HELP! I AM TRAPPED INSIDE A CONTENT FACTORY!
How to make money on AI comics, plus the X-Men, plus Superman!
The AI thing really isn't going away, is it? It has even found its way to offensively bland fantasy books, like Image's THE LAST BARBARIANS, a book so entirely devoid of originality it might have stolen its aesthetic wholesale from those Witcher video games. As a total hack myself, I also dabbled in claiming a machine's work as my own; I did it as a goof, to be sure, but I have experience in the field nonetheless. This gives me just enough authority to go ahead and lay down the earnest case against the use of art generators in comics, so let's do that, for the few people who subscribed to this newsletter by mistake assuming I'd be way into every little new awful gimmick the bad actors of this industry invest into. (I am not, and your little NFT project can go fuck itself, whichever one it is this week.)
The fundamental problem, of course, is that what the model peddlers at Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are calling "artificial intelligence" is, at best, a complete misnomer, and at worst, something entirely more nefarious. First and foremost: it is not "intelligence". All the models based on diffusion do is reverse-engineer the pictures that were fed into it into properties it can use to curate random noise, based on the data it gets from a text input. Put more simply: the model takes the output of infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters and does its best to remove all the letters in the way of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Hopefully, you've noticed the problem here: the complete works of William Shakespeare already exist. Nothing here has been created, the computer is just rearranging pictures it already knows into something that answers what it has perceived as the initial prompt. The thing is, "putting things together in a coherent way" is such a nothing skill that even Your Least Favorite Artist can do it, and they can in fact do it better.
Of course, the fact that those models need to be trained on several thousands of already existing pictures bring us to the second lie of "artificial intelligence" as it applies to art. It's not even artificial. Humans, real humans with flesh and blood and whatever else, they made all those pictures the computers are learning to turn into noise. Do you think they are seeing even one lowly red cent from the dipshits trying to peddle what the machine spit out as their own thing? Of course not, because if you paid the actual costs every single vision of a "girl in a cyberpunk city with the big bazonga" would bankrupt the horny nerds that summoned it into being.
Now, none of the above is anything new, for sure. I just wanted to put it in writing to make the following point: if a total clownshoes idiot like yours truly can grasp the situation, people whose job it is to know better absolutely can pull it off. And they have! Right as everyone was clowning on that THE LAST BARBARIANS cover for looking like hot trash, the United States Copyright Office made a ruling in the case of Kris Kashtanova's Zarya Of The Dawn, stating that the illustrations, which were generated through Midjourney, would not be eligible for copyright. Does that mean that it's all over? Probably not. Does that mean you can just take the art in Zarya Of The Dawn, put your own words in there and sell that? I think it does, so when I'm done with this I'm immediately getting to making my "original" fantasy graphic novel. SEE YOU IN THE BEST-SELLERS LIST GANG!!!
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: MORE PARASITIC THAN ANY COMPETING COMIC BOOK CRITIC
I know it has been a while since anything, but it's really been a while since we kept on top of a comic book event, hasn't it? Well, at last, it's time to get back on the grind, thanks to Sins of Sinister, absolutely the most engrossing thing to happen to X-Men comics since former man with a plan and current Ultimate Universe relauncher Johnathan Hickman left the ship to pursue a six-digit Substack check. Since we met the event last, three comics have come out, laying out the tapestry of twisted delights, and I'm going to tell you about them in a part of the newsletter I simply am forced to call THE SINS OF SINISTER YEAR TEN RECAP. That's what this is, so let's go.
First, we'll acquiesce to recency bias and get into Immoral X-Men #1, probably the easiest of the bunch to wrap your head around: it is in all but name Immortal X-Men #11, and as such it keeps many of the main series' formal trademarks; it is your monthly recommended serving of Quiet Council intrigue and scheming, dished out from the perspective of one of its members. The sinister twist, obviously, is Sinister, having perverted the proceedings and remade the world in his image. Explicitly and implicitly, it is about making the subtext text, in all ways and at all times. On one side, it means that our antagonist is being made aware of the exact nature of the hell his conspiracies have made for himself. On the other side, it means a comic where every character leans into their persona so far forward you might think they're lying prone on the ground. Charles Xavier is once more weeping for the poor humans that can't see the dream; Hope Summers, ever her father's daughter, is readying herself for the war to come. And Emma Frost, as ever, well, I'm not about to spoil something as delightful as this. It's really great, is the thing. As the table setter for the whole thing, Kieron Gillen doesn't get to be as formally adventurous as he has been in the past. Out of necessity, this is a really great comic.
As ever, if you want genuine playfulness, you'll turn to Al Ewing, whose Storm And The Brotherhood Of Mutants #1 takes what remains of X-Men Red in this broken timeline and rearranges it into a shape that should remind you of Star Wars, unless you somehow lost the ability to remember things. Let's run down the list, shall we? There is, of course, the opening crawl in front of a starry background; there's the regent of a dead planet looking for justice; the delivery of a secret, setting in motion a plan that is just dangerous enough to work; there are vague references in there to wars that will not be seen, and yes, there is some planet-hopping action. Of course, Star Wars has an happy ending, and this, being an alternate-timeline X-Men story, doesn't, thanks to a few pretty clever twists hinting at the larger game being played. Still, if you wanted your X-Men Red to go a little more operatic, that should hit the spot. Plus Paco Medina, who's on art duties on all three of the year 10 books, flexes his creative muscle with some of the most devious chimeras in the event so far.
But for my money the most daring feat there is to be found in Sins of Sinister so far comes from Nightcrawlers #1, a book that succeeds in keeping the ideas and the themes that have been there from Way of X to Legion of X while removing most of its cast, deliberately brushing aside its existing plotlines, and taking place in a completely different location. What connects the book to what came before is extremely loose, then: it is about enforcers of the law, and it is about the search for greater meaning through the pursuit of the New, in whatever shape that takes. In keeping to that animating principle of the books that came before, Si Spurrier delivers something that is at once exactly as engrossing to anyone who likes thinking about the spiritual pursuit of X-Men comics as before, and yet with enough original twists and turns to thrill your average event comic reader. It is wickedly smart, emphasis obviously on the wickedly, and the way in which it keeps the Spark alive is, as ever, genuinely beautiful.
In conclusion, then: yeah! Sins of Sinister kicks ass! Catch you in 90 years!
It has become the fashion, amongst the coolest elite of the comic book crit literati, to treat Joshua Williamson's name as anathema to all that is great and good, for the crime of fumbling the bag pretty hardcore on Dark Crisis On Infinite Earths, and making a book so committed to everything being the same again that its emotional climax involved Deathstroke fighting the Teen Titans, and not even the newest Teen Titans, the regular old Teen Titans, the Adult Teen Titans.
And so, when the news came that he would relaunch Superman after a year of forward-looking bright-eyed populist Jon Kent comic book fun as only Tom Taylor can make it, a pall of dread fell on the comic book reading populace, made even more dreadful by the release of Action Comics #1050, an absolute heartbreaker of an issue where the classic Superman status quo came back with that classic Lex Luthor vengeance and one by one took away almost all of the fun toys that had been introduced in the years before. And yet, not all on the horizon seemed so dark. How? Well, because against all odds, the comic was good. It knew what it was doing, what emotions it was playing with, and it hit its notes exactly right. Maybe this would work out.
Because here's the thing about Joshua Williamson: the dude has written some balls-out banger comics in his time as DC's it-guy. Robin? Deathstroke Inc.? Absolutely unassailable action comics. Superman #1, despite all the Big Relaunch trappings, is closer to those than it is to the rest of his output. First and foremost, it is once again a showcase for one of comics' most dynamic voices. First there was Big Gleb, then there was Howard Porter going even further beyond, and now, we have Jamal By God Campbell, making it all look effortless. We can't go further into this review without talking about how so goddamn good this book looks, how clever its little storytelling tricks are, and the sheer amount of care put in every detail present on every page. Somehow it is all absolutely iconic, and it makes it all worth reading over and over again to catch everything that was put in there. This is the absolute peak of modern comic book storytelling, straight-up, and I don't know who could beat it this calendar year.
All that said, the story itself? Classic Superman favorites with a couple of fun new twists, showing a lot of promise. It's smart, it's authentically funny, and it comes from an obviously genuine place of love; more than anything, it feels like a celebration of all the storytelling opportunities you can explore with Clark Kent back in the picture. In short: it is everything that you should be expecting from a monthly superhero comic book in 2023. It is the standard, and thus all is as it should be. I loved it very much.
And that's it! That's another one! We're done! We're getting into the groove again and it's only going to get better from here! So all I want you to do is stay tuned! Subscribe if you haven't already! Follow me on the one good social media website for more entertainment! Things are looking up! Things are heating up! What else is there to do but HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!