Posted in: Comics, Conventions, Events, NYCC, Pop Culture | Tagged:
“Creating” A.I. Graphic Novels At NYCC And Frankfurt Book Fair
“Creating” A.I. Graphic Novels at New York Comic Con and Frankfurt Book Fair… where are we all heading now?
Article Summary
- Creating A.I. graphic novels at NYCC spotlights legal risk, authorship, copyright, and AI publishing law.
- NYCC panels examine how generative AI fits into comics as publishers weigh ownership, infringement, and rights.
- Frankfurt Book Fair spotlights Novvel.co, pitching AI-assisted graphic novels with faster production and lower costs.
- Publishers face fresh backlash as AI-assisted comic art scales human designs, but copyright limits still cloud use.
A.I., or artificial intelligence, specifically generative A.I., is the bane of the comic book industry right now. The two biggest issues from two very different sides of the industry are that a) it steals from existing art and artists, illegally scraped, without consent, credit or compensation, and b) no one owns the results. So if an artist uses A.I. to generate an image, the publisher doesn’t own that image. This is DC and Marvel‘s worst nightmare. Given this push from both sides of the industry, you might have thought it was a done deal, but it seems not.
At New York Comic Con, they have been running panels about using Generative A.I. in comic books and other creative works. Yesterday saw one titled “Defining the Author: Mitigating Legal Risk in AI-Generated Works”, a look at legal issues, authorship, ownership, copyright protection, and infringement risks, as well as documenting AI use, drafting agreements, managing rights, and reducing legal exposure. While today we have “From Script to Shelf: New Developments in Comic Book Publishing Law”, including “AI integration.”
Meanwhile, the Frankfurt Book Fair is highlighting the publishing entity Novvel.co from Singapore, with a full page PR interview in Publisher’s Weekly edition for the fair, with Anumeha Bisaria, formerly of Google, promising an “AI-powered platform to assist with the creation of graphic novels, claiming to cut production time and cost by roughly half”. Anumeha Bisaria tells Publishers’ Weekly, “Production is expensive and slow. The average production cost of a graphic novel runs somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000, and it typically takes 12 to 18 months. Most small publishers and authors don’t have that kind of capital to spend on a bet, and even large publishers that do have to be very selective about what they commit to.” And how does it work? “You put in a manuscript. The system spends time studying the story, including the background, the protagonist, and the emotional beats that pay off for a reader, and produces a storyboard that gets you to roughly 60%–70% of a finished product. Then an editor, the author, and an illustrator go in and shape that further, because a purely AI-generated output tends to lack soul and be generic.”
Also, I guess because people are really good at spotting A.I. comic book art right now and cry foul. “We’re seeing roughly 50%–70% savings on production time and cost versus the traditional process. Pricing varies depending on the project. Factors like length, visual complexity, creative requirements, and the level of human involvement, but even at the higher end, we’re able to deliver significantly better speed and lower cost than traditional production processes.” It’s not sounding great, especially when the process is explained further. “If someone asks us to replicate something like Charles Schulz’s Peanuts or the Moomins, we won’t do that, because that style doesn’t belong to us. What we do instead is have the client sit down with our illustrator and describe what they want, and our illustrator develops an original style from that description, which we then apply at scale.”
Draw one page of art, get paid for one page of art, and they’ll create a 200-page graphic novel off the back of it? Publisher’s Weekly also asks about the copyright issues raised by the NYCC panels. “A purely AI-generated image can’t be copyrighted under current law. The storytelling, meaning how you sequence panels, pair dialogue with imagery, and structure the narrative, requires human creative input, and that layer can be copyrighted. If a client is building a franchise and wants a consistent, exclusive character likeness that no one else can replicate, we typically work with a human artist up-front to establish that design, and the AI is then used to scale and multiply it, not originate it.”
Look for “AI-assisted” to be the next catchphrase to avoid such copyright issues.”We’re in the business of taking a 300-page novel and doing it justice as a visual story.”And so far that has included a graphic anthology of O. Henry stories, relocating “The Gift of the Magi” to Asia, with differing versions for China, Kashmir, Bihar and Singapore. “There is also a library of books that we have created on our own from public-domain stories” such as Arthur Conan Doyle‘s The Red-Headed League.
While at New York Comic Con, a number of vendors are already getting heat for some of their promotions, Whatnot being the most high-profile…
Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!
Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!
