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Drawn to Extinction

Coming Spring 2026

Why | Matters

And why the silicon machine doesn’t get to decide.

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.

Torunn Grønbekk
Writer, Creator

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.

Patrick Goddard
Artist, Creator

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.

Dan Cornwell
Artist, Creator

If we treat historical material as neutral training data, we quietly lock past bias into the future.

Dr Julia Round
Professor of Comics Studies

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.

John Wagner
Writer, Creator

People talk about speed like it’s progress, but speed has never made a drawing better. Time does.

Steve McNiven
Artist, Creator

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.

Jonathan Bailey
Copyright and Plagiarism Consultant

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.

Ram V
Writer, Creator

Godfather of British comics John Wagner compares Ai creativity to a jukebox, capable of replaying songs but never feeling the room. Illustrator Patrick Goddard imagines a world where our first instinct is to assume everything is a simulation. Creative force Dan Cornwell warns that when you remove the work, you remove the reason to improve, while master storyteller and world-builder Ram V speaks candidly about ambition flattened into adequacy. Writer and artist Torunn Grønbekk reminds us that every line carries responsibility, and comic book royalty Steve McNiven helps to strip it back to a truth most artists already know, that speed has never made a drawing better, and that struggle is not waste, it is the work.

Around them, the wider picture sharpens. Professor of comics and storytelling Dr Julia Round exposes how bias hides inside systems that claim neutrality, while plagiarism expert Jonathan Bailey lays bare the contracts and clauses quietly transferring power away from creators. Lesley Gannon, a leading voice for the writers’ guild, speaks about class, access, and who is always first to be pushed out when industries decide efficiency matters more than people.

And running through all of it is the voice of a comic book nerd who found confidence, courage, and identity in ink and panels, and now uses those same pages to give rhythm and purpose to a personal exposé on how Ai is reshaping the world that made him.


Drawn to Extinction is the next book by lifelong comic book obsessive and technologist, Pete Trainor. It’s part love letter to the artists and rebels who built an industry from nothing, part cultural autopsy of what we’re losing to automation, and part rallying cry for the future of human creativity.

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.”

“I also think it’s time to move beyond lazy social media arguments about Ai slop and novelty, because comics have always existed to ask harder questions. We need to slow the conversation down, and to make sure societies obsession with shiny technology isn’t quietly dismantling an industry built on sweat, skill, and care, love and authenticity.”

“Stephen King wrote back in 1988 that ‘All the intelligence and determination in the world cannot create art without a bit of talent, but intelligence and determination can create some great forgeries,‘ and I think that’s worth exploring.”

Find yourself Drawn to Extinction

If you’re a creator, your voice matters more than ever. Drawn to Extinction isn’t just a book, it’s a record of what it feels like to make something human in an age of machines. I’m collecting honest reflections (not press quotes) from the big names to the small tables, from those still climbing to those who’ve been knocked off the ladder. If you care about the craft, the culture, and the people who keep it alive, add your story to the piece. Let’s make sure the future remembers who made the pages before the machines did.

Please take 15 mins to fill in this questionnaire.
A voice isn't a style you can freeze, it's a moment in time, shaped by where you are, what you fear, and what you haven't figured out yet.
Ram V
Ram V
Writer, Creator

Drawn to Extinction isn’t a book about the fear of technology, or anger at inevitability, it is the refusal to accept that creativity should be reduced to output, that culture should be trained on its own past until it can only repeat itself, or that the next generation should be locked out of learning because the ladder has been pulled up in the name of convenience. It’s a love-letter to anyone who has ever felt that comics mattered, not just as entertainment, but as identity, community, and escape. It is for creators who refuse to believe they are disposable, and for readers who sense that something essential is slipping through our fingers while we are being told to applaud the next convenience culture.

The silicon doesn’t dream, it replicates, and if we mistake replication for creativity, we don’t just lose jobs, we lose something more profound…

A huge thanks to every contributor who lent their intelligence, lived, earned, and human, the kind that thinks, doubts, argues, and cares, not the artificial kind that merely imitates the shape of thought.

Drawn to Extinction is a cultural examination of comic books as a human craft at a moment of genuine risk. Part love letter, part warning shot, the book explores the labour, identity, and lived experience behind comics, and asks what is lost when machines replicate what people once made by hand.

For interview requests, review copies, event bookings, festival appearances, or wider press enquiries, please use the contact details below.

Press Contact
Pete Trainor, Author
Email: pete[AT]drawntoextinction.com
Social: @petetrainor.fyi on BlueSky

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