Shelton State’s Eisner Nominated Instructor Creates New Comic Miniseries
June 28, 2022 – Following his recent nomination for an Eisner Award, Shelton State Community College’s Carson Grubaugh has now created a four-issue comic book miniseries, The Abolition of Man in collaboration with an AI image-generation system, MidJourney AI.
For the duration of the miniseries, Grubaugh, an accomplished illustrator and painter, has handed over all illustration duties solely to an AI image generator, which operates by responding to text prompts from the user. For the first issue, Grubaugh supplied the AI with lines from C.S. Lewis’ groundbreaking lecture, “The Abolition of Man,” and used the images generated by the AI unit.
“I’ve spent years as an artist abusing many different publicly available app-fads, in an effort to illustrate what could be called a “Banal, Content Apocalypse,’ in which we’ve generated so much semantic content that something genuinely new is near impossible to come by,” says Grubaugh. “These new art-making AI open up both new means for generating previously unimaginable content, but also speed the production to the point where all we will have left to us is to transmute the meaning-rich gold of the past into recycled lead of the present.”
Grubaugh concludes, “In a world where there is nothing new under the sun, choose to change the sun.”
The Abolition of Man #1 will be available in English-language comic book shops worldwide in October of 2022, distributed exclusively by Diamond Comics. It’s available to preorder now from Diamond Comics-affiliated comic shops, or the PreviewsWorld ordering system, using the Previews order code APR228727.
Living the Line Books is a publisher of dynamic, visually striking comics and graphic novels, founded in 2020 by writer/illustrator Sean Michael Robinson. Living the Line’s graphic novel debut, The Strange Death of Alex Raymond (Dave Sim and Carson Grubaugh) was recently nominated for an Eisner Award for “Best Reality-Based Work.” The Strange Death of Alex Raymond is available for purchase where books are sold.
For more about Shelton State fine arts, visit sheltonstate.edu.
