The Betrayal Clause
How the comics industry was built on creative dispossession, and why Ai didn’t need to break down the door because it was already open.
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.