APRIL FOOL's GUMBALL MAN LAUNCH
Goes exactly as you would expect...
Well, we promised to post a page and what better day than today, April 1st, to post it:
Ain’t it a beauty?
Okay, okay… it’s a Fools. But I’m not exactly a liar… we will be unveiling this beautifully drawn and colored page this week. WE PROMISE. No Foolsies.
Please don’t leave! Can we (pestilent writer Tyler Danna and brilliant artist Trina Dasgupta) offer you a glimpse of the first superhero comic we collaborated on?…
“What the heck does this Doujinshi version of the Man of Steel have to do with a Man of… Gum?” you ask.
Well, a few things it turns out, and you will find out in the weeks ahead. There are so many fascinating creations of Trina’s to meet between now and then — take this small offering of the wonderfully expressive character Timothy for example:
Look at Lil’ Tim trying to find his way through page 1… He represents all of us in a way.
I know I said we were going to ask for feedback on the first page, but that was going to be a poll following the trollishly blurred page. We were hoping you could help us figure out our workflow and how frequent our rollout of pages will be.
But we abandoned that idea as we are too excited — and have been asked too many times by too many awesome friends — when we will just post the first freaking page. And we shall in the next few days. After the drop — from page 1 to page 10 — thanks for bearing with us as we figure out how timely we can be with new pages.
The characters Trina has been so hard at work creating for this thing are beyond my wildest expectations and I question how the art she creates is humanly possible.
Which brings me to the real goal of this post…. the man vs. machine AI controversy. Sorry. There is no escape from this latest inflammatory concept. Personally, as a creative person — and as a person working with an incredibly talented creative person — I roll my eyes at the idea that AI can somehow replace artists at this level.
As an example I offer what Stable Diffusion presents when I ask for the “Gumball Man comic” we are all waiting for and this is the yield:
Actually… that is pretty fucking close to our first page. Eeek.
Well, back to the drawing board, Trina. See you in a few months.
April Fools, April Fools.
No. That looks NOTHING at all like what we are creating. Because we as the creators with the lived experiences have not yet made our comic available to be fed into some engine of appropriation.
It will be very interesting — between now and the completion of the several issue comic that will constitute our paperback volume — to see how the existence and sharing of our comic might shift the machine learning’s interpretation of the words “Gumball Man comic”… and perhaps even a measure of our success.
If the influence can be clearly demonstrated because of this proactively posted bit of reconnaissance… It certainly raises a question about why protections aren’t being put in place, and why royalties are not being arranged (looking at you WGA negotiations) for creators whose work has been used as reference for artificially generated... anything.
Seems straightforward enough to me. Personally, as a writer, I don’t want my style or voice plugged into the aesthetic of a fancy bot. And it seems much more definitively predatory when AI relies on the work of an amazingly unique visual artist like Trina.
Most importantly I posted this little sampling as the beginning of our before and after evidence. It will be presented for the lawsuit we will be forced to initiate against an attention seeking, investor placating, Microsoft owned AI service that will inevitably start making its own Doujinshi of ‘Gumball Man’… And you best believe when our day in court comes — our lawyer will be AI.
Very excited to share our first pages with you.
See you soon,
- The TDs
(Okay fine, I guess we would all be better off if AI wrote these posts.)
And I still have some of the black & white limited coloring cards if you reply and let me know how to get it to you.
Was I not being fair to the AI with my prompt? Welp, for this one I entered the entirety of the the script for our first panel to see what the AI would generate:
I’d say our blurred version of page 1 is looking pretty good by comparison.
For the apprehensive fans this is our first evidence Trina actually approves all these posts and has strong feelings about me not giving myself enough credit in the crafting of this story:
I mean… would AI give props like that?.