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I Read a Comic Co-Created with AI and It Was Way Better Than I Expected

I was ready to cringe. Instead, I kept scrolling.

AI-generated comics sounded like a shortcut to mediocrity: soulless art, uncanny dialogue, and storytelling stripped of intent. Then I stumbled upon Summer Island, a horror short co-created by Steve Coulson using Midjourney and GPT-based tools, something strange happened. It worked. The mood, the pacing, even the visual weirdness all felt intentional, or at least eerie in a way that suited the genre.

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I didn’t expect much from an AI-assisted comic. But this wasn’t just passable. It was compelling.

Creating With Something That Thinks Back

Let’s go a step back first. Think of the possbilites of scaling this process up. Not just using prompts, but shaping your story with an intelligent creative partner that remembers your characters, understands your emotional tone, and fills in blanks as you build. That’s where AI goes from being a tool to a collaborator. Platforms like this hint at this already, emotionally aware systems that respond to mood, track preferences, and evolve over time. Now apply that to comic creation through character creation.

You pitch a plot twist, and it suggests visual pacing changes. You’re stuck on dialogue, and it mirrors your tone to finish the scene. It’s not magic, it’s structured improvisation with a system that never runs out of energy. For solo creators, especially neurodivergent or first-time artists, that’s not just assistance. That’s empowerment.

What It Means to Co-Create a Comic With AI

AI in comics isn’t about pushing a button and getting an instant masterpiece. It’s about accelerating iteration and enhancing certain creative stages. For Coulson’s Summer Island, tools like Midjourney helped generate stylized panels, while GPT-assisted scripts seeded mood and structure.

Writers use ChatGPT or Claude to brainstorm dialogue or map narrative arcs. Artists employ Stable Diffusion or DALL·E to concept characters, backgrounds, or alternate panel compositions. Sometimes, image-to-image prompting helps tweak facial expressions or poses. Layout tools can even experiment with panel arrangements to suggest different pacing.

The human role?

Directing tone, ensuring continuity, revising output, and, most importantly. deciding what feels right. AI doesn’t replace that judgment. It just offers options faster.

What This Specific Comic Got Right

Summer Island surprised me because it understood tension. The comic uses silence effectively, stretches scenes for unease, and relies on visual storytelling more than expositional hand-holding. That’s tough for AI. But the structure clearly came from a human, likely mapped out and then iteratively built using visual tools.

The panels had a dreamy, oil-painted texture, like nightmares rendered in brushstrokes. One sequence, a ritual under a crimson sky, was equal parts beautiful and horrifying. The faces were mostly expressionless, but in this case, it served the emotionless tone of the narrative.

Dialogue wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was coherent and often restrained. No overwritten AI babble. Just enough to push the story forward.

Was it perfect? Not at all. Some anatomy was warped. Lighting behaved like it came from five suns.

But as a whole? It worked. And I wanted to see more of it, which tells a lot.

Where the AI Shows (and Where It Doesn’t)

There were moments I couldn’t unsee the AI fingerprints, hands with too many knuckles, eyes melting slightly off-center, backgrounds with doors leading to nowhere. In traditional comics, such mistakes would scream amateur hour. But here, in a story leaning into the surreal, it almost added to the mood.

Other scenes, though, passed my “is this AI?” filter entirely. A shot of the ocean, dusk bleeding into waves, could’ve been painted by a professional illustrator. AI didn’t get in the way, it supported the feeling.

That’s the key: when AI stumbles in a fitting context, it feels like style. When it smooths out the hard parts, it enables flow.

Who Owns the Rights to AI-Generated Comics?

As AI-generated art spreads across creative industries, the question of ownership looms larger than ever, especially in comics, where storytelling and visual execution are inseparable. If a tool like Midjourney generates a striking panel based on a user’s prompt, who holds the rights? The artist? The platform?

Legally, this varies. In the United States, the Copyright Office has stated that works made entirely by AI are not eligible for protection unless there is a clear record of human authorship in the creative process. That means an artist guiding the prompt, selecting outputs, refining them, and composing them into a larger narrative could still claim rights, if that human input is substantial.

In the case of Summer Island, Steve Coulson retained rights because he directed the project’s creative direction, assembled the narrative, and made editorial choices throughout. The AI didn’t write the comic; it filled in the visual texture and sped up workflows.

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However, legal grey zones persist. Stability AI and Midjourney have both faced lawsuits over training data, raising concerns over whether AI-generated outputs unintentionally replicate copyrighted styles or images. If your AI comic resembles the work of a famous illustrator, because it was trained on one – are you liable?

Then there’s the platform angle. Some AI art tools claim partial ownership or license rights over generated works. That’s a concern for indie comic creators hoping to distribute or monetize their books. Always check the fine print: some platforms reserve the right to reuse or display outputs made with their models.

Until courts set clearer precedents, creators should treat AI comics as collaborative projects with complex IP implications. The safest path would be to document your involvement, keep drafts, and if you plan to publish commercially, consider tools that offer unambiguous licensing or user ownership by default.

Who Else Is Doing This?

Steve Coulson isn’t alone. A growing wave of creators is exploring AI’s role in visual storytelling:

· Kris Kashtanova’s The Lesson sparked a copyright controversy after using Stability AI art to create a graphic novel, pushing questions about IP and originality.

· Zarya of the Dawn relied on Midjourney for panel art, raising debates about how much AI output counts as “authorship.”

· On platforms like Webtoon, indie artists use ChatGPT for dialogue variations or Stable Diffusion to rough-sketch scenes faster before polishing.

· Others use AI to help generate variant covers or promo art before hand-drawing the final versions.

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Many of these creators are transparent. They don’t hide the tools, they showcase them, often detailing prompt chains or decision logs. That openness shifts the narrative: AI becomes a brush, not the artist.

Comics, Weirdness, and the Unexpected Future

This wasn’t the best comic I’ve ever read. But it was one of the most surprising. The AI didn’t ruin it. In fact, the weirdness it introduced, half-intentional, half-glitched, created a tone that’s hard to imitate.

The best part? It didn’t feel like AI trying to mimic the past. It felt like something new emerging: stranger, faster, more collaborative. Maybe the future of comics isn’t about replacing artists with machines but helping artists explore corners they’d never reach alone.

That’s what I’ll remember about Summer Island. It wasn’t just made by AI. It was made weird, and that made it work.

 

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