The Man Who Counted the Dead
What a man inking a dome taught me about everything we're about to lose.
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.