Coming June 2026
Comics are built slowly, painfully, lovingly. Lines are argued with, erased, redrawn, and stories are hammered into shape under deadline pressure and self-doubt. Writers, letterers, editors, colourists and illustrators learn through failure, repetition, and long nights that the fans never see. The entire industry and its culture has survived not because these things are easy to make, but because people cared enough to keep going when it would have been simpler to quit. That culture is under threat.
Drawn to Extinction is a book about what happens when an important but fragile creative ecosystem collides with a technology that values speed over meaning and scale over care. It is not a manifesto against machines, and it is not a nostalgic plea for a golden age that never truly existed. It is a warning, and a reckoning, written at a moment when automation is being sold as progress without anyone stopping to ask who is paying the price in creative spaces. It is a book crafted from the voices of the people in the middle of the storm, not theories. Writers, artists, academics, advocates, and legal experts speak plainly about what is already being lost, often quietly, often behind closed doors. They talk about apprenticeships that are disappearing, about trust eroding, about bias amplifying the tropes of an already trope-driven space, and about a future where everything looks finished but nothing feels alive. This is about the slow violence of acceptability, and the way silicon hallucinations require standards to slip, not with a bang, but with a shrug.
If you remove intention from the process, you don’t get neutrality. You get bias that no one feels accountable for.
What’s sad is that at some point we’ll stop and question everything, ‘Do you think that was actually done by a person?’ because our default position will be that everything is a simulation.
If you take the work away from people, you take away their reason to get better. And that’s when everything starts looking the same.
If we treat historical material as neutral training data, we quietly lock past bias into the future.
If you take the work away from people, you take away their reason to get better. And that’s when everything starts looking the same.
People talk about speed like it’s progress, but speed has never made a drawing better. Time does.
Most creators don’t lose their rights in a single dramatic moment, they lose them one clause at a time. Ai and Automation doesn’t break contracts, it exploits the fact that most people who work in comics never had leverage to begin with.
The danger isn’t that ai makes something bad. It’s that it makes something acceptable, and acceptable is how culture slowly forgets how to ask for better.
“Don’t worry, this isn’t another dystopian book about Ai. But it is about a generation of creators being quietly overwritten for profit. It’s my journey to learn about the paper cuts, the convention lines, the late nights lettering splash pages by lamp-light, and it’s about the fans who’ve held the line for decades, and the kids growing up swiping instead of sketching.”
“It’s also about the tech-bros who’ve never drawn a panel in their lives, but still want to own the entire art-form. We’re at a cross-roads, and I see a way to zig instead of zag.”
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