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Abolition Of Man, First Comic Book Entirely Drawn By A.I. Algorithm

With news that Google has suspended a scientist after they tried to secure legal representation for the rights of a LaMDA artificial intelligence. And it is in this light, oil painter and cartoonist Carson Grubaugh has created a four-issue comic book series, The Abolition of Man, in collaboration with an AI image-generation system, MidJourney AI. Rather than draw or paint the comic book himself, he has handed over all illustration duties solely to an AI image generator, which operates by responding to text prompts from the user. For this first issue, Grubaugh supplied the AI with lines from C.S. Lewis' 1943 series of lectures and book, The Abolition of Man, and used the images generated by the AI unit. The resulting comic book with the same name will be published by new publishers Living The Line in October 2022. I wonder if it will get royalties?

Abolition Of Man, First Comic Book Entirely Drawn By A.I. Algorithm

Grubaugh states, "I've spent years as an artist abusing many different publicly available app-fads, in an effort to illustrate what could be called a 'Banal, Content Apocalypse,' in which we've generated so much semantic content that something genuinely new is near impossible to come by. These new art-making AI open up both new means for generating previously unimaginable content, but also speed the production to the point where all we will have left to us is to transmute the meaning-rich gold of the past into recycled lead of the present… In a world where there is nothing new under the Sun, choose to change the Sun."

Abolition Of Man, First Comic Book Entirely Drawn By A.I. Algorithm

"It's been a wild few months since this technology has slowly crept into the public consciousness," says Living the Line publisher Sean Michael Robinson, "and I've been searching for art to make sense of this technological cusp. Grubaugh's Abolition miniseries promises to capture both the wonder and despair inherent in this new technology."

Abolition Of Man, First Comic Book Entirely Drawn By A.I. Algorithm

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis, subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools", was a defence of objective value and natural law as well as a warning about the consequences of doing away with either. It defends "man's power over nature" as something worth pursuing but criticizes its use to debunk values, the value of science itself being among them. You can see why that might be a point of inspiration for such a project.

Abolition Of Man, First Comic Book Entirely Drawn By A.I. Algorithm

ABOLITION OF MAN #1 (OF 4) (MR)
LIVING THE LINE
APR228727
(W) Carson Grubaugh (CA) Sean Michael Robinson (A/CA) Carson Grubaugh
What do you get when you take a groundbreaking philosophical essay and feed it into an AI image generator, one line at a time? The world's first (and only) entirely-computer-illustrated comic book, The Abolition of Man issue #1, by oil painter turned Eisner-nominated cartoonist Carson Grubaugh (Strange Death of Alex Raymond). Alternately hilarious and terrifying, ABOLITION gives a chilling peek into the world of the future, where humans and their most treasured passions have lost all purpose.   Part 1 of a 4 issue miniseries.  In Shops: Oct 26, 2022
Final Orders Due: Sep 12, 2022
SRP: $6.99

Abolition Of Man, First Comic Book Entirely Drawn By A.I. Algorithm Abolition Of Man, First Comic Book Entirely Drawn By A.I. Algorithm


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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