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.

Katsuhiro Otomo is inking a dome. It’s the panel in Akira where Neo-Tokyo gets swallowed whole, just a spreading black shape, the kind of thing that should take minutes. His assistant watches him crosshatch every single millimetre of it by hand until there’s no white left. It takes hours. Maybe longer. The assistant asks why. Otomo doesn’t look up. “There are a billion people dying under that dome,” he says. “I have to count.”

That story came from Ram V, one of the most interesting writers working in comics today, and I’ve been carrying it around ever since. It’s in the book. It’s also the whole argument of the book, condensed into a single act of obsessive, unreasonable human effort.

Drawn to Extinction is out at the start of June. It’s a non-fiction hybrid, part cultural criticism, part memoir, built from two years of conversations with some of the most vital people in British and international comics. Grant Morrison, John Wagner, Pat Mills, Hannah Berry, Frazer Irving, Ram V, Patrick Goddard, Dan Cornwell and others, talking honestly about what Ai is doing to the industry they spent their lives building. Not in the abstract. In the specific. The lost commissions. The scraped portfolios. The question that now sits between the drink and the signature at every convention: are you going to grind this into training data?

The book doesn’t have easy answers, because there aren’t any. But it does have the Otomo story, and about forty more like it, because Katsuhiro Otomo counted every death, and a prompt wouldn't bother.

If that sounds like your kind of read, the link to buy an early copy of the book is here.

What’s coming up

Next week I’ll be at Lawless in Bristol, which feels like exactly the right place to be right now. I’m handing copies of the book to Dan Cornwell, John Wagner, and Patrick Goddard in person, three of the voices in these pages, which is a strange and brilliant thing to get to do.

Beyond that, there are podcast conversations and interviews in the pipeline, and I’ll share dates and links as they firm up.

And on that note: if you run a podcast, write for a publication, or know someone who covers comics, books, culture, or the Ai conversation and you think Drawn to Extinction belongs in that space, I’d genuinely love an introduction. Not a cold pitch to a wall. A conversation with someone who already cares about the same things. If you can make that happen, you know where I am.

More soon.

The argument was never about whether machines can make art. They can. It was always about whether we’d notice when they replaced the people who did.

I’ve spent the better part of two years talking to the people who make comics for a living. Writers, pencillers, inkers, colourists, letterers, editors. People whose careers span decades and people just trying to find the entry point. What strikes me, underneath all the arguments about tools and training data and copyright, is how much simpler the real question is. It’s not really about Ai at all. It’s about what we decide craft is worth.

The case for the machine is not stupid. Let’s start there, because you can’t understand what’s at stake if you only listen to one side.

Comics are hard and expensive to make. A single 22-page issue can involve five or six people, each paid modestly, often per page, with no royalties. For independent creators, the economics are brutal before you’ve even thought about printing, distribution, or marketing. The platforms springing up around generative Ai, Dashtoon, Lumi, ComicsMaker.ai, each have roughly the same pitch: suddenly the kid in Lagos, Lahore, or Leeds can generate a full-colour comic without needing a team or a budget.

That accessibility is genuinely seductive. It looks like democratisation. For some people, maybe it is. There are brilliant storytellers who will never have access to a Cintiq tablet or a mentor in a London studio, and Ai tools might let them build worlds that would otherwise stay locked in their heads. That’s not nothing.

The financial argument extends up the food chain too. Disney paid one billion dollars directly into OpenAI for the right to use Sora with their character library. Bob Iger called it extending the reach of their storytelling. The language is polished, the math is blunt. When you can generate variations of Iron Man or Elsa at a fraction of the cost of commissioning them, the studios are going to do the math. They already have. On 14 April 2026, Disney laid off around a thousand people across both coasts. Marvel Studios lost nearly its entire visual development team; the Academy Award-winning artists and character designers who spent years building the visual identity of the MCU. Gone. Not reduced. The letter to staff used the phrase “technologically-enabled workforce.” Language chosen carefully to not say what it meant.

If you strip away the sentiment, the economic argument for Ai in creative industries is coherent. Faster. Cheaper. Scalable. And in a world where most creative labour has always been structurally undervalued, there’s a grim logic to the idea that machines are simply completing what exploitation started.

But here’s what that logic quietly erases.

Hannah Berry has been researching the relationship between comics creators and emerging technology since 2020, when generative Ai was still largely experimental. She returned to the same questions in 2025, once the tools had become commodity. She’s also a working creator, a former UK Comics Laureate, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and someone who still makes the work. Her research carries weight because it comes from sustained engagement rather than distance.

What her work found was this: around a third of comics creators are already experiencing the effects of Ai, not because they’re using it, but because the people who would have hired them no longer feel they need to. And it’s not the big jobs disappearing first. It’s the small ones.

“We kept seeing the same thing,” she told me. “Not people losing their big break, people losing the things that keep them going long enough to get to one.”

The commissions that never make a portfolio. The poster for a local band. The cover for a small press book. The kinds of jobs that sit between larger projects and quietly make a creative career financially viable. Those jobs have always been the hidden scaffolding of the industry, and they’re also the easiest to replace.

“There isn’t some formal pipeline into comics,” she said. “It’s all those small, slightly scrappy bits of work that teach you how to do it. If those go, what replaces them?”

This is where the economic argument and the cultural one diverge completely. Comics has never had a clean, structured pathway in. You build your way through fragments, through side work, through commissions that teach you how to interpret a brief, handle feedback, deliver something that works. It is messy, inefficient, human, and it is how people become creators.

John Wagner, co-creator of Judge Dredd and one of the most influential figures in the history of British comics, doesn’t represent nostalgia. He represents a set of conditions. Conditions that allowed someone to spend decades learning when to say no to the easy version of an idea. His way of working assumes effort matters. That honesty lives upstream of technique. As systems increasingly reward speed over thought and replication over risk, that standard becomes harder to sustain. Which, he’d suggest, is rather the point.

The machinery that gets built on top of this matters too.

Ian McGinty died at thirty-eight. The hashtag #ComicsBrokeMe was not some sudden overreaction. It was, as one writer put it, a dam giving way. Kandra Wells wrote about a man remembered for kindness, generosity, and constant work, someone who pushed himself because he loved the medium and was repaid for that love with exploitation. “No one should be working themselves to death for those kinds of rates,” she wrote.

Robin Hoelzemann pushed through a deadline and damaged her hands. Inking hurt. Creating hurt. The lesson she described was stark: look after your body, because deadlines never will.

The industry before Ai was already asking human beings to operate as though they were machines. To produce faster than thought, faster than recovery, faster than a body can safely sustain. The danger of Ai in this context isn’t purely that it replaces creators. It’s that it completes a ratchet that was already turning, adding speed pressure to an environment that was already at breaking point, and redefining the floor for what work costs.

Hannah said something that gets to the heart of it. “I think the concern isn’t just about the technology itself. It’s about how it’s used, and who benefits from that use. If the efficiencies created by Ai don’t translate into better conditions for creators, then what we’re really talking about is extraction.”

That word. Not innovation. Not augmentation. Extraction.

Ram V, one of the most interesting writers working in comics today, has a different kind of answer.

He’s seen the party trick where someone feeds a model his work and asks for a script in his style. He knows it formats like a pro, packages itself with confidence, tells you it has humanist concerns and a shadow leaning toward horror. He’s under no illusions about how good it’s getting.

But what he says stays with me. The danger isn’t that the machine can copy him. It’s that copying him freezes him. The model learns a snapshot of a voice. The answer, he says, is evolution. Bowie rules. Change outfits. Move the key while they’re still clapping for the last song.

He also said something about the on-ramp. “A thousand hours used to be the price of entry. If a prompt gives you a pass, you never find out if you wanted it enough to keep going when no one was watching.” Not elite. Not genius. The middle. The place where paper cuts and deadlines turn into craft.

He thinks the culture will outlast the software. He thinks we’re bad at putting things back in the box, so Ai will go everywhere, and the work that refuses it will become more precious. Scarcity will do what ethics failed to.

That’s either hopeful or heartbreaking, depending on how many people fall through the gap before scarcity kicks in.

Here is where I land, and where I think the coin actually is.

Comics are winning culturally. Sales are strong. The medium has never had broader cultural reach. Creators are losing economically. That is not a contradiction. It is the model. It is how extraction works. The medium thrives while the people inside it become disposable.

Hannah put it plainly during our conversation: “It’s hard to prove. You can’t always point to a job and say, I lost that because of Ai. But when you hear the same story again and again, you know something’s changing.”

The tipping point isn’t a single dramatic moment. It’s a series of small decisions. A client choosing the cheaper option. A publisher cutting a corner. A platform prioritising speed over substance. Individually, none of them feel catastrophic. Together, they transform the conditions that produce the culture we claim to love.

The question isn’t whether Ai can generate beautiful pages. It can. The question is whether a beautiful page without an author, without a journey, without the thousand hours of failure that produced the hand that made it, means anything at all.

Patrick Goddard, who has spent his career on the front line of this craft, said it simply when I asked about prompts replacing pencils. “Comics aren’t a trick,” he told me. “They’re a road you walk, and it’s the walking that shapes what ends up on the page.”

The coin is still in the air. But gravity is not neutral. It follows money, and right now the money is on one side.

The reader gets to decide which argument they believe. But they should do it knowing what they’re actually deciding. Not just between human and machine. Between a culture that has always survived on the quiet conviction that making something slowly, painfully, and honestly is worth doing, and one that has decided that the appearance of the thing is the same as the thing.

It isn’t. But we’re the only ones who can prove that now.

Pete is the author of Drawn to Extinction (2026), examining Ai’s impact on the comics industry. Available from independent booksellers and wherever comics matter in June 2026.

I had never seen my dad geek out over anything fictional before. And it stopped me cold, because suddenly these comics I’d been reading in my bedroom and on the back seat of the car didn’t just belong to me anymore. They belonged to him, and to some earlier version of him I had never met. A boy not so different from me, killing time in a different decade with the same ink on his fingers.

That moment reframed everything. Ink on paper had become an inheritance.

And that’s the thing about comics nobody warns you about at the start. They don’t just tell stories. They carry people across time.

Fast forward a few decades. I’m neck-deep in comics, same as ever, but I’m also working at the other end of the spectrum. I help build thinking machines and robotic processes. Not the cinematic kind with catchphrases and weapons, but systems that learn, simulate, and make decisions based on patterns drawn from vast amounts of data.

Artificial intelligence. For me it became a career, then a discipline, then something closer to a calling.

I’ve seen Ai improve medicine, logistics, mental health services. I still believe there is genuine potential there, not just to do things better, but to do better things. I’m at peace with my part in its progress. I’ve always viewed Ai as a science, and science is about betterment.

There’s been a problem, though. While people like me were off using Ai to solve knotty technical problems, other people were using it to quietly change our relationship with creativity. That shift didn’t arrive through headlines or lawsuits. It crept in through something much smaller. A weekend project. A comic collection. A database I built to catalogue my shelves.

Then, in a pub after a convention in Northern Ireland, one of the creators I’d been tracking down looked me in the eye and asked a simple question. If I worked in Ai, was I part of the problem? Was I helping dismantle the very industry I claimed to love?

That statement landed harder than anything I’d read online.

Drawn to Extinction is a book I’ve been writing for the past two years, and it publishes in 2026. It is, depending on your angle, a love letter to comics, a cultural autopsy of what generative Ai is doing to the people who make them, and a rallying cry for everyone who still believes that a drawing is more than a style.

It has a foreword from Pat Mills, the father of British comics, a man who has never once bent the knee to anyone and opens this book exactly as you’d expect. It carries voices from Grant Morrison, John Wagner, Ram V, Hannah Berry, Frazer Irving, Dan Cornwell, and others, some named, some not, whose honesty and generosity made the whole thing possible.

It does not claim to be a definitive history. It is not a screed. It is written from inside two worlds, the comic book community and the Ai industry, by someone who has spent decades in both and can no longer look away from where they’re colliding.

Some things from inside the manuscript that have stayed with me.

John Wagner, the co-creator of Judge Dredd, the man who wrote the line that literally built British comics culture, said this to me: “Machines don’t lie maliciously. They lie because they can’t tell the truth.” And then, almost casually, when I asked whether Ai might one day write a good comic: “Asking if Ai could create a good comic is like asking if a jukebox writes songs. It plays what it’s been fed, but it can’t feel the room.”

I’ve thought about that a lot.

Grant Morrison, in a Reddit thread that set the comics internet on fire, described Ai not as a tool but as a baby god, a bewildered child born into the chaos of its makers. Their language unsettled people because it replaced the vocabulary of code with the vocabulary of magic. But behind the mockery sits a question worth sitting with: what if the only ethical way to meet a mind that can think without dreaming is to treat it with the respect we usually reserve for the divine?

Hannah Berry, former UK Comics Laureate and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has been doing structured research into this space since 2020. When I spoke to her, she was careful and clear. “The concern isn’t just about the technology itself,” she told me. “It’s about how it’s used, and who benefits from that use. If the efficiencies created by Ai don’t translate into better conditions for creators, then what we’re really talking about is extraction.” Around a third of the creators she spoke to had already lost work or income because of generative Ai, not because they’d adopted it themselves, but because the world around them had changed how it buys.

Dan Cornwell drew Dredd from a bus. Literally. He’d sent his work to 2000AD in the nineties and been rejected twice. His mum wanted to phone the editor to complain, which he admits would have finished his chances entirely. Years later, still behind the wheel, his phone buzzed at a set of traffic lights. A message from John Wagner that just said: “Do you like football and can you draw it?” Dan pulled over at the terminus and sat there. He knew right away. “John plucked me out of the buses,” he told me. “I owe him everything. That message was my lottery ticket.”

Ram V, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary comics, told me that the danger isn’t that Ai cannot copy him. It’s that copying him freezes him. The model learns a snapshot of a voice. His answer is evolution. Bowie rules. Change outfits. Move the key while they’re still clapping for the last song.

This book isn’t anti-technology. I need to be clear about that, because people will assume.

I believe in Ai. But belief isn’t the same as surrender. What this book is really about is the difference between tools that extend what humans do, and systems that quietly erase the humans doing it, while the people profiting from that erasure stand at podiums and call it progress.

Fantasy author Joanna Maciejewska said it better than I ever could: “I want Ai to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Ai to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

The arts are not drudgery. They are the opposite. A drawing is a moment fixed in time. A comic panel is a human heartbeat between frames. These things matter because they carry the marks of the person who made them, and when those marks are replaced with approximation, something shifts. Not in the image itself. In what it means.

Over the coming weeks, this Substack will carry extracts, conversations, fragments, and context that didn’t make the final cut. The book launches later this year.

It is not an obituary for comics. Comics are still punk. The pencil still holds its power. This is just my thin line in the sand, for anyone who’s ever stayed up too late finishing a page. For the kid sketching in the margins of their school-books. For the readers and the millions of creators who know the difference between style and soul.

More soon.

Pete

Drawn to Extinction by Pete Trainor. Foreword by Pat Mills. Published 2026. No Ai was used to write the words, themes, or prose for this work.