. “The pages people respond to most strongly are often the ones made under exactly those conditions, not the polished ones, but the ones where I stopped performing and just got the job done.” The contrariness in that observation is very Frazer. He has spent a career doing things the industry did not expect, from 2000AD to Batman and Robin to collaborations with Grant Morrison that pushed atmosphere and psychological unease into the mainstream without asking permission, and he has never described any of it as the result of getting things right.

What he is describing (though he would not put it this way) is authorship. The decisions you make when there is no time to second-guess them are the truest account of how you see. That is where the self leaks through, and it is also, not coincidentally, where the machines fall down.

One of Frazer’s sharpest observations about current Ai output is one of the simplest: “It is too good. Too consistent. Too evenly distributed in its attention across a page. It does not know where to be lazy.” Humans, by contrast, are constantly making value judgements, pouring effort into faces and hands and letting backgrounds dissolve, implying rather than stating, trusting the reader to meet them halfway. That trust is the foundation of comics as a medium, and it lives in the decision about what to leave out rather than what to put in. He comes back to the gutter, the space between panels where the reader’s brain does the real work, time, motion, emotion, all of it happening in the gap. Films show you everything. Comics make you imagine it. Remove that absence and you do not improve the medium. You destroy its participation.

He jokes that if someone truly wanted machine-made art to feel human, they would have to work incredibly hard to fake mistakes, to introduce awkwardness and inconsistency and hesitation. And once you are doing that, you have already conceded the argument. You have admitted that imperfection is the point.

When I speak to Ram V he arrives at the same place from a different direction. He came to comics as a chemical engineer who found his way to San Diego’s green rooms by making work people wanted, not by clocking decades in a queue. He thinks about the industry architecturally, about structures and succession and what happens when you remove a load-bearing wall. He is five out of ten on the fear scale, he will tell you, and he means it, the art form will outlast the software, something feral always survives in the corner refusing to be replaced. But the middle worries him considerably more than the peaks.

“People talk about Ai like it democratises the workforce,” he said, and then he took the word apart. Democratisation only means something if the person making the thing is the one who benefits. If the machines strip value from the middle, the place where most of us work and most of the culture actually gets made, then what we are calling democratisation is erasure. The Otomos and the Moores will command attention regardless. The people on the rungs below them will find the ladder pulled away.

The on-ramp is what concerns him most, because most of us begin by copying someone we love, spending years sounding like someone else while our own voice surfaces underneath the imitation. A thousand hours used to be the price of entry, but if a prompt hands you a pass, you never find out whether you wanted it enough to keep going when no one was watching. He has seen the party trick where someone feeds a model asking for a script in the style of Ram V. It formats like a professional, packages itself with confidence, tells you it has humanist concerns and a shadow leaning toward horror. It understands the brochure of a story, not the story. He is not naive about how good the fine-tuning will get. The danger, he said, is “Not that it cannot copy him. It is that copying him freezes him.” A model learns a snapshot of a voice. The answer is evolution. Change outfits. Move the key while they are still clapping for the last song.

Then he told me the story about Otomo.

One of Katsuhiro Otomo’s assistants watched him ink the black dome that swallows Neo-Tokyo in Akira. It is, at its most reduced, just a shape. A mass of dark. You could achieve something functionally identical with a bucket fill and be done in seconds. Otomo crosshatched every square millimetre by hand until there was no white left. When his assistant asked why, he said: “There are a billion people dying under that dome. I have to count.”

That is the thing the current conversation about generative Ai almost completely fails to account for. Not the output. The reason. The moral weight carried inside a gesture that, to any outside observer, looks like a grown man filling in a circle with a pen. Software will never count the dead inside a gesture. It can fake the pattern. It cannot fake the reason.

Frazer would recognise that instinct immediately as he talks with me about legacy, about what happens when great artists are gone and there will never be another piece of work from their hand. He imagines a future where technology might preserve not just an artist’s output but their way of thinking, not through indiscriminate scraping, but through something focused, intentional, and consented to. He references a science fiction story about a headset that lets someone paint like a legendary artist by downloading their mind, with the catch that the user starts to inherit the artist’s madness alongside the technique. He laughs at that, but the point lands. Art is not separable from neurosis, instinct, obsession, and failure. Any system that pretends otherwise is lying to itself.

What he does see as genuinely useful is something narrower and more honest than the current pitch. Not a general model trained on everyone’s work without asking, but a personal tool trained on you. Your taste, your decisions, your mistakes. Something that reduces the grind while leaving judgement, meaning, and authorship intact. An assistant, not an author. The history of art is full of workshop models, Renaissance studios, Japanese manga production houses, teams built around a central vision. The ethical version of this future looks like that. The machine serves the artist. Not the other way around.

Ram would add that the punk side of comics has never needed anyone’s permission to survive. Pen, paper, stapler. A table at a con. A room in Yorkshire. He thinks a second indie boom is possible, driven by the artefacts of real work, the messy notebooks, the scratched margins, the flaws that carry fingerprints. Scarcity will do what ethics has failed to do. The work that refuses the machine will become more precious for its refusal. It is not the victory either of us wanted. But it is, as he put it, a map on how we might walk toward a logical conclusion.

What these two conversations share is not a position on Ai so much as a shared understanding of what craft actually is. Frazer approaches it through process, through the mark and the decision and the error that becomes a signature. Ram approaches it through structure, through the ladder of succession and what the industry loses when the middle collapses. But they converge on the same point. That what generative Ai threatens is not output. The machines can produce output indefinitely. What they threaten is the long, costly, necessary process through which a person becomes themselves, the accumulated wrong turns that eventually add up to a voice no one else has.

Otomo counting the dead inside a dome of ink. Frazer making a deadline decision that leaves a background unfinished and trusts the reader to complete it. Ram writing the draft that still sounds like someone else, because the next one will finally sound like him.

None of that is efficient. None of it can be prompted. All of it is what the work actually is.

The machine will learn to fill the black fast. The rest of us will have to count the bodies under the dome.

Drawn to Extinction is out now. If any of this landed, the book goes much deeper, into the voices, the history, the law, and the people holding the line. You can find it at your local independent bookshop, on Amazon, or at comicvault.cc.

It never fails to surprise me that the most imaginative industry in the world ended up being such a masterclass in creative dispossession. Comics and graphic storytelling were built by dreamers, by people who drew gods and monsters in rented flats and at kitchen tables, who poured their entire visual vocabulary into characters that would outlive them by decades.

...but at some point in the 60s and 70s the contracts arrived. Small print, written in ink that bled real slow.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in a Cleveland apartment in the 1930s and sold the rights for a few hundred dollars. Within a few years he was a cultural icon, plastered across radio, lunchboxes, and newspapers across the world. The two young men who gave him breath were left behind, financially, legally, and emotionally, watching from the margins as the character they invented became one of the most monetised figures in human history. Jack Kirby co-created the Marvel universe, drew Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the New Gods, and died still fighting for his legacy. His style was so distinctive you could identify it at a glance, and it is also now one of the most frequently mimicked by Ai models (or rather the people using them). Steve Gerber, who co-created Howard the Duck, put it plainly: “What I created belonged to them. That’s how it was. You invented a character, gave it breath, soul, words, and they just took it like it was a coffee mug on a desk.” Alan Moore eventually refused credit on the film adaptations of his own work, not out of bitterness but out of protest, the only form left to him after watching Watchmen become a perennial moneymaker for DC despite a deal that promised the rights would revert to him once it went out of print. “They offered us a deal where, once the book went out of print, rights would revert to us,” he said. “What they didn’t tell us was that it would never go out of print. That’s the trick, isn’t it? Keep it alive, keep it selling, and you never have to give it back.”

Work-for-hire was the legal mechanism behind all of it. Professional, tidy, but only on the surface, the reality is it was always s contractual guillotine in practice. Under work-for-hire, the moment a writer typed the first line of dialogue or an artist inked the first panel, they were doing it not for themselves but for the company. Ownership, rights, residuals, all of it vanished the second the cheque cleared. The industry ran on output not ownership, and it made sure creators stayed hungry enough to need the next assignment.

This is not ancient history, and it is the architecture that the Generative Ai era has walked straight into.

I’ve been sitting with that thought across two years of conversations with artists, writers, lawyers, union reps, lecturers, and a few gleeful Ai evangelists who genuinely believe this is all just a new kind of art school for people who can’t draw.

Throughout all the geek chats, there were two people I kept coming back to; The incredibly generous Jonathan Bailey, who runs Plagiarism Today and who has spent twenty years swimming in copyright cases while the rest of us argued about fictional fistfights on social media, and Lesley Gannon, Deputy General Secretary of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. Someone who is either in the room when creative rights are being argued in Parliament or preparing the people who are.

I owe them both a huge debt of gratitude because they both ended up describing the same thing from different ends of the line.

I started where I always start; with the feeling. The thing artists struggle to name but can’t stop returning to. When I told Jonathan about a night in Enniskillen, a pub, the moment the warmth in the room curdled the second I mentioned I worked ‘in Ai‘ to a comic book illustrator. He smiled in the tired way of someone who’s fielded this too many times but still cares enough to answer properly.

“My default position,” he said, “is to support human creators, human authors. Support the humans, whatever that entails.”

Lesley put the same instinct in different language. “What I’m hearing across the industry is enormous concern, with the bottom line being whether people are going to be able to stay in the industry at all.”

Neither of them is anti-technology. Both of them grew up building careers inside the same internet now being used against their respective audiences, and that matters because the argument that’s most often levelled at people like them (and now me, bizarrely - if you’re a social media warrior, at least do your homework!) is that they’re just afraid of change, that this is nostalgia dressed up as ethics, collapses the moment you actually talk to them. Jonathan was in journalism school when Napster hit, sitting in ethics classes hearing one thing about copyright while the world outside behaved very differently. He’s watched the same movie play out several times now. “The joke,” he said, “is that copyright was never meant to be understood by normal people. It was aimed at the gatekeepers. Publishers. Record labels. Film studios. You, taping an episode off the TV, simply did not matter at the scale the law cared about.”

The internet changed that, and generative Ai has changed it again, more profoundly, because it’s not just about distributing existing work. It’s about feeding that work into a machine and asking it to produce something new in the style of the person who made it. “For centuries,” Jonathan said, “you could unintentionally infringe and never be worth suing. Now anyone can type ‘give me an image in the style of Studio Ghibli’ and instantly broadcast what comes out. You’ve gone from a private experiment to a derivative work with a potential audience of millions, in about thirty seconds.”

I told him I was tired of people pretending the software had agency. That the creators of it “don’t know what it’s doing,” as if that absolved the board and the CEO and the engineers who made deliberate decisions about what to feed it. He nodded and reached back to the Grokster ruling, the post-Napster file-sharing service that tried to claim it was a neutral middleman. The Supreme Court didn’t buy it, because Grokster had actively marketed itself as the new Napster and promoted the behaviour. They were found liable for inducing infringement. The parallel to Ai companies celebrating outputs “in the style of” specific artists, or publicly announcing the replacement of human staff with software is not subtle.

But what landed hardest wasn’t the legal theory, it was something simpler; “We had an informal deal with the early web,” Jonathan said. “Let Google crawl your site and you’d get traffic back. They take value, you get value. It felt like a fair-ish exchange, or at least a tolerable one.” Now those same bots have scraped the same sites into Ai models, and there’s no return path. The machine ate the content and keeps readers inside its own answer box rather than driving them back to the source. “It feels like content was used,” he said, “and nothing was given back. No licensing, no fees, no traffic. Just extraction.”

That’s what betrayal means in this context. It’s not dramatic, it’s transactional. Creators didn’t get a vote, and their pages were bundled into someone else’s training data and monetised without a conversation or consent.

Lesley took that feeling and gave it its structural shape. She told me the issue isn’t only the headline threat of replacement, though she’s clear that is very real, it’s what she called the hollowing. Not destruction, not an overnight collapse, but a gradual excavation of everything that makes a creative career possible. “If the low-level work is being done by a machine,” she said, “where are people getting to develop their skills to move on up?” No entry level means no mid level. No mid level means no future masters of the craft. You lose not only individual livelihoods but the entire generational chain through which technique gets passed, hand to hand, across decades. In comics, that chain is everything. It’s how the medium reproduces itself.

Don’t move on with this article... sit with that last paragraph for a minute because it is PROFOUND. It’s also part of the business model that MidJourney, OpenAi, HeyGen etc etc, are all literally banking on.

She’d already seen the numbers that unsettled me most. Working-class creatives as a proportion of the industry have halved since the 1970s, and they were only fourteen per cent then. Now they’re in single digits, and whenever there’s economic constriction, minoritised writers, women, writers of colour, disabled writers, those outside the major cities, they do worse. Unregulated Ai doesn’t merely perpetuate that bias, it intensifies it. The limited, skewed history of the medium gets fed back into the next fifty years of output with sharper edges. “It changes who believes they can enter the industry at all,” she said.

I told them both something that had rattled me; That recent modelling suggests synthetic content now outnumbers human-created content online. Jonathan looked at it as a legal problem, the point at which the cultural record becomes unreliable, contested, impossible to untangle. Lesley just went quiet for a moment and said, “Wow.” Not performatively, it was the sound of someone who spends her life weighing risk realising the scale had already tipped.

But then she said something that genuinely surprised me. “Ai has done something almost no other issue has managed; it has brought all creators together. Photographers, painters, writers, performers. One voice across all forms.” The cross-union collaborations, the shared statements emerging from disciplines that once stayed in their own lanes. For once it’s not a case of competing agendas, and Jonathan agreed. The clarity, he said, was unusual. Everyone knows what’s being taken, even if the law hasn’t caught up to naming it yet.

“Prohibiting ‘in the style of’ prompts,” Lesley concluded, “will be a major battleground. For writers. For actors. For illustrators. Anyone whose voice can be mimicked. It is the line between homage and theft.”

Here is what strikes me after learning so much about all of it from people like Jonathan and Lesley; The comics industry spent decades building a system that stripped its creators of ownership, dignity, and legacy. Not always maliciously, often just through the logic of an industry that ran on output and treated creativity as a renewable resource. But the consequences were real, and creators who drew gods they didn’t own, writers who invented mythologies and watched them become products, whole careers dissolved into corporate balance sheets.

You can extract the word ‘Comics’ from that and replace it with any creative space where craft has now been viewed as a commodity.

The Ai era did not invent that system, it inherited it. Every work-for-hire clause, every unsigned artist, every character legally owned by a publisher who never held a pencil, all of it became the infrastructure through which the machines moved without resistance. The art was made by humans, the rights were handed to corporations. The machines watched, learned, and copied.

What we are watching in the courtrooms and the guild offices and the convention back rooms is not purely a story about technology. It is the same story the industry has been telling since Jerry Siegel signed a piece of paper and the world got Superman and he got nothing. The machine didn’t need to break down the door. It was already open.

The question now is whether we are going to stand in the doorway.

Drawn to Extinction is out now. If any of this landed, the book goes much deeper, into the voices, the history, the law, and the people holding the line. You can find it at your local independent bookshop, on Amazon, or directly from me, here.

So as a piece of arithmetic, much of this has been a failure. The savings were a mirage. The work didn’t vanish; it shifted, got messier, and demanded exactly the kind of human judgement nobody had bothered to account for.

But I don’t want to talk about the arithmetic, because the arithmetic, however badly it’s been done, is the least of it.

The thing the spreadsheet can’t see

When a company makes an Ai-driven layoff, it performs a particular kind of conceptual sleight of hand. It takes a person, with a career, a craft, a history of decisions made well, a sense of being good at something, and converts them into a line item. A cost. A variable in an equation that, as we now know, most of the people running it didn’t fully understand.

And then, months later, when the equation breaks, it converts them back.

We talk about this as though it were a logistics problem. A planning error. An over-correction to be quietly walked back. But sit with what it actually is for the person on the other end. You were told, in the clearest possible institutional language, that your contribution could be automated away. That what you did, the thing you’d spent years getting good at, was a rounding error a piece of software could absorb, and then you were told, just as clearly if rather more sheepishly, that actually, no, they needed you after all.

You can rehire a role. You cannot so easily rehire someone’s belief that their work mattered. That damage doesn’t show up in the cost model, because the cost model was never built to see it. It lands on self-esteem, on identity, on the quiet internal story a person tells themselves about whether they’re any good. It lands on mental health. It follows people home.

We have built a habit of making decisions about human beings using instruments that are constitutionally incapable of registering the human being, and then we act surprised when the consequences are human.

This is a design problem

I’ve spent my career arguing that design is, at its heart, the discipline of seeing the person behind the data point. Not the persona. Not the segment. Not the user-as-conversion-event. The actual person, with their context and their constraints and their dignity intact.

That’s not a soft skill. It’s the whole job. Good design refuses the abstraction that lets you optimise a system while quietly degrading the lives inside it. It insists on asking who is this for, and what does this do to them before asking how fast or how cheap.

Which is why the current moment is, for designers, both an enormous opportunity and a profound responsibility. We are watching organisations make decisions of exactly the kind design exists to interrogate: high-stakes, human-affecting decisions, made fast, made in fear, made on the basis of a capability nobody yet understands. The temptation is to treat Ai adoption as a pure efficiency exercise, a problem of cost, throughput and headcount. And efficiency, unexamined, has a way of becoming a euphemism for we stopped seeing the people.

The designerly instinct (sit with the ambiguity, ask the question before reaching for the solution, understand the problem properly before deciding how to solve it) is precisely the corrective this needs, not because designers are nobler than anyone else, but because we are trained to notice the cost that doesn’t appear on the invoice.

To the people making the cuts

If you’re a leader weighing one of these decisions, I’d ask you to hold two things at once.

The first is simple self-interest, and the data backs it: the cuts are frequently not saving what you think they’re saving. The institutional knowledge that walks out the door, the morale that quietly collapses, the customer trust that erodes, the contractors you hire to plug the gaps, the rehiring you’ll likely be doing in six months at a premium. None of that is in the headline saving. The boomerang isn’t a feel-good HR trend. It’s the sound of a miscalculation coming back.

The second is harder, and matters more. Every name on that list is a person whose sense of their own worth you are about to put your thumb on. You may need to make hard decisions; sometimes leaders genuinely do, but there is a vast difference between a hard decision made with clear eyes and full respect for the people it affects, and a panicked one made by treating those people as figures to be optimised away.

The first can be survived, by everyone. The second leaves marks.

Get under the skin, but don’t lose it

I keep coming back to a question a thoughtful designer asked recently: as this new capability arrives, what are you doing to get under the skin of it?

It’s the right question. We should be relentlessly curious about what these tools can and can’t do, where they fit, where they fall short, where the genuine partnership lies. I’m all for getting under the skin of the capability.

I just don’t think we can afford to lose the skin in the process. The people are not the inefficiency. They were never the inefficiency. They are the thing the whole enterprise exists to serve, and the thing it cannot, in the end, run without.

Don’t do things better, do better things, starting with how we treat the people we were so quick to reduce to numbers.

I explore the human cost of Generative Ai further in my new book, Drawn to Extinction, which digs into the mental health implications of Ai when it’s deployed as a tool for replacing people rather than working alongside them.

A team of researchers at Duke, led by a PhD student called Lucas Bellaiche, wanted to know something simple. Do people really prefer art made by humans over art made by machines, and if so, why? So they built a test. They gathered thirty paintings. They showed them to people, one at a time, and asked them to rate each one on four things. How much they liked it. How beautiful it was. How profound. How much it was worth. Every painting carried a little label telling you who made it. Human, or AI.

The results were exactly what you’d hoped for as people rated the human work higher. Not by a hair, either. A real, meaningful swing towards warmth, towards depth, towards worth. The human stuff moved people. The machine stuff left them colder. Score one for the species. We can still tell. There’s something in us that knows.

Except.

Every single painting in that experiment was made by a machine. All thirty. The “human” label and the “AI” label were shuffled and slapped on at random, like name tags at a party where nobody is who they say they are. There was not one human brushstroke in the entire study. The only human thing in the room was the lie on the label.

Sit with that for a second, because it’s doing something sneaky to everything you believe about your own taste.

People didn’t rate the art. They rated the story. Tell someone a person made this, and they find depth in it. Tell them a machine made the exact same image, and the depth evaporates. The pixels didn’t change. The thing that changed was what the viewer believed about the hours behind the image. The late nights they imagined. The ink-stained fingers they pictured. The lived-in human they assumed was on the other end of it, paying for this in some small way.

We don’t respond to the object. We respond to the imagined cost of making it.

And here is where it stops being a cute psychology result and starts being the most important sentence in this whole argument. The researchers cite an older study, one I can’t stop laughing at in a bleak sort of way. Give people Coca-Cola with the label on, and they enjoy it more than the identical Coke poured from an unlabelled cup. Same liquid. Same sugar. The brand does the tasting for you.

So that’s where we are. The thing we tell ourselves is sacred about art, the soul of it, the part no machine can touch, behaves in a lab like the logo on a fizzy drink. A context cue. A story we swallow before the first sip.

Now. The instinct is good. The loyalty is real. People want to value human effort, reach for it, defend it on pure gut feeling before they can even explain why. That subliminal pull towards human creation is the best thing we’ve got going for us. It might be the only firewall left between working artists and a future that has decided it can do without them.

But read the study the way the machine-builders are reading it. Because they are. Those “strong implications for marketing and branding” the authors mention? That’s not a footnote to them, that’s a roadmap. If preference lives in the label and not the canvas, then you don’t need to make better art. You need to manage the label. You need a generation that stops checking it. A generation raised on the feed, that never waited months for an artist’s next issue, never learned to recognise a particular penciller’s hand across decades, never built the loyalty in the first place because nobody ever taught them there was something there worth being loyal to.

If people stop expecting craft, they stop valuing it. And the study is the proof of concept, sitting right there in a peer-reviewed journal, that the valuing was always at least partly a story we could be told. Which means it’s a story we can be told out of.

That’s the part that should keep you up. Not that the machine can paint. We know it can paint. The frightening thing is that the experiment found the soul of art hiding not in the artist’s hand, but in your willingness to believe a hand was there at all. And belief, unlike a brushstroke, can be edited.

So the next time something stops you in your tracks, a page, a panel, a cover that dares you not to look away, check the label. Then check yourself. Ask whether you’d feel the same if the label flipped. Because somewhere, right now, someone is working very hard to make sure that one day you won’t bother looking, and won’t feel the difference when it’s gone.

The machine doesn’t dream. It replicates. The terrifying discovery is how much of the dreaming was happening on our side of the page all along.

Drawn to Extinction is officially out on 1st June 2026, with a foreword by Pat Mills. The Bellaiche study is real; the citation is below. If this rearranged something in your head, that’s the book doing its job, and the best thing you can do is hand it to someone who’s stopped checking the label.

Lucas Bellaiche et al., “Humans versus AI: whether and why we prefer human-created compared to AI-created artwork,” Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 8:42 (2023).

Kenny Who, by Cam Kennedy. Progs 477-479, 1986. © Copyright Rebellion

A young artist from the Caledonian Hab Zone, the future Scotland of Mega-City One’s twenty-first century, arrives in the big city with a portfolio under his arm. His name is Kenny Who?, the question mark part of the name, a private joke we will come back to in a moment. He has come south to pitch his work to Big 1, the city’s biggest trashzine, and he is the kind of artist anyone who has ever sat in a creative meeting will recognise instantly. He is naive. He is eager. He is convinced that the work will speak for itself, that if he can just get his portfolio in front of the right editor everything will fall into place, that the years of unpaid practice in the Cal-Hab tenement where he learned to draw will at last be acknowledged. Kennedy draws him with a kind of helpless dignity, a short man in his late thirties with red hair and earnest blue eyes, clutching a folder full of work he believes will change his life. The reader knows what is coming. Kenny does not.

He walks into the Big 1 offices. He hands his portfolio to the receptionist. She tells him to wait. He waits. He is eventually shown into the office of a senior editor, a fat, expensive-looking man behind a desk that costs more than Kenny will earn in his lifetime, and the editor flicks through the portfolio for perhaps thirty seconds. The verdict is brisk. The work does not cut the synthi-mustard. The style is not what Big 1 is looking for. Kenny is shown the door. He stands in the corridor for a long moment, his portfolio back in his hand, the rejection ringing in his ears, and then he does what working-class Scots have done for centuries when life has just kicked them in the teeth. He goes to find a pub.

He sits at the bar with a drink he cannot really afford, staring at the wood grain in front of him, trying to absorb the failure. The television above the counter is showing adverts, the usual flicker of consumer noise nobody pays any real attention to, and at some point Kenny looks up. What he sees on the screen is his own artwork. His linework. His colour. His style. A Big 1 advertisement, professionally produced, broadcast across Mega-City One, drawn unmistakably in the hand of the man sitting at the bar staring up at it. Kennedy gives this moment its own panel, an artist looking at his own work and not recognising the world he is standing inside, and it is one of the cleanest pieces of cartooning in the strip. The pint in front of him goes cold. The advert plays out. The slogan flashes. Nobody else in the bar notices anything is wrong.

Kenny goes back to the Big 1 offices. He demands to see the editor. He demands an explanation. The editor, when he finally agrees to receive him, gives one with the patient air of a man explaining a perfectly reasonable business arrangement to a slow child. In Mega-City One, in the twenty-first century, the editor tells him, human artists are no longer required. The machines can imitate any style perfectly. They do not need wages, holidays, contracts, sleep, or food. They never miss a deadline. They never argue about scripts. They never come into the office demanding to know where their royalties are. The machines have been producing comics in Kenny’s style for some time now, the editor explains, and the work has been performing extremely well in the trashzine market. Kenny’s art was already on the wall before he walked in the door, sold under Big 1‘s name, drawn by no one, and the editor seems genuinely puzzled that Kenny is upset about any of this. We didn’t steal your work, the editor says, with the bright reasonableness of someone who has rehearsed the line many times. We recreated it. Artists have been doing that since the dawn of time.

Kenny Who, by Cam Kennedy. Progs 477-479, 1986. © Copyright Rebellion

This is the line. This is the entire parable in a single piece of dialogue, set down by Wagner in 1986 and printed on cheap paper in a weekly British comic, and you can read it back now in the press release of any generative AI company you care to name. The argument has not changed in forty years. The line about recreation rather than theft. The casual appeal to art history as cover. The implicit suggestion that the artist objecting to the use of his own style is the unreasonable one in the conversation. The editor at Big 1 is not a science-fiction monster. The editor at Big 1 is a press release, a legal brief, a podcast interview with a tech founder, an op-ed in a serious magazine, a generation of comments under any artist’s social media post about generative AI. The dialogue Wagner gave him is the dialogue we have been receiving from the people building the machines that scrape our work without our consent. We didn’t steal it. We recreated it. It was wrong in 1986 and it is wrong in 2026, and the precision with which Wagner identified the lie before the technology even existed to tell it is the part of this strip that should keep every working artist awake at night.

Kenny does what any of us would do in that bar, with that television above the counter, and that bewildered hot rage rising in his chest. He goes back to the Big 1 offices, finds the machine that has been drawing in his style, and takes a fire axe to it. He smashes it to pieces. He destroys the chrome housings, the visible solenoids, the spindled mechanisms Kennedy drew with such loving comic-book exaggeration, and he does it with the kind of fury only an artist who has watched his own work being stolen in front of him can summon. The senior editor immediately phones the Judges. He reports, in the bleakest line of the whole strip, a murder of a great talent, by which he means the destruction of the equipment, not the slow erasure of the man holding the axe. The Judges arrive. Kenny is arrested for criminal damage. The machines, the ones that produce work in his style without his consent and without his payment, are characterised by the law as the victims. Kenny is sentenced to the iso-cubes, where he will sit for the duration of the next story while the work that bears his style continues to roll off the production line in the next room.

That is the first story. Wagner and Grant come back to the character in 1990, in the opening issues of the new Judge Dredd Megazine, in a sequel called Beyond Our Kenny that takes the parable somewhere even sharper. Kenny’s family travel south from the Cal-Hab to plead for his release. His wife is the wounded party, a woman who has watched her husband ruined by an industry that took his work and gave him nothing in return, and she sits in the offices of Big 1 and tries to make the case for him on the only ground she can think to stand on. She tells the editor that her husband is the creator. She tells him that Big 1 used his style without his agreement. She tells him that her husband has rights, that the work was his, that as the person who made the thing he ought to have some say in what is done with it. She is using the language we have all been taught to use when we talk about this. The language of authorship, of creation, of consent, of attribution, of the basic moral fact that the person who made a thing has some claim on it.

The editor pauses. He holds her gaze for a beat. Then he turns in his chair and opens the door to the adjoining office, where a row of grey men sit beside their mechanical drawing boxes producing the work that has stolen her husband’s career, and he calls through to them, cheerfully, Hey guys, get this, creators’ rights!

The entire room erupts. The laughter goes on for a panel and a half. Kennedy drew it with such care that you can almost hear it through the page, a wall of male hilarity, executives and middle managers and the men who programme the machines all laughing together at the suggestion that a person who made a thing has any right to it. The grey men in the next room laugh too. They are in on the joke. They have always been in on the joke. The wounded woman sits in her chair while a publishing company laughs at the suggestion that her husband’s creative work is his own, and Wagner and Grant put her there to make us watch it happen. They wanted us to see the face of the institution. They wanted us to hear the laughter. They wanted us to understand that the people who treat creative work as raw material do not consider the question of rights to be a serious question. They consider it a punchline.

This is the second piece of dialogue that should be printed in every working artist’s studio. Hey guys, get this, creators’ rights. It is not a hypothetical. It is the actual register, the actual tone, in which the question of creator consent is treated in every boardroom where the decision is made to train an algorithm on a body of work without the permission of the people who made it. The laughter is real. The laughter has been real all along. Wagner and Grant did not invent it for the strip. They put on the page what they had been hearing in the meetings, what every artist of their generation had been hearing in the meetings, what creators have been hearing in meetings since the comics industry first realised it could pay its artists a flat fee and keep the rest. The laughter at creators’ rights is the soundtrack of the industry. Kenny Who? simply made it visible.

Wagner and Grant then do something with the rest of Beyond Our Kenny that is the part of the strip nobody who cites it in passing ever seems to mention, and it is the part of the strip that ought to make any present-day tech evangelist deeply uncomfortable. The grey men in the next room keep producing their machine-drawn comics. A rival publisher, watching the saturated market, makes a gamble. They release a comic that is deliberately, ostentatiously, drawn by a human, with all the visible imperfections of an actual hand, the smudges and the off-register colour and the slight inconsistencies that no machine would ever produce. The market responds immediately. The slop loses its commodity value the instant readers discover that human-made work is the rarer product. Sales of the human-drawn comic explode. The publishers in their boardrooms, the same men who were laughing at creators’ rights a few panels ago, are now urgently demanding that Kenny be released from the iso-cubes because their competitors are eating their lunch with hand-drawn work, and they need a human artist they can put on the cover. The work that bore Kenny’s stolen style for months becomes worthless overnight. Scarcity creates premium. Premium creates margin. The publishers do not have any moral conversion. They have a commercial problem, and the solution is to remember, suddenly and loudly, that the human hand exists and might be worth something.

Wagner and Grant come back to Kenny one final time, in 2005, in a Megazine story called Who? Dares Wins. By this point Kenny is back in the Cal-Hab, in the blighted northern reaches of a country the future has forgotten, and he is still drawing. He is still working. He is still refusing to stop. What he has made now is a trashzine of his own, a strip he writes and draws and prints himself, starring a character called The Hoolie, a working-class hero who fights corrupt judges led by a recognisable thug named Judge Dread. The pages are crude by the standards of Big Meg production, hand-drawn and badly printed, none of the polished synthetic gloss the machines turn out in their thousands, and that is precisely why they catch on. The Hoolie becomes a sensation. The trashzine sells out of every black-market stall it reaches, passed hand to hand between readers who have grown sick of identical machine-generated dreck, and Kenny finds himself, for the first time in his life, commercially successful on his own terms. The Judges arrest him for defamation. He is dragged back to Mega-City One to face a sentence, defended in an appeal by Public Defender 314, his conviction overturned on technicalities, and he returns home to Cal-Hab to keep drawing. The work made by a person, sold by a person, refusing to disappear into the production line, will always find an audience if the audience is allowed to find it.

It helps to understand why the three of them were able to see all of this so clearly, and the answer is that they were not predicting anything. They were testifying. 1986 was the moment British comics broke open and the conditions that produced Kenny Who? were already burning around the men who made it. DC Comics had crossed the Atlantic with chequebooks raised and was hoovering up the talent that 2000AD had spent a decade training. The publishers in London, IPC and Fleetway, were being forced to look at their own contracts for the first time and discovering that the artists they had been treating as interchangeable hands had developed enough international leverage to walk out the door entirely. The talk in the convention bars, in the offices, in private letters and in increasingly public statements was about royalties, ownership, residuals, and the basic question of whether a creator owned anything of what they had made. Somewhere around that period John Wagner is said to have walked into the group editor’s office, dumped a heap of Judge Dredd merchandise on the desk, and observed flatly that he did not see a penny from any of it. He was not asking. He was reporting a condition. That same year, 2000AD hit prog 500, and the milestone was supposed to be a celebration. The editorial team invited the core creators to each contribute a page, and what they got instead was an inventory of grievances so candid that two of those pages, Mick McMahon’s and Brian Bolland’s, had to be redrawn before the issue could ship. Bolland was furious about the lack of royalties. McMahon characterised the artists tracing his style as bloodsuckers. The writers were angry. The artists were angrier. None of them had a union or a bargaining apparatus or any legal protection worth the name. What they had was the page, and so they used it, which is precisely what artists do when they have no other leverage; they put the protest into the craft, they make the work argue for them, and they trust that the work will outlive the meeting room where their grievances were ignored.

The title of the strip is a private joke with a sharp edge, and the edge cuts in real life. Kennedy had flown south from the Orkney Isles, where he then lived and still lives, to meet Wagner for the first time to discuss a creator-owned project they were trying to pitch to DC, a strip called Outcasts, and despite the fact that Kennedy was by then one of the most distinctive artists in British comics he had been trying to reach the DC offices in New York by telephone with no success. After roughly the hundredth attempt to get through, the story goes, the switchboard simply replied Kenny who? The full name had evaporated inside a New York receiver, a Scottish artist erased by a casual American mispronunciation, and the dismissal stayed with Wagner long enough to become the name of a character. Cam, working at the drawing board on the strip that grew out of that humiliation, took the joke further than the title. The character himself looks like Kennedy, drawn by Kennedy, the artist quietly painting himself into the parable as the man whose style was being replicated. Then he drew Wagner into it as well, sitting at the bar as one of the local drunks while Kenny stares up at his own stolen artwork on the television. The boardroom figures at Big 1 bear a deliberate and recognisable resemblance to the actual management at IPC. The whole strip is a roman-à-clef drawn so casually that most readers, then and since, have missed how much of it is on the record.

That is the parable, in three movements, written across nineteen years by men who were not trying to be prophets and could not have known they were doing it. Wagner, Grant and Kennedy were not writing science fiction in any predictive sense, because there were no large language models in 1986 or 1990 or 2005, no diffusion architectures, no scraped datasets, no synthetic images, and Kennedy’s machines were drawn with chrome housings and visible solenoids that look quaint now in a way the script around them absolutely does not. The prescience is colder than science fiction. What the three of them identified was not the technology but the underlying logic of the industry that would one day welcome it, the appetite that drove the boardrooms, the patience the publishers had for human labour only while no cheaper option existed, the laughter at the suggestion that a person who made a thing had any claim to it. They saw that the moment a machine could be trained to imitate a hand, the hand would be removed. They saw that the moment the market noticed it had been sold slop, the human hand would be quietly reinstated, not because of any moral correction but because scarcity creates premium and premium creates margin. They saw that the artist, refused by the system and prosecuted for objecting, would have only one path left open. He would go home. He would draw anyway. He would print it himself, sell it himself, build the audience himself, and outlast the machinery that had tried to make him obsolete.

The strip has been sitting in plain sight the whole time. In the Judge Dredd: The Art of Kenny Who? collection on the shelves of comic shops. In the 2000AD archive. In the Ultimate Collection partwork. Anyone could have read it. Most of us did. We laughed at the gags about Highland accents and the Man Bites Jock cover, admired Kennedy’s bubbly architecture and his offbeat colour, recognised Wagner’s writing somewhere underneath, and went home satisfied that we had spent twenty minutes inside a clever piece of mid-eighties satire. We did not think it was about us. We thought it was about an American editor in the 1980s who did not know who Cam Kennedy was.

It was about all of us. It just had to wait for the world to catch up.

Drawn to Extinction is available now with contributions from John Wagner, Pat Mills, Patrick Goddard and many others.

Kenny Who, by Cam Kennedy. Progs 477-479, 1986. © Copyright Rebellion

In the late eighties, the comics industry tried to have a conversation with itself about who actually owns the work. It went badly.

The people who turned up for it were the right people. Alan Moore, mid-flight on Watchmen, watching a contract he’d signed in good faith quietly mutate into a perpetual annuity for someone else. Steve Bissette, fresh from Swamp Thing, beginning to understand that the paperwork he’d put his name to didn’t just take the character away from him, it took the authorship away too. Scott McCloud, who would spend the next four decades trying to explain comics to people who hadn’t bothered to look properly. Dave Sim, before Cerebus curdled him into someone harder to sit next to. Kevin Eastman, whose Turtles money meant he could put his shoulder behind something the rest of them couldn’t afford to. They gathered at a summit in Northampton, Massachusetts in November 1988, and they drafted a Bill of Rights for Comics Creators. Twelve points. Plain language. The right to own what you make. The right to control how it’s reproduced. The right to be credited. The right to approve the promotion of yourself and your work. The kind of document that sounds so reasonable you almost miss how radical it was simply to need it.

A year later, at a panel in Toronto chaired by the writer Mark Askwith, some of the same names sat onstage with the people who ran the publishers and tried to argue the principles out in public. Gary Groth from Fantagraphics, Bill Marks from Vortex, Steve Saffel from Marvel, Bill Sienkiewicz, Bissette again. The transcript was published in The Comics Journal the following September. I have a copy of that issue on my desk as I write this. I bought it at auction, partly because it’s a beautiful object, partly because the cover painting by McCloud and Bissette shows Superman as a marionette with a giant corporate hand holding open scissors above his strings, and partly because the room it documents is one of the most poignant rooms in the history of the medium.

Poignant because they were right, and because almost nothing changed.

Groth, near the start of that panel, on why his publishing house had never owned a creator’s work: it doesn’t do the artist any good, it doesn’t do the public any good, it only ever does the corporation any good. Sienkiewicz, on the slow realisation of what he’d signed: the more I did it the more I realised that I couldn’t continue on this way. Bissette, on the legal fiction of work-for-hire: we signed away the fact that we wrote and drew the book. Read that sentence twice. He’s not saying they took our credit. He’s saying we signed a piece of paper that legally redefined who made the thing. The hand that drew it became, in the only sense the courts cared about, a hand that hadn’t.

Groth, in his closing remarks, landed the verdict. The companies, given that they had the power to dictate the terms, treated the creative talent in comics like serfs.

That was 1989. The Bill went into the archive. Kevin Eastman tried to build a publisher around its principles. He lost fourteen million dollars and it folded in three years. The contracts didn’t change. The page rates didn’t change. The work-for-hire model didn’t change. The men in that Toronto room won the argument, intellectually, comprehensively, and then went home and discovered the argument hadn’t actually been the thing. The thing was the leverage, and the leverage was elsewhere.

I want you to hold all of that in your mind for a second, because I’m about to fast-forward thirty-six years.

Hannah Berry is a former UK Comics Laureate and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She still makes the work. 5 More Minutes, her short piece about parenthood and existential dread, is one of the most disquieting things published in any medium in the last decade, and you can read it in about the time it takes to drink a cup of tea. Hannah also does something most working creators don’t have the energy for, which is sustained research. In 2020 she ran a structured study of UK comics creators and their relationship to emerging technology. In 2025 she went back and did it again, with the same rigour, to see what had moved.

What she found should be the headline of every piece written about generative Ai and the creative industries in 2026, and isn’t.

The creators are not using it. Across five years of unbelievable hype, of cover stories and conference keynotes and confident predictions that the tools were about to revolutionise the form, almost none of the people actually making British comics had integrated generative Ai into their practice. This is not technophobia. The same industry adopted digital colouring, lettering software, online distribution, the lot, the moment those things genuinely helped. This feels different, Hannah told me when we spoke for my book. Different because the tools don’t extend the hand. They attempt to replace it.

And here’s the part that should make the rest of us pay attention, whatever we do for a living.

Around a third of the creators in her research have already lost work or income to generative Ai. Not because they’re using it. Because the people who used to pay them are. The small commissions vanish first. The local band poster, the small press cover, the character design someone would have happily paid for a year ago. The hidden scaffolding of a creative career, the work that sits between bigger projects and quietly keeps a freelancer solvent. It doesn’t go with a bang. It just stops. The emails stop. The small jobs stop.

This is the 1989 panel happening again, in a different language, with different machines, with the same outcome. Creators arguing intellectually impeccable positions about consent and credit and compensation, while the actual leverage moves somewhere else entirely. The people in that Toronto room weren’t beaten by a better argument. They were beaten by the simple fact that the means of distribution didn’t belong to them. The people in Hannah’s research aren’t being beaten by a better argument either. They’re being beaten by the fact that the means of production have been quietly redefined as something that doesn’t need them in it.

The comics industry has been the rehearsal room for this fight for forty years. We’ve been here before. The receipts are sitting on my desk in a yellowing magazine from September 1990.

The only thing that’s new is that this time, it’s not just comics.

Drawn to Extinction, out 1st June 2026.

You can usually tell when an email has been written by someone who wasn’t actually there when they wrote it, and the giveaway isn’t anything as obvious as a clunky phrase or a misplaced bit of jargon, it’s a quality of flatness, a hotel-pillow plumpness, the sense that all the right words have been arranged in all the expected places by someone whose attention was politely elsewhere. You’ve probably had three of them this week. You may have sent one.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’ve just spent a year writing a book about an industry that’s currently losing its grip on the distinction between using a tool and being used by one, and the more I look at it the more I see the same pattern bleeding into everything else. Designers being asked to clean up whatever the model spat out. Lawyers filing briefs whose footnotes cite cases that never happened, an embarrassment that’s occurred often enough now to qualify as a genuine professional sub-genre. Copywriters generating “first drafts” that are also, somehow, the final drafts. Teachers marking essays using the same systems their students used to write them, in a sort of joyless closed loop nobody quite signed up for. The work that used to be the work has quietly become an overhead to be optimised away, and a lot of the people doing the optimising have started to feel the small private wince that arrives when you hit send on something you didn’t really write.

So let me say the thing this piece is here to say, and then we can wander around it for a bit.

Don’t outsource your thinking to Ai. Use Ai to help execute the thinking you’ve already done.

The thinking is the job. Whatever your job is, the thinking is the job. If you’re a designer the thinking is the day and a half you spend staring at the brief working out what it’s actually asking for, which is almost never what it says. If you’re a copywriter the thinking is the part where you figure out who you’re talking to and what they’re frightened of, before a single word goes near a page. If you’re a lawyer it’s reading the case carefully enough to spot the angle the other side hasn’t. If you’re a teacher it’s clocking which kid has gone quiet this week and working out why. The output is the residue of the thinking, and the thinking is the thing the salary’s actually for, even when the job description pretends otherwise.

When you outsource the thinking, you haven’t saved time, you’ve outsourced the job. The output looks fine, often it looks better than fine, because these tools are genuinely brilliant at producing things that look fine, but you’ve quietly removed yourself from the loop you were hired to occupy, and there are several very rich men in California whose entire business model depends on you not noticing for as long as possible.

I should say at this point that I’m not writing this by candlelight with a quill and a sense of moral grievance. I use these tools. I’m writing this on a laptop that has, somewhere in its memory, more Ai assistance than I’d particularly care to itemise on a tax return. The tools are useful in roughly the way a calculator is useful, which is to say they handle the bit you’ve already worked out and they spare you the arithmetic, and that’s a real and lovely thing. The trouble only starts when you stop being the person who works it out.

There’s a tell, if you want to start catching this in yourself. Ask whether you knew what you wanted to say before the machine helped you say it, or whether the machine told you what you thought. The first is using the tool. The second is the tool using you, and somewhere in a server farm a meter is ticking up while a model gets very slightly better at impersonating the version of you who used to do this work properly.

The book I’ve finished is called Drawn to Extinction. On the surface it’s about the comics industry, which is currently being asked to accept that the labour of generations of artists, writers, letterers, colourists and editors can be hoovered into training data and resold back to the public as a slightly cheaper, slightly faster and considerably hollower version of itself, and which features long conversations with people like Pat Mills, John Wagner, Hannah Berry, Frazer Irving and Ram V, whose voices are the actual heart of the thing. But the book isn’t really just about comics, it’s about what extraction looks like when you can watch it happening close enough to map, in a culture small enough to hold in your head. Comics is the canary, and whatever you do for a living is the mine.

The reasonably good news, and there is some, is that the distinction at the top of this piece is genuinely available to you without any dramatic life rearrangement. You don’t have to throw your laptop in a canal or write a manifesto or grow your hair out. You just have to keep the thinking on your side of the desk and let the machine do the bit that comes afterwards. Decide what the email needs to say before you ask the tool to tidy the sentences. Decide what the design needs to do before you ask the tool to generate variations of something you haven’t yet figured out. Decide what you actually believe, and then, only then, let the machine help you put it on the page. It’s simple in the way that going for a run is simple, which is to say not at all, because the temptation to skip the first step is enormous and the short-term cost of skipping it is essentially invisible. The long-term cost is that you slowly stop being someone who can do the first step at all, and nobody is pricing that in yet.

I’ll be writing more of these over the coming weeks, pulling from the book and from the conversations that shaped it. If any of this lands, stick around. If you want the long version, with all the names and the studios and the people who taught me why any of this matters, the book is below, and I’d be grateful if you ordered it, read it, posted your little review or any thoughts online, and then passed it on.

In the meantime.

Don’t outsource your thinking to Ai.

Use Ai to help execute the thinking you’ve already done.

Drawn to Extinction, out now.