Kevin here, coming to you with the new comics launched on Kickstarter for Monday and Tuesday, January 26th and 27th, 2026. So, a little more robust Tuesday than I expected for even in January. Between Monday and Tuesday, we had 26 launches in the comics category. That’s more than I thought we would have. There are definitely some worthy choices in there. I found four that I want to share with you as ‘Comics I Like’, and I’ll talk about those in just a few minutes.

Disney Comes to Kickstarter Comics

Among all the releases from Monday and Tuesday, there was one giant corporate release from Dynamite Entertainment featuring Disney villains. I’m trying to remember if there was another Disney property launch that wasn’t a Marvel art book or something like that. So this is kind of a first, at least by my recollection. I don’t recall any other Disney properties making a big splash on Kickstarter from even a third-party publisher like Dynamite. You would think Marvel would be doing this since they’re part of Disney, but I know they outsourced some of their Disney publishing rights to other publishers, and here we are with Dynamite. It looks like a good project.

It’s not one that I chose as a /Comic I Like’. There’s just not a lot of interior artwork there to make a decision about. You’re pretty much relying on the intellectual property or Disney fandom to make that decision. They’re not crazy expensive, but they’re expensive, and this is a corporate campaign, so the pricing of the tiers is pretty high.

Self-Disclosure of Generative AI Use in Kickstarter Comics

What I want to talk about today was generative AI in comics. Now, I know this is a hot-button topic. The term ‘AI slop’ gets thrown around left and right, regardless of how the AI is being used, but, here, we’re going to talk about things objectively. We’re going to look at what’s actually happening with generative AI in comics. I recently made a post where I revealed that, based on my daily reviews of comic launches on Kickstarter for the past year and a half, only one campaign has actually resulted in a comic book featuring interior sequential art generated using AI technology.

As I mentioned at that time, there was another campaign around the same time as the one that was successful in producing a book that still hasn’t been fulfilled, and it was not as carefully laid out, nor as meticulously planned. You could tell from the campaign page it just wasn’t at the same level as the one that not only funded, but produced three comics in a year, three actual books produced from that in a year. There’s only one property that did that.

Now, that doesn’t mean that generative AI isn’t used in comics on Kickstarter all the time. It is, and as you should know, you’re required to self-disclose if you’re using generative AI in your comics on Kickstarter. It’s the honor system. In my opinion, the more important factor here is, are people using generative AI being honest about it, self-disclosing as Kickstarter requires, in order for backers to make informed choices? If you don’t want comics with generative AI involved in the artwork or the imaging, you should be able to know that, so you can make a choice.

If you’re curious about it, you should be able to know that it’s generative AI that’s involved in the art and how it’s involved in the art. So, down at the bottom of every campaign page, there’s a self-disclosure aspect if you used AI. Now, I’m fairly confident that there are a lot of creators who are using it in some capacity that aren’t disclosing it, who are obscuring the fact that they’re using generative AI. And I have to tell you, I’m surprised that there are as many who honestly disclose it as there are. It would be easy not to, because nobody’s checking, nobody’s policing this at Kickstarter. So, I respect the people who admit that they’re using generative AI, even in little bits and pieces, parts of covers, things like that.

But the vast majority of the usage now, at this point in time, is for covers. And the vast majority of that usage is in the not-safe-for-work (NSFW) category. So, let’s look at a couple of examples of self-disclosure statements for AI in a couple of not-safe-for-work projects that were launched just in the past couple of days.

And we’ll start with Nolan Hartsoe’s Pyromantic No. 2 dark fantasy comic, a NSFW book currently funding over $6,000. That’s pretty good for just a couple of days on the platform. The AI self-disclosure statement for this project:

So, are you using it for the cover? Are you using it for character concept designs? Are you using it for interior sequential art? This is where you can answer that question. They want to know if you are using copyrighted materials from other artists that are being used by the AI generator, or if you’re using copyrighted elements of other artists’ work in the generative process. That’s how I interpret that.

This campaign’s response is pretty vague, but this is a pretty vague area of the whole AI situation at this point in time. I do applaud this creator just for acknowledging the use of AI. It’s fairly obvious if you look at the cover art, simply because it’s just a little too symmetrical, a little too perfect, and it’s a very stereotypical style that you see with generative AI art. Beautiful covers, however, very obviously AI-generated covers.

So, maybe the creator didn’t feel they had a choice but to acknowledge that they used generative AI to create these covers. Yet and all, they don’t have to admit it on Kickstarter, but they did. So, here we are, and at least the honesty should be acknowledged. And you can make your own decisions whether to back this campaign, given the use of AI art on the covers.

Let’s look at another example from the same launch day. Okay, this one is called Valentine vs. the Man-Eater, number one through three, not safe for work, horror noir. It’s funding just slightly behind at $5,229 with 106 backers. So, roughly in the same echelon of funding, roughly just as successful. But let’s look at their answers to the questions:

Okay, pause.

You should know what medium your cover artists are using. Okay, and generative AI is its own medium at this point. It’s not going anywhere. Let’s not argue that. But you should know how your cover artists are generating their covers, how they’re making these images. Bottom line, that’s your responsibility as a publisher, even as a self-publisher.

And I’m not sure that being confident about that means that it’s not happening. Most generative AI uses text-to-image generation with heavy editing on the backside. If you’ve actually used generative AI, if you’re speaking from a standpoint of understanding and knowledge about this technology, you know that 99.9% of the time, a text prompt is not going to give you a workable, professional-looking cover or panel because AI is not going to generate a page of sequential art.

It just doesn’t work that way. Every panel is its own piece of art, if you’re using it in that fashion. You have to know that if you have somebody working with generative AI to create covers or any art for your project, that text-to-image generative AI is probably involved.

I feel like they’re skirting the issue here, not necessarily being deceptive, but it’s such a sensitive subject. It’s such an explosive subject that creators are honestly hesitant to put themselves out there as actually using it when it’s fair game right now. I know that it’s frowned upon, but it’s here, it’s probably not going anywhere, and going after creators who use it in any little sense at all is not productive.

If you’re looking at Kickstarter campaigns, scroll to the bottom of the Kickstarter page and see what their self-disclosure about AI. In fact, there’s a makeshift table of contents on every Kickstarter page based on how you put in your headers and how you answer the questions about AI that automatically includes ‘Use of AI’ in that table of contents at the upper left of the Kickstarter page. If you look there, you can just click that and see what they’re disclosing and make a decision on your own without the angst, without the bile, that normally comes with this topic. We’re in a position at this point that we can objectively assess whether AI is being used and decide whether to back that campaign, support that creator or not, and just go our happy way.

My point here is to share with you the AI disclosure on Kickstarter so that you can find it and make your own determinations about whether to support or to not support a campaign. The general culture around generative AI right now, the general uproar around it, makes people afraid to confront it head on.

I just don’t think we have to address things that way. We can have a constructive discussion and acknowledge that it’s being used widely in comics - and much more widely than anybody’s willing to acknowledge because they don’t want to get attacked.

Do your own research. Look through these campaigns and see what people are doing with it. Arm yourself with knowledge about how generative AI is actually being used now. You’re going to see it’s a very narrow lane. There will be more.

I’ve ventured into that arena myself just to see how it works. Can it be done? It can be done, but you have to know how to make comics.

It can be very bad if you don’t know how to make comics and how to use digital editing software on the back end to actually make images look like they belong together and to generate some sort of visual consis...